BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

TheVoice · 24 Mar 2022 at 13:35

V F said:
PS4. Maybe their 1Gb Ethernet wasn't fully capable? I couldn't get it to go over 320Mbps.

Or maybe it's a PS4 thing?...

It does seem that way, on the PS5 my downloads and the network speed test get near maximum speeds for my connection.

andy_mk3 · 24 Mar 2022 at 13:45

Even if these services can't max out your 500Mb/1Gb connections, at least you can still download at a decent pace while streaming 4k and whatever else without it being affected. Before moving house I was on 30Mb FTTC, and downloading from Steam meant Youtube was buffering the whole time even at 480p.

MrRockliffe · 24 Mar 2022 at 13:48

My One S capped out at ~250Mb, Series X at ~650.

I suspect it’s processing power and drive type related, as I imagine the consoles do a lot of decompressing to install as they download, and the older consoles won’t be as good as the newer ones

adam cool dude · 24 Mar 2022 at 13:53

andy_mk3 said:
Even if these services can't max out your 500Mb/1Gb connections, at least you can still download at a decent pace while streaming 4k and whatever else without it being affected. Before moving house I was on 30Mb FTTC, and downloading from Steam meant Youtube was buffering the whole time even at 480p.

I know your pain. The missus watching EastEnders upstairs on iPlayer. The daughter playing Fortnite whilst I am lagging around and rubber banding on Battlefield. No longer an issue and I still get single digit pings. Shame Battlefield is complete rubbish now so I have nothing competitive to play now

.

V F · 24 Mar 2022 at 14:23

andy_mk3 said:
Even if these services can't max out your 500Mb/1Gb connections, at least you can still download at a decent pace while streaming 4k and whatever else without it being affected. Before moving house I was on 30Mb FTTC, and downloading from Steam meant Youtube was buffering the whole time even at 480p.

Yes, that is true. I remember it when I used to have 60 - 40Mb on FTTC. Soon as Steam started something for a few hours, everything else suffered. Then if you throttled Steam, it would be even more hours. Anything from 3 - 6 so nothing else suffers. I remember many times only keeping the games I loved installed since redownloading was a long nightmare of waiting.

This was when I feared clicking the download button from anything within Steam. As I knew I'd see many hours remaining.

To think once I remember 40 - 60Mb felt like a new world in 2016 over 5Mb ADSL.

Gammawolf · 24 Mar 2022 at 16:30

Caged said:
Openreach flipped our area to "fibre coming soon" in June 2021, added it to the Fibre First map and rollout documents around October last year, and are currently building on the other side of town. That's all scheduled to finish mid-April according to the roadworks they've booked in, my hope is they get over to us shortly after that and we might be looking at a go-live around June/July. I'll see how long the service takes to become available to order after the work completes in the current areas.

Probably going to go with 500/75 for cost reasons initially, the only use for 1Gb would be the upload and going from 75Mbps to 115Mbps isn't a game-changing number for the usage it's likely to get. The increase from ~17Mbps will be welcome enough.

I'm waiting as well although i don't have anything specific for my area (large segment of the city) beyond "To be built April 2021 to April 2024". I'd probably go to the same service you mentioned, i'm not that intrested in the download as i'm on 330mbps currently, but a 50% uplift on upload to 75 would be nice. Also a few ms less of ping would be nice too

TheVoice · 24 Mar 2022 at 17:59

andy_mk3 said:
Even if these services can't max out your 500Mb/1Gb connections, at least you can still download at a decent pace while streaming 4k and whatever else without it being affected. Before moving house I was on 30Mb FTTC, and downloading from Steam meant Youtube was buffering the whole time even at 480p.

Absolutely, and that's where the faster speeds probably come into their own especially in larger households. I had 32Mbps before Hyperoptic installed in my building last Nov and the difference has been phenomenal. You don't actually have to worry about downloads causing issues with streaming or anything else because it finishes so quickly.

faceman123 · 24 Mar 2022 at 22:26

g67575 said:
I look forward to 10gbps connections, or 1 Gigabyte connections. I doubt I would ever 'need' anything more than that.

I'm not sure connections this fast will be affordable for most customers in the next 5-10 years, though.

I remember seeing 100mb connections in the same light, trust me 8k video etc is around the corner with bigger game files etc incoming, I guess it's a never ending loop

g67575 · 25 Mar 2022 at 00:12

Unless we end up with 1TB games ever (would still only take < 20 mins on a 1 gigabyte connection), I think 1 gigabyte would more than enough.

Turn · 25 Mar 2022 at 01:22

g67575 said:
Unless we end up with 1TB games ever (would still only take < 20 mins on a 1 gigabyte connection), I think 1 gigabyte would more than enough.

Obviously, but we know that's not going to be the case.
Most people don't have 10Gbps yet either, so although it may seem sufficient for now, who knows what the future will hold.

g67575 · 26 Mar 2022 at 02:16

I'd guess it would depend on how much they can improve NVME SSD write speeds. I think the highest end NVME drives can handle around 4GB/s at the moment, or 32 gigabits per second. There's bound to be another storage technology that will overtake SSD flash memory though, eventually.

A lot of people are using SATA SSDs at the moment though that limit them to ~4gbps write speeds, still very fast.

ChrisD. · 26 Mar 2022 at 09:30

The point in having speeds beyond 1 Gbps is so multiple devices can benefit from higher speeds simultaneously.

Steveocee · 26 Mar 2022 at 09:46

Random question, has anyone had their area announced for fttp and then followed the install and how long it took? My area was announced about 2 months ago, a few of the local poles have been roped and we have some new poles on the next street. Wondering if I should be getting ready for a BB move or whether people’s experienced say it’ll be another year?

Caged · 26 Mar 2022 at 11:10

I posted a couple pages back about how we were announced in June last year and there's still no signs of a build in the streets near here, but there is activity across town.

g67575 · 29 Mar 2022 at 12:21

Found out the reason why my FTTC line isn't particularly good (significant packet loss and lower than expected downstream). An Openreach engineer informed me that the cable in our street is aluminium, rather than copper, which limits the maximum speed in the street to ~60mbps.

He enabled interleaving on the upstream, so I will see if that helps much (in theory, it should).

V F · 29 Mar 2022 at 12:44

Oof! Aluminium. I suffered a similar experience once but the aluminium kept disintegrating. Everytime the engineer tried to make a new piece of wire after stripping it back it kept disintegrating in his hands. Until it eventually could no longer be joined. He had to put me on what spare pair was available until there were no more but they too were aluminium. The cables on that part of the road are at least 42 - 44 years old.

Then there were the other problems of external interference it was picking up. The cables weren't twisted plus water was getting in. Christmas sometimes was pretty bad. The line got so bad it could no longer hold 60Mb until it reached the point it could no longer hold 40Mb. Until it reached the point it fell back to 29 - 23Mb and kept getting worse over time along with the phone itself crackling/hissing and spitting. Aluminium is a real pain and nightmare.

g67575 · 29 Mar 2022 at 13:00

@VF - Have you been able to upgrade to FTTP or Virgin DOCSIS?

I just wish this information was made available to my family years ago! I mean, customers should really be informed whenever they change their internet package if their line is aluminium (and adjust the speed estimate for the line)... Would save a lot of faffing around, trying to figure out the problem.

V F · 29 Mar 2022 at 13:31

Yeah, I got FTTP on October last year because of those issues. My line had no stability for 6 months before FTTP was installed. Could be 10 - 20 drops a day depending on the weather and external interference and vibrations on the road. Sometimes I'd lose the phone and still have broadband, or lose both for hours. The only time it stabilized was during warm/hot days.

It wasn't until 2007/8 I found out from an engineer that it was aluminium on a section of the line. Which slowly degraded over the years. Aluminium is hell for broadband.

g67575 · 29 Mar 2022 at 13:48

I wonder how common aluminium lines are in the UK? I'd guess 10% of all Openreach lines?

Armageus · 29 Mar 2022 at 13:58

V F said:
To think once I remember 40 - 60Mb felt like a new world in 2016 over 5Mb ADSL.

I remember moving from 56K modem to ADSL and it genuinely did feel like a new world.

Currently I'm on ~22Mbps FTTC and at times I feel like the user experience isn't that much better than it was back on 56K (given how much bigger webpages are now with the bloat of adverts, social media integration, developer optimised frameworks and the like).

The same will no doubt be true even when gigabit connections become the norm - web pages or whatever the main services are at that time is, will continue to grow and absorb that capacity.