Is there a *functional* fibre availability checker?

Angilion said:
I just checked 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 :)
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I've recently moved somewhere without great internet and having to use a mix of landline and 4G to make do :s I'm lucky though I get FTTC here albeit most days only connects at ~25Mbit out of a potential 37Mbit - the rest of the village has to make do on an average 1.8Mbit! (only 4 houses one being mine have FTTC). I manage to get a fairly stable 30Mbit on 4G as well which helps a lot in spreading the load.

Coming from having 2x 80/20 connections it is painful though hah.
 
MissChief said:
POST YOUR RESULTS FROM THE BT DSL CHECKER SITE USING YOUR ADDRESS.
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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 said:
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?
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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.
 
MissChief said:
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.
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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.
 
MissChief said:
I remember getting Telewest Broadband back in the day at 512kb!
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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.
 
ChrisD. said:
Your best bet is Virgin Media, I'm sure they do new customer deals.
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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.

ChrisD. said:
Pretty sure he said that they do.
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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.

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



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.



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).
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So to get that deal I'm sure you need to go via moneysavingexpert?
 
Ayahuasca said:
If you’ve never been a customer with VM for your broadband then you can absolutely get that deal.
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Assuming I could get that deal even if it's not being offered to me, how does that overcome this:

Angilion said:
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.
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and this:

Angilion said:
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.
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and this:

Angilion said:
I think it's worth reading the comments in the thread on that deal
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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.
 
Seems like your options are to stick with what you have, to move to VM and then try and get a retention deal at the end of the contract term, to cancel VM at the end of the contract term and move back to ADSL (assuming nothing else has become available in the interim) so you can sign up as a new customer to VM again, or to use a 4G service.

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.
 
Caged said:
[..] 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.
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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.
 
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