BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Will these already have been retrofitted?, How does this work in practice , ducts to the poles?, overhead fibre already installed etc? I imagine when the exchange was FTTP enabled then the surrounding infrastructure could have been upgraded but it seems an expensive for just a handful of properties, maybe 4 or 5.

I'll be at the cottage this weekend I'll have a closer look at the poles.
 
This is turning out to be a complete mess. The order had failed with Zen and now they're wrangling with OpenReach to get it sorted. Unfortunately, my patience has run out. I've just told them to stuff it (in nicer words) and I'll try and get a few £ knocked off with Sky. All this hassle, which has been going on for a month, is not worth saving a tenner for.
 
ChrisD. said:
So it wasn't just limited to PlusNet. Usually problems with orders are not down to the ISP themselves, it's Openreach.
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Yeah, that seems to be the case my good man. Unfortunately Plusnet are still in my bad books as they haven't begun the process of returning my initial payment yet. So I'm still on their case, logged a formal complaint and am expecting to refer them to the Communications Ombudsman.
 
Had a better look at the cabling round the cottage today and found this pole about 5 metres away. Yellow label says 'Caution Overhead Fibre' so it looks like the infrastructure is there already.Poles take the cabling down to the main road and I'm guessing underground to the exchange nearby.

It's looking promising ;) .

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RD5RQLst.jpg
 
The only major exchange I'm aware of is about 15 mile away.

I've seen a few Openreach engineers working down an access point adjacent to this building so I was thinking the fibre went under the road to the property as well as some fibre continuing on to the next small town .

I'll ask the engineers next week.

Local exchange

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So, I have just moved house and my line speed is a bit slower than expected. I have the 80/20 package from my last house, is there anything or is the line just rubbish? Am I better off just dropping back to the 40/10 product and saving £2.50/month?

The DSL checker was reporting 70-44mbps down and 19-13 up. I'm getting 42/13 on speed tests, minimum speed guarantee was 33 so I am miles above that currently.

My router is reporting my line stats as:
Downstream:
Actual Rate: 43432
Max Rate: 49395
Noise: 6.3
Attenuation: 20.10
Power: 6.9

Upstream:
Actual Rate: 13582
Max Rate: 13582
Noise: 6.0
Attenuation: 0.00
Power: 6.9

The master socket is the old version so I am using a filter.
 
aminegriffy said:
Ok thanks for the explanation. I'm just paranoid, I had the worst experience with BT that it made not want to deal with any ISP related with BT.

Shame I'm stuck with openreach because Virgin refuses to cover small towns. I had the worst possible service from BT that even the ping spikes happened when no one was using the internet.

After months of complaining, I got put on a new server which reduced the ping spikes massively from several everyday to maybe once or twice a week, but I still cannot game when someone is even playing a Facebook video. It's ridiculous that BT customers are paying premium price compared to other ISP but we are getting nothing but unstable broadband.
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Virgin have a modem that isn't fit for purpose, and is exactly why I'm moving away from them. Their modem has a chipset that induces lag spikes and packet loss, and despite their insistence that it's fixed, it isn't.

As for premium prices, I've been offered 330Mb down 50Mb up for roughly the same price Virgin is offering 350Mb/36Mb for. I'm aware of the current issues with BT, but it's clearly a routing issue that they're aware of and can be fixed. The Virgin issue cannot be fixed without them supplying a different model of modem that doesn't have the Intel puma chipset. Their upcoming modem will have Intel's puma 7 chip which suffers from the same issues, just not quite as bad.
 
spoffle said:
Virgin have a modem that isn't fit for purpose, and is exactly why I'm moving away from them. Their modem has a chipset that induces lag spikes and packet loss, and despite their insistence that it's fixed, it isn't.

As for premium prices, I've been offered 330Mb down 50Mb up for roughly the same price Virgin is offering 350Mb/36Mb for. I'm aware of the current issues with BT, but it's clearly a routing issue that they're aware of and can be fixed. The Virgin issue cannot be fixed without them supplying a different model of modem that doesn't have the Intel puma chipset. Their upcoming modem will have Intel's puma 7 chip which suffers from the same issues, just not quite as bad.
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It’s relatively rare for intel to drop the ball once, it happens, but relative to the number of chipsets they have produced over the years, it’s thankfully rare. For them to drop the same ball twice in a row on successive chipsets is unlikely when they have acknowledged the issue previously and released multiple patches to mitigate years in advance seems very unlikely. That’s the kind of issue that gets your products on the NFC list, it’s not like other market players wouldn’t jump at the chance to pick up national contracts worldwide.
 
Avalon said:
It’s relatively rare for intel to drop the ball once, it happens, but relative to the number of chipsets they have produced over the years, it’s thankfully rare. For them to drop the same ball twice in a row on successive chipsets is unlikely when they have acknowledged the issue previously and released multiple patches to mitigate years in advance seems very unlikely. That’s the kind of issue that gets your products on the NFC list, it’s not like other market players wouldn’t jump at the chance to pick up national contracts worldwide.
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Tell that to the regular security vulnerabilities found within Intel CPUs...

Puma 6 cannot be fixed, they've just attempted to mitigate the problems. The vast majority of people aren't going to notice the problems because the vast majority of people won't be playing online games over their Internet connection, or they are but don't really understand the issues it causes, and play casually so they don't really notice it.

I'm getting the mentioned issues in games, and packet loss. After having tested everything I can, the only the thing it can be is the Virgin modem or Virgin line. But I had a repull last year using the thickest cable they could use.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
So, I have just moved house and my line speed is a bit slower than expected. I have the 80/20 package from my last house, is there anything or is the line just rubbish? Am I better off just dropping back to the 40/10 product and saving £2.50/month?

The DSL checker was reporting 70-44mbps down and 19-13 up. I'm getting 42/13 on speed tests, minimum speed guarantee was 33 so I am miles above that currently.

My router is reporting my line stats as:
Downstream:
Actual Rate: 43432
Max Rate: 49395
Noise: 6.3
Attenuation: 20.10
Power: 6.9

Upstream:
Actual Rate: 13582
Max Rate: 13582
Noise: 6.0
Attenuation: 0.00
Power: 6.9

The master socket is the old version so I am using a filter.
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after 2-3days of stable connection the line speed will likely increase to the 49395 figure when interleaving is turned off. i guess you can make sure no extensions are wired to the master socket, thats about it.
 
zipp0r said:
after 2-3days of stable connection the line speed will likely increase to the 49395 figure when interleaving is turned off. i guess you can make sure no extensions are wired to the master socket, thats about it.
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We have been in a few weeks now, probably didn’t help the router got unplugged a few times over the last couple of days while decorating.

I have had the master socket off the wall to paint round and nothing else is plugged into it other than a single pair from the main feed.

There is other wiring behind which goes to other sockets around the house but none are attached. Looks like it is what it is, I’ll drop down a package then when I get round it it, little point in paying more for the tiny extra bit of speed.
 
zipp0r said:
after 2-3days of stable connection the line speed will likely increase to the 49395 figure when interleaving is turned off. i guess you can make sure no extensions are wired to the master socket, thats about it.
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After moving to a new property it has taken 4 months after having our line sorted before seeing an increase from the actual rate - which stayed at 22339 despite an attainable rate of 32015 - now at 24998 - SNR target changed from 10 to 9 so probably waiting for a drop to 6 before seeing around the attainable rate :s
 
Rroff said:
After moving to a new property it has taken 4 months after having our line sorted before seeing an increase from the actual rate - which stayed at 22339 despite an attainable rate of 32015 - now at 24998 - SNR target changed from 10 to 9 so probably waiting for a drop to 6 before seeing around the attainable rate :s
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well seems as neither you or born2sk8 are on a fresh dlm profile, it can take ages to increase speeds/disable interleaving. you should really have requested a dlm reset at the same time your line was fixed. actually.. if it seems like its never going to increase and seems stuck, isps will now let you request a dlm reset without an engineer visit. id give that a try tbh.
 
zipp0r said:
well seems as neither you or born2sk8 are on a fresh dlm profile, it can take ages to increase speeds/disable interleaving. you should really have requested a dlm reset at the same time your line was fixed. actually.. if it seems like its never going to increase and seems stuck, isps will now let you request a dlm reset without an engineer visit. id give that a try tbh.
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Engineer said they were going to do a DLM reset sometime in the 24 hours after he left - but doesn't seem like it happened. I've not bothered too much as I'm mostly using 4G at the moment as it is getting better speeds and latency isn't too bad.
 
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