BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Phonesis · 2 Nov 2017 at 16:42

So turns out the alarm cable issue goes little deeper than my phone extension wire. Had one of the original electricians over today and he admitted they had messed up and used alarm wire to connect each apartment's master socket to the communal cupboard hub where the lines reach the building from outside.

Basically, my choice is now to either leave it as is (tbh, it's pretty fast and seems reliable) or get a BT engineer to re cable my apartment's connection to the communal cupboard and go along surface of my hallway wall to the socket or even just put new master socket by front doorway. Not sure it's worth it for what I suspect will be a 5-8mb speed increase on download. Upload is already max (20mb).

Bradmax57 · 2 Nov 2017 at 20:48

Just noticed Ive got my boost today 67 down and 17 up, seems a little low considering when I was previously on talktalk max I got 76 and 19, still hasn't cost me anything so I'm happy

MissChief · 2 Nov 2017 at 21:26

Phonesis said:
So turns out the alarm cable issue goes little deeper than my phone extension wire. Had one of the original electricians over today and he admitted they had messed up and used alarm wire to connect each apartment's master socket to the communal cupboard hub where the lines reach the building from outside.

Basically, my choice is now to either leave it as is (tbh, it's pretty fast and seems reliable) or get a BT engineer to re cable my apartment's connection to the communal cupboard and go along surface of my hallway wall to the socket or even just put new master socket by front doorway. Not sure it's worth it for what I suspect will be a 5-8mb speed increase on download. Upload is already max (20mb).

What DL speed are you getting atm?

Phonesis · 2 Nov 2017 at 21:48

MissChief said:
What DL speed are you getting atm?

67 down, 20 up. Hardly slow but I suspect the wiring from communal cabinet to my master socket has probably cost me about 5-8mb down.

MissChief · 3 Nov 2017 at 01:04

Phonesis said:
67 down, 20 up. Hardly slow but I suspect the wiring from communal cabinet to my master socket has probably cost me about 5-8mb down.

For the hassle you'll have trying to get someone to change it, I'd be happy with that.

Phonesis · 3 Nov 2017 at 08:57

MissChief said:
For the hassle you'll have trying to get someone to change it, I'd be happy with that.

Thanks MissChief, I am leaning that way now. Not worth hassle. If it was 40mb or something I would. What do you reckon about these connection stats? I am about 400m from cab:

Broadband Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 67787 kbps 20000 kbps
Line Attenuation 13.6 dB 0.0 dB
Noise Margin 6.1 dB 9.9 dB

Daaaavvveee · 3 Nov 2017 at 09:05

Phonesis said:
Thanks MissChief, I am leaning that way now. Not worth hassle. If it was 40mb or something I would. What do you reckon about these connection stats? I am about 400m from cab:

Broadband Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 67787 kbps 20000 kbps
Line Attenuation 13.6 dB 0.0 dB
Noise Margin 6.1 dB 9.9 dB

If its a new build can you not get the builders back in and get them to fix it under their snagging obligations?

Phonesis · 3 Nov 2017 at 11:07

They probably could but it would be major work (holes in walls etc). I'm not sure I can be doing with the hassle right now. As long as connection stays at around that speed I will live with it. If it degrades, I will prob get them to do it I guess. Or do a surface re wire from communal cupboard to my apartment.

sparkymark75 · 3 Nov 2017 at 22:37

So today was the day I was supposed to be enjoying dumping my 1Mb ADSL connection and saying hello to 200Mb FTTP. OpenReach guy appeared this morning, looked at the blue rope and said that he thought there would have been a cable pulled through already. He then checked the chamber in the pavement outside my house and the one across the road. He tells me my distribution point was down the road at number 36 (I'm number 76) but he couldn't pull a cable that far as his drum is only 150m and that run was nearer 300m.

He wasn't sure why my DP was that one and suggested I should be connected to the DP across the road but that one wasn't yet active (new build estate). He's had to pass it back to the planning department to see what they want to do. Either someone else comes out to pull a cable from the DP at house number 36 up to my house or they active the DP across the road and he can pull a cable over to that. God knows why they didn't know all of this before they sent an engineer out. I placed the order two weeks ago, they've had ample time to check it. There was me thinking I'd be getting decent internet just in time for the release of the Xbox One X and it's massive 4k patches.

TL;DR: The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing when it comes to Openreach. And I'm now waiting for god knows how long to see what happens next.

Phonesis · 4 Nov 2017 at 19:59

sparkymark75 said:
So today was the day I was supposed to be enjoying dumping my 1Mb ADSL connection and saying hello to 200Mb FTTP. OpenReach guy appeared this morning, looked at the blue rope and said that he thought there would have been a cable pulled through already. He then checked the chamber in the pavement outside my house and the one across the road. He tells me my distribution point was down the road at number 36 (I'm number 76) but he couldn't pull a cable that far as his drum is only 150m and that run was nearer 300m.

He wasn't sure why my DP was that one and suggested I should be connected to the DP across the road but that one wasn't yet active (new build estate). He's had to pass it back to the planning department to see what they want to do. Either someone else comes out to pull a cable from the DP at house number 36 up to my house or they active the DP across the road and he can pull a cable over to that. God knows why they didn't know all of this before they sent an engineer out. I placed the order two weeks ago, they've had ample time to check it. There was me thinking I'd be getting decent internet just in time for the release of the Xbox One X and it's massive 4k patches.

TL;DR: The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing when it comes to Openreach. And I'm now waiting for god knows how long to see what happens next.

Sorry to hear it man. Broadband is never straight forward! So frustrating. I'm sure it'll be put right eventually one way or another.

sparkymark75 · 4 Nov 2017 at 22:41

Phonesis said:
Sorry to hear it man. Broadband is never straight forward! So frustrating. I'm sure it'll be put right eventually one way or another.

Thanks. Its the "eventually" bit that worries me. Openreach never seem to be in a rush to do anything. You'd think they'd be keen to get infrastructure up and running so they can make some money from it. A half finished deployment is just wasted time and money.

r7slayer · 5 Nov 2017 at 00:19

hyperfighting said:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...-pricing-fttp-demand-ultrafast-broadband.html

Seems a step in the right direction for fttp, hopefully cheaper...

Seems they want to try and entice ISPs to levy some of the costs. It will allow them to create extra top tier packages and generate more money from eventually signing up newer customers. But im going to assume they will only do it if they can get a number of people interested in the same street etc.
Will help get the infrastructure moving in the right direction.

chef-borjan · 6 Nov 2017 at 00:06

Hi all, this is a bit of an odd one.

Normally, any previous router I have had will not contain any entries in the port forwarding table unless I tell it to.

But for some reason, I am looking at the table in the BT Hub (which has been set up for a good few months now) and it seems to have a bunch of entries already in there and mapped to certain devices on my network.

The rule names are either general numbers such as iCXXX or reference whatsapp. These are all UDP entries. I presume its nothing to worry about or want to remove?

bremen1874 · 6 Nov 2017 at 00:13

Is it UPnP doing it's thing?

It's one of those things that I always disable because I don't need it (and never really trusted it).

chef-borjan · 6 Nov 2017 at 09:11

bremen1874 said:
Is it UPnP doing it's thing?

It's one of those things that I always disable because I don't need it (and never really trusted it).

Yeah looking a bit more into it, that seems like what is happening...

I’m going to look into how much one needs it’s active, didn’t realise people turn it off. Cheers!

SupraWez · 6 Nov 2017 at 09:32

I never use UPnP, always manually setup, at least that way you have some control on what enters your network.

r7slayer · 6 Nov 2017 at 10:24

I don't trust UPnP, because you're handing all the trust to your computer's firewall to ensure stuff that you don't want opening ports to gain access to your network or internet access doesn't get that access. Id rather have to manually do it, can be a pain but you have bit more security in doing so. I remember forgetting to do it and saw some unusually stuff with a external and internal port opening.

ChrisD. · 6 Nov 2017 at 11:34

I've been using UPnP for years and years without any single issue, that includes running snort on pfSense and checking logs.

El Jimben · 6 Nov 2017 at 15:55

sparkymark75 said:
Thanks. Its the "eventually" bit that worries me. Openreach never seem to be in a rush to do anything. You'd think they'd be keen to get infrastructure up and running so they can make some money from it. A half finished deployment is just wasted time and money.

It took them 6 weeks & 4 engineer visits to get my fibre up and running recently. The left really doesn't know what the right is doing as you say. I did get £150 compensation out of them in the end but I hope that your experience is better than mine!

sparkymark75 · 6 Nov 2017 at 16:07

El Jimben said:
It took them 6 weeks & 4 engineer visits to get my fibre up and running recently. The left really doesn't know what the right is doing as you say. I did get £150 compensation out of them in the end but I hope that your experience is better than mine!

Ouch! Was that 6 weeks from ordering? They give you the spiel about it FTTP being complicated to deploy, which I'm sure it is on a nation scale but the fibre's in my street, just hook me up goddammit