BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

firstborn said:
Work has just started outside of my house to put poles in place from which to run fibre to houses on the street - anyone else been in this position and have any idea how long it will now be until it's available to order? Openreach aren't saying anything
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My pole was finished nearly 3 weeks ago now, still waiting for it to be activated
 
It's interesting to look back at how this thread has changed over the years, from the initial buzz around 40Mbps FTTC to that becoming "slow" and the new buzz being around 1Gb FTTP!

I'm "stuck" on about 50Mb FTTC and whilst I would like to have more, I can honestly say unlike the 6Mb I had a few years ago, I don't feel massively constrained. I can absolutely see the purpose of FTTP and I am fully behind it, I will likely get it as soon as it becomes available. But can't say I will be getting the 1Gb package, 200 is probably enough for my family.

I guess the scaling is the best thing about FTTP in a way, you want a speed and you get it. We've never had something like that on BT-provided broadband before.

I am interested to see if our FTTP is state-funded as FTTC was or whether it ends up being commercial this time. At least two of the cabinets on our exchange have been expanded so the demand is certainly there and a lot of people are still disappointed with the slow speeds because they are so far from the cabinet. So I would think FTTP take-up will be high as well.

I'm thinking sometime between now and 2025 for FTTP in more rural areas with existing FTTC, thoughts?
 
Gigabit said:
I'm thinking sometime between now and 2025 for FTTP in more rural areas with existing FTTC, thoughts?
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I would hope that Openreach pull their fingers out and get reliable broadband put into rural areas and not spots in many towns and cities. There’s apparently a legal requirement that doesn’t allow a provider to sell a broadband connection if it’s under 10Mb/s. This just means that many people end up with no broadband at all! Pitiful.
 
I completely agree with you. My parents are struggling with a very poor 4G signal for their internet needs. A fixed line, no matter how slow, would be infinitely preferable.
 
Bluecube said:
According to both BT and Sky there is. They refused to sell a broadband package as it wouldn’t reach 10Mb/s
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They don't want their average speed being dragged down which affects how they can advertise their products. It's stupid since every FTTC service will sync at the same speed but there's nothing that ISPs can do to differentiate their products any more until FTTP gets built, so they compete on price and things like an average speed being 69Mbps on one provider vs 67Mbps on the other. To keep these averages high they often refuse to sell FTTC to customers where the sync rate will be low.

The result is that if you're on an FTTC cabinet with a long line that can only get say 15Mbps, a lot of the big retail providers don't want to know, so you have to pick one of the more expensive options as well as having a slower service. I know someone with an estimate of 7Mbps from an FTTC service, BT and TalkTalk will only offer 2.5Mbps ADSL.
 
Caged said:
They don't want their average speed being dragged down which affects how they can advertise their products. It's stupid since every FTTC service will sync at the same speed but there's nothing that ISPs can do to differentiate their products any more until FTTP gets built, so they compete on price and things like an average speed being 69Mbps on one provider vs 67Mbps on the other. To keep these averages high they often refuse to sell FTTC to customers where the sync rate will be low.

The result is that if you're on an FTTC cabinet with a long line that can only get say 15Mbps, a lot of the big retail providers don't want to know, so you have to pick one of the more expensive options as well as having a slower service. I know someone with an estimate of 7Mbps from an FTTC service, BT and TalkTalk will only offer 2.5Mbps ADSL.
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Didn't BT used to sell "faster broadband with fibre" for exactly this reason, what say Sky?
 
I guess there's a point where the estimated speed gets too low and BT won't sell it - IIRC the 'faster broadband with fibre' is for between 10 and 15Mbps estimates
 
I've just been playing with the access control on the BT Smart Hub 2 and is a bit better than I thought. The misleading thing is the app just mentions wifi - when infact it will quite happily block wired connections too.

Which is nice as I wanted to explicity block all my PoE IP cameras from being able to phone-home to China. In the BT app I created a blocked group and added all the cameras to it, then added 2 blocked schedules - 00:00->23:59 and 23:59->00:00 (annoyingly theres not a single option for 'always blocked').

I thought I was going to have to get a better router with a more feature-rich firewall, or start replacing all my switches and setup vlans, but this is a nice low cost (£0) option.
 
My Smart Hub Type B was dropping the line constantly (I only put it on because I was curious to see how it synced compared to other modems, I'm on a Huawei cabinet - it synced a bit slower on the downstream but upload was quite good) and BT live chat have sent me a Smart Hub 2 with Wi-Fi disc for free as a replacement.

Guess I can flog them if they turn out to be useless but not a bad result for a few minutes of time.
 
The Business version of the hub (no v2 yet unfortunately) has more options - you can set the DNS servers and add static routes. Not bad for the ~£20 they can be bought for.
 
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