Moving house - general questions

[iamtheoneneo]

Hi all,
im about to move to a modern flat outside of the city and pretty much fear i have to go adsl, now after 5 years of fibre this is not a thought im happy with

questions:

1) double checking virgin it seems fibre is not in the area - i presume this is always right???
2) Now my understanding is that fibre is always faster then adsl, so how on earth do adsl get 20mb speeds as many are advertising? does this actually transfer to RL speeds ie . over 1mb downloads as like you get when on fibre??

thanks for reading.

 

[paradigm]

1) double checking virgin it seems fibre is not in the area - i presume this is always right???

99 times out of 100. It may be that Virgin have only cabled up to the end of your road, or sometimes worse, half way down it. My ex was less than 20m from the termination of the fibre, but they still wouldn't extend it.

2) Now my understanding is that fibre is always faster then adsl, so how on earth do adsl get 20mb speeds as many are advertising? does this actually transfer to RL speeds ie . over 1mb downloads as like you get when on fibre??

With ADSL, typically the further you are from the exchange (in cable length, not necessarily the same as geographical distance), the worse speeds you'll get. You can acheive 24Mb on ADSL, but you'd practically have to live in the exchange. Do a postcode lookup on samknows to get a rough estimation of distance to the connected exchange.

But yes, speeds of over 1MB/s are possible on ADSL, I'm currently downloading at 1.4MB/s at work on their ADSL.

 

[rpstewart]

Have you checked samknows.com to see what is available, it's about as accurate as you can get.

ADSL2+ will give you speeds up to 20mbps but only on a good line close to the phone exchange, like normal ADSL speeds will roll off as line noise increases. The key thing is that ADSL2+ is not available in all exchanges, again Samknows will give you an idea of what's available.

EDIT: Must type faster

 

[iamtheoneneo]

hey yeh iv just checked that website, good find there.
it says cable is available and then Virgin Media: Available in some areas, so i guess its 50/50 then.
its a one year old flat so what are the chances vm had the cabling done during the build? i guess i have to ring them.

it seems im pretty close to the exchange about 2 roads away in the centre of the town and the walking distance is about 2 minutes from the flat.

 

[Sp00n]

Unfortunately just because the map says you are right next to it, doesn't mean the cabling is as direct as possible, so you could have some stupid wiring (like some clients I have) that extends the link way more than expected and thus reducing the speeds.

I would phone VM and see if you can get cable, gotta be the best bet.

 

[iamtheoneneo]

ok thanks il check it out...dont really like the idea of paying bt £125 to reconnect my line