Is there a *functional* fibre availability checker?

[Angilion]

Short version - I want a tool that I can feed my phone number or complete address to and which will check all fibre providers to see if any cover my house specifically.


For decades (and yes, I do mean that lterally), I've switched providers only on the couple of occasions that the provider I was using was bought out and I was automatically switched. Sheer inertia. As a result, I've been with TalkTalk for at least 10 years, probably more. Inertia and adequate service have kept me there.

My bill has, unsurprisingly, crept up. It's all direct debit, so I barely notice how much it is. I happened to notice this week that I'm now paying £33 a month for ~10Mbps downstream and ~1Mbps upstream. Not the best deal nowadays and a growing inconvenience with the growing size of patches and games.

So, fibre it is...maybe. Still going with inertia, I tried to upgrade to Talktalk's 70Mb service. No go - not available to my house. A bit of a surprise, as I live in a house in a city. I thought those were all covered.

So I tried to find a tool online to check for fibre availability...and failed. I can find referal sites pretending to be availability sites, but all they do is refer me to deals. I can Openreach's own availability checker, which doesn't recognise my phone number for some unexplained reason. It suggests that it can take a day for a new phone number to be recognised by their checker - I've had this phone number for over 20 years. Postcode searches sometimes tell me that fibre is available, but they're not reliable because post codes cover a fairly large area.

I'm reluctant to even consider Virgin because everyone I know who has used Virgin has had problems, usually serious, and I'd rather have expensive 10Mbps than problems. But I had a look...and Virgin's availability checker is postcode only and therefore useless.

I know there are some other providers covering some areas, but which ones and where? BT's website says there are no plans to cover my area and suggests I try to gather enough people to give BT enough money to persuade them to do it. That's...not ideal

 

[Angilion]

Only BT Wholesale numbers show up on the Openreach checker which is pretty frustrating. The VM post code checker is fine and won't work using a BT or other non-residential number anyway.

That explains the oddity with the phone number, so thank you. The issue I'm having with a postcode checker is that the postcode area I am in appears to be partially covered by fibre. If I put in just the postcode, fibre can show up as being available but if I get the chance to put in a house number as well it will show as being not available.

No there isn't.

That's what I feared. Maybe the government's much-publicised talking about fast broadband everywhere would be helped by it being possible for a person to find out if they can get fast broadband. Radical idea!

Anyone who uses the Openreach structure are interchangeable, so if you are looking at FTTC or FTTP the best checker you can use is the BT one.

That's what I thought. So no go there.

If you are thinking about alt-net's then you'd have to go to them individually.

If you live in a city centre then there is a decent chance there will be an alt-net provider who can help you with some Gb goodness.

So now I have to find every alt-net and check them individually and hope I don't miss any...or do nothing and stick with expensive 10Mbps. Joy!

 

[Angilion]

This is the main checker I use to see services that can be connected to your house via Openreach based networks: https://www.dslchecker.bt.com also there is a checker on the Openreach site: https://www.openreach.com

Neither of which work for me because they don't recognise my phone number. ChrisD explained why in post #2. Neither has an option to enter an address, only a postcode. The postcode option rightly states that it isn't reliable. Postcode areas aren't the same as fibre availability areas.

I guess the other sites would be VM website, maybe Vodafone as part of their network is covered by CityFibre, you might be lucky enough to live in an area they are covering. If you live in flats or an apartment block Hyperoptic might be available: https://www.hyperoptic.com

I looked at Hyperoptic, but I live in a house in a terrace and they cover, as you say, blocks of flats and suchlike. CityFibre I didn't know about, so I'll check those.

That's the problem for me now - finding all the alt-nets and where they cover. There doesn't seem to be any central source. My searches returned no end of press releases and nothing useful. Vodafone is promising - their prices and reported service are pretty good. I'll check them now.

There are also people giving consideration to the mobile broadband offered by the usual companies as being a viable option, especially if you get a good signal to your phone.

Not for me - I don't have a mobile phone. Weird nowadays, I know, but it's not something I need or want.

EDIT: I went to Vodafone's website to see if I could get faster broadband here...and everything on their site related to broadband is down. There's a placeholder message saying "We'll be back soon. Thank you for your patience". Marvellous! I had no idea it would be so hard to get modern broadband.

 

[Angilion]

What city are you in?

Stoke on Trent. It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy, so I'm not surprised it's one of the few urban areas with nothing more than the most basic broadband.

 

[Angilion]

[..] I had this through the post about a month ago now but it was called VX Fiber, looks like they've change their name. It looks promising but could take a while to be implemented.

That was one of the press releases I found, written about 2 years ago. Also, the price quoted was £50 a month for the basic service. So it would probably be more. It's not a name change per se - Lilaconnect is part of VX Fiber.

I'd be OK with the 40Mb you get, but I can't even get that. BT's checker offers me an expected 7Mb! Maybe I should get some new string for the tin cans that seem to be what connects my house to the phone system

 

[Angilion]

Looking on the speed test results overlay on the map at thinkbroadband shows results from various tests in various places and the logo of the ISP. One of them is a stylised multicoloured "S" and nothing else. Any ideas what ISP that is?

 

[Angilion]

I'd imagine it is Sky.

Ah, good call. I'll try to check them.

Where in the city are you? I'm Weston Coyney and that's the speed I get.

Hanley. Or maybe Northwood. Depending on who I ask.

I tried checking availability on Vodafone. After granting dozens of sites permission to do anything they want on my PC (good luck with that - my browser is sandboxed and all cookies are deleted when I close the browser or if they're not used for 30 seconds) Vodafone's website informed me that merely checking to see what broadband packages I could get from them would change my phone number. I assumed that was wrong and fed it my postcode, house number and phone number. The result was, and I'm not even surprised any more, "Sorry, there's a problem. Looks like something's gone wrong. Please go back and try again."

If I ever get a spare day and a lot of patience, I might try to find a phone number I could call and maybe eventually get to speak to a person who might be able to tell me what products I could buy. Very old fashioned, but there are still a few businesses who actually want to sell something.

 

[Angilion]

What does the BT checker (dslchecker.bt.com) say if you just do an address check? Click the address search option, enter just the postcode and pick your house from the next screen.

Off the top of my head, I don't recall whether I checked with BT or Openreach or both before posting

I know there are some other providers covering some areas, but which ones and where? BT's website says there are no plans to cover my area and suggests I try to gather enough people to give BT enough money to persuade them to do it. That's...not ideal

in the first post in this thread, but I doubt if it matters since in this context they're the same thing. The result was that they have no plans to offer anything more than basic (<12Mbps) broadband to my house unless I can get enough people around here to contribute enough money to pay for the costs ourselves.

I've just gone again to get more precise details:

WBC ADSL2+ Up to 15Mbps down
WBC ADSL2+ Annex M Up to 15 down, up to 1.5 up
ADSL Max Up to 7 down
WBC fixed rate 2 down
Fixed rate 2 down

 

[Angilion]

I'd imagine it is Sky.

I just checked Sky (because I think you're right and the users just down the road from me who uploaded their location and speed test results are with Sky) and they're prepared to offer me 4.3Mbps down and 0.7Mbps up, with the possibility of maybe getting as much as 12Mbps down sometimes, maybe, possibly. So no go there.

I also check Virgin, just to be sure. They're available, but at £49 a month for just internet and a phone line. I do still use a landline phone, so I do want that functionality and if I dropped that functionality I'd have to pay for a mobile to replace it anyway so I wouldn't be saving much if anything . Given that I don't want to switch to Virgin anyway, that price is offputting.

Looks like I'll have to just pretend that waiting 20 hours for a download to complete is nostalgia for the old days of early dial-up

 

[Angilion]

POST YOUR RESULTS FROM THE BT DSL CHECKER SITE USING YOUR ADDRESS.

I ALREADY DID THAT IN THE ORIGINAL POST THAT I STARTED THIS THREAD WITH.

I HAVE DONE IT AGAIN WITH COMPLETE DETAIL TWO POSTS ABOVE YOURS.

CAN WE STOP SHOUTING NOW?

 

[Angilion]

Pardon me. So you can’t get Fibre. At all. You’re stuck with ADSL. At up to 15Meg down and up to 1.5 up. So likely 10-12 down and 1-1.2 up.

check a couple of neighbours houses just to make sure that there’s not an error. Also try and find your local cabinet. The checker shows which cabinet you’re connected to so go look for it or use street view. It may be that the cabinet is hundreds of yards away or it’s not been upgraded yet.

1.01Km (from the thinkbroadband map) is labelled as the exchange and 220m (from the openreach checker) is labelled as the cabinet. According to the thinkbroadband checker, even the exchange isn't capable of anything better than ADSL.

I checked both ends of this street and around the middle just for the sake of completeness. Same results.

I can't find any sign of any alt-net around here other than VX fibre/Lilaconnect and so far that's a press release, a tiny test area a couple of miles away and a stated intention to cover the city at some point in time.

I remember when 2400 baud was superfast internet. Now I'm complaining about only being able to get 4000 times that speed. Although stuff to download is generally more than 4000 times larger now, so what I have now is effectively slower, in a sense.

 

[Angilion]

I remember getting Telewest Broadband back in the day at 512kb!

I go back to a connection that could be configured between 300/300 and 1200/75. Bits, not kilobits or megabits. On a VT100 terminal. ASCII only (80x24 IIRC) and you could buy either a green on black monitor or an amber on black monitor but you couldn't choose between the two unless you bought one of each. My first connection at home was 2400 down (I don't recall how much up). Twice as fast, wow! Next upgrade was to the brand new (and quite expensive) 9600 modem, then another expensive jump to 28.8K. So fast it was measured in kilobits rather than just bits. Amazing! Then 33.6K, then 56K and then, wonder of wonders, 256K and being able to use the phone at the same time! From there, I've done nothing and just had my speed bumped up every now and then by the ISP.

 

[Angilion]

Your best bet is Virgin Media, I'm sure they do new customer deals.

They probably do, but I'm not interested in changing ISP every year. I want to know the real price, not the bait price to hook new customers. For Virgin, that's £49 a month for ~100Mb broadband and phone only.

Pretty sure he said that they do.

I did. At least, their checker says they do. Also, they spammed me with junk mail for a few months a few years ago so I'm fairly sure they serve my address. I doubt if they'd bother doing that if they couldn't sell me anything.

If you can get VM then... https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/vi...-equates-to-just-1775-a-month-via-mse-3319703

I think it's worth reading the comments in the thread on that deal (which I'm not being offered anyway - the deal VM offers me is £33 a month for 12 months, then £49 a month unless they decide to increase it).

 

[Angilion]

If you’ve never been a customer with VM for your broadband then you can absolutely get that deal.

Assuming I could get that deal even if it's not being offered to me, how does that overcome this:

I'm reluctant to even consider Virgin because everyone I know who has used Virgin has had problems, usually serious, and I'd rather have expensive 10Mbps than problems.

and this:

They probably do, but I'm not interested in changing ISP every year. I want to know the real price, not the bait price to hook new customers. For Virgin, that's £49 a month for ~100Mb broadband and phone only.

and this:

I think it's worth reading the comments in the thread on that deal

On top of that, of course, there's the fact that I can't even do the usual "lie to the company every year to avoid paying their real price" tactic. If I go with VM for fibre, that's it. I can't plausibly pull off the "I'll move to another company if you charge me your real price" thing because there isn't any competition. Besides, I don't like being deceitful to companies any more than I like companies being deceitful to me.

 

[Angilion]

[..] I sort of feel the thread has run its course now as it's reasonably clear you don't want to use Virgin Media, and I've only ever had bad experiences with them as well although I'm aware it does generally vary by area. To answer your question regarding the existence of a single tool that you can put your address into that checks for broadband availability across all the major networks as well as smaller altnets - no, this doesn't exist.

I agree. All the useful stuff was in the first half of this thread. I was pretty sure that the answer to my question in the OP was "no", but I was allowing for the possibility of me being wrong and having somehow missed the existence of a fully functional broadband availability checker. Such a thing would have course be an obvious part of any govenment's plans to get more people on to faster broadband, but it would be wildly optimistic to assume that our government has plans for that (or anything much). Media soundbites, yes. Plans, no.