BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Man of Honour
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That's what I thought. I'm with Zen at the minute, so it's only £3 per month, but I fancy a cheaper provider next year, maybe back to Sky, and fancied saving a little. Line has dropped 5mbit this past month actually, highly annoying.
 
Soldato
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Parents have decided they want to switch from Sky to BT TV. Engineer came today to install but was unable due to the fact the Hub is at the top of the house and the BT TV will be down stairs.

Need a switch also as all Ethernet ports in use on Hub.

I'm gonna need to buy a 20 odd meter Ethernet cable and run it on the outside of the house.

Do I need to buy any special weather resistant cable, or will any Cat 6 cable do?

Whats the best type of cable to buy?
 
Soldato
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9 Mar 2003
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14,242
Parents have decided they want to switch from Sky to BT TV. Engineer came today to install but was unable due to the fact the Hub is at the top of the house and the BT TV will be down stairs.

Need a switch also as all Ethernet ports in use on Hub.

I'm gonna need to buy a 20 odd meter Ethernet cable and run it on the outside of the house.

Do I need to buy any special weather resistant cable, or will any Cat 6 cable do?

Whats the best type of cable to buy?

You'll get various responses on here from, just run a cable to you need to run an expensive armoured cable through a conduit. Both can work but it depends on your environment and how neat of a job you want.

The reality of it is what ever you choose to do you will need to buy the bare cable and either face plates or plugs and make your own terminations otherwise the holes your going to need to put in the wall will be huge compared to the size of the cable.
 
Caporegime
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18 Oct 2002
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26,102
Just buy external-grade Cat6 if you don't expect it to be at risk of crushing or cutting. There's no point using normal 'indoor' cable because it's not massively cheaper and hopefully you value your time more than that.

The only time I'd recommend conduit is if you need to buy the cable.
 
Soldato
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For that job I'd stick with external grade Cat5e. The additional flexibility and smaller bend radius will make the installation much easier.

The network isn't going to see any benefit from using Cat6.
 
Soldato
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27 Jul 2007
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6,091
Is anyone experiencing YouTube buffering problems? HD videos keep buffering at any time of the day on my Infinity 1 connection. I'm using the Google DNS servers and a wired connection.

My speedtest results are fine:

 
Soldato
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North Wales
Is anyone experiencing YouTube buffering problems? HD videos keep buffering at any time of the day on my Infinity 1 connection. I'm using the Google DNS servers and a wired connection.

My speedtest results are fine:


I'm having the same issue with my plusnet FTTC connection. It will buffer loads towards the start of the video then will gradually stop buffering as the video gets going.
 
Soldato
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27 Jul 2007
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I'm having the same issue with my plusnet FTTC connection. It will buffer loads towards the start of the video then will gradually stop buffering as the video gets going.

Mine doesn't buffer any of it :( I will say though that it's better now than it was at 5pm, so perhaps it's a congestion issue.

EDIT: YouTube won't play for **** now :(
 
Last edited:
Soldato
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12 Jun 2005
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St Albans
1e50zt.jpg


What happened to our estimated speeds, they've dropped since the line was taken over from BT to Sky. The FTTC line was active as of Tuesday but they don't complete until Monday. I'm interested to see what speed they get now..

Estimated speed has dropped again, rather dramatically this time:

5bwsau.jpg


How do Openreach calculate these speeds, and then how often are they reviewed? We've had Openreach visit twice since the FTTC went live on 1/Feb. They now seem to have a stable sync at 39Mbit down/7Mbit up.
 
Soldato
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Location
Newcastle
Mine has dropped since i got fibre installed around 12 months ago swell (first person on cabinet) but i also wondered how BT calculate these speed estimates.

It must be an average sync speed on lines connected to this cabinet or something?
 
Soldato
Joined
18 May 2010
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22,376
Location
London
Parents have decided they want to switch from Sky to BT TV. Engineer came today to install but was unable due to the fact the Hub is at the top of the house and the BT TV will be down stairs.

Need a switch also as all Ethernet ports in use on Hub.

I'm gonna need to buy a 20 odd meter Ethernet cable and run it on the outside of the house.

Do I need to buy any special weather resistant cable, or will any Cat 6 cable do?

Whats the best type of cable to buy?

We tried Ethernet extenders as a first step and they seem to work so this seems to be the simplest solution.
 
Soldato
Joined
3 Oct 2009
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19,892
Location
Wales
Not Infinity but no poverty BT thread..

We had no internet for the best part of 3 weeks until someone finally came out and fixed it on Monday, apparently it was a problem with the wire between the outside of the house and the main telephone socket. Previously the phone and router were plugged in with a microfilter.

The engineer has now fixed the wire and replaced the telephone socket with one with two sockets, one for phone, one for router. So i assume that negates the need for a microfilter? The phone is never in use anyway.

Now the internet works fine... Except the speed is 0.25Mb average!!! BT are claiming there are no faults with the service in the area or our connection but I've tried 2 different Home Hub 3's and both are the same (obviously). It's absolutely shocking but no idea what is going on and don't fancy another call out charge from BT..
 

KIA

KIA

Man of Honour
Joined
14 Nov 2004
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13,785
The engineer has now fixed the wire and replaced the telephone socket with one with two sockets, one for phone, one for router. So i assume that negates the need for a microfilter?

Yes.

Now the internet works fine... Except the speed is 0.25Mb average!!! BT are claiming there are no faults with the service in the area or our connection but I've tried 2 different Home Hub 3's and both are the same (obviously). It's absolutely shocking but no idea what is going on and don't fancy another call out charge from BT..

Please post the router stats.
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Sep 2015
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Your downstream sync rate is on 285.7Kbps so that'd explain the speed you mentioned.

The attenuation is quite high and the noise margin is quite low. So in other words there's quite a lot of noise for the amount of usable signal.

When sync rate increases the SNR decreases so the system would normally find a point where the connection is stable, normally that's around a 6dB SNR so there's room for a bit of increase on your sync rate but only a small amount.

The sync rates there seem fairly consistent with the figures you shared. What speeds were you getting before the outage?

How is the voice service on the line? It's possibly dodgy copper somewhere in the path or maybe you're now connected via some aluminium cable which will kill your sync rate.
 
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