New fiber optic BT broadband £19.00 per month

[G1BB0]

Rroff I think at the moment there is so many changes going on that everyone will experience issues at some stage, exchanges are migrating over LLU eqpt, new cable both copper and fibre is being updated, LLU's are are constantly upgrading at their end also. On thursday my bband/phone dropped completely for a few hours, I was told it was a fault... when my bband came back I found my speed had infact doubled from about 3.5mb to 7.8mb and 500k upload.... obviously work been done by sky/bt

we have an ageing network in the UK that in all honesty requires a massive overhaul, it is going to take time and money but is happening. I am at the bottom of the pile lol so only get snippets of info, there is a massive push on FTCC tho and by the end of this year a hell of a lot of towns and cities will have the FTCC work completed. Bare in mind the copper network also is still going to be their, even more work for us lowly engineers lol.

 

[Rofflay]

FTTC will all be about how close you are to the green cabinet.

Most houses are within 500 meters or so. VDSL2 works basically flat-out (100Mbit/s is possible) sub 100 meters. Then it starts tailing off.

Luckily for me, the green cabinet is literally within stone throwing distance

how many people does 1 green cabinet cater for? my town has about 1700 people listed on the exchange, its green on congestion, will they stick just one for this town ?

positioning for this also would maybe the bang in the middle of the town? or near the old exchange?


no hopes for 1 green cabinet per street then lol, damm i live beside the only spot on my street with a spot for one ><

also whats gonna happen after fttc, how fast can i go? if most people are 500m away whats the max speed?

and can anyone see bt linking up the final few yards to everyones house in the uk with fibre aka fttp?

i mean if fibre is coming to towns up to the cabinet at least, surely they cant keep using copper past 5 years? or at least build more cabinets so everyone is clsoer to one for 100mb?

virgin are going ahead with 200mb and bt could match them but they stop short of your house with lovely fibre by about 500m

 

[Azuse05]

Can't be, there's 220 houses in my street and a cabinet outside my house, but there's another near the other end of the street. It depends on how they were layer down, but the typically go by distance not address

Are you sure there arn't any already near you?

Umm, virgin also stop short of the house by afew meters, copper can handle a GB/s over short distance, so why bother with fibering every house in the country?

 

[Gzero]

The infrastructure seems a mess to me... atleast 3 days a month signs of congestion in the core network are creeping in with high pings on certain nodes... when peak time traffic managed theres all sorts of application issues i.e. if anything is updating on steam all other internet traffic disconnects. Frequent bounts of high pings or packetloss and I'm being routed all the way around the country to get out on the internet Somerset->Sheffield RAS->Ilford/ealing - explain that one :S

When's your contract up?
Any decent LLU providers on your exchange?

I'm wondering how other ISP's take advantage of this upgrade. It would be nice to go from 15mbps to 22mbps on my O2 connection if this cuts out the noise on my line.

Although I still wouldn't sign up for BT's new package, it isn't a good deal no matter how many numbers they throw around, they simply do not care about keeping a good capacity of network available for their home/residential customers.

With my current provider O2/Be, they are doing ok, struggled here and there before (mostly just fibre breaks) to keep levels such that those who care never notice a dip in speeds and service.

I think it's working for them as they sign more and more 'light' users.

FTTH is a dream at this stage though.

 

[alwyn]

Virgin offers better deals IMO, the basic line in our area now is 10 mbps + all we pay for TV + Broadband + Phone is £ 19.00
+ No download limits so far, have downed over 750 GB a month, well the capping between 10 to 9 for download sucks but it still offers a reasonable amount.

 

[G1BB0]

holy moly, just dloading on newsgroup and was getting 350kb/s or so down, since my outage on thursday night I am now dloading at 1000kb/s

as stated above, there is lots of 'stuff' going on at the mo, all for the good

fyi cabinets usually have between 2-800 lines depending on location (copper) not sure about fibre

 

[Gzero]

holy moly, just dloading on newsgroup and was getting 350kb/s or so down, since my outage on thursday night I am now dloading at 1000kb/s

as stated above, there is lots of 'stuff' going on at the mo, all for the good

fyi cabinets usually have between 2-800 lines depending on location (copper) not sure about fibre

So just under a 1mb/s xD

Imagine the speed you could do if the attenuation on your line was less
Oh wait FTTC should do that

 

[NathanE]

how many people does 1 green cabinet cater for? my town has about 1700 people listed on the exchange, its green on congestion, will they stick just one for this town ?

positioning for this also would maybe the bang in the middle of the town? or near the old exchange?


no hopes for 1 green cabinet per street then lol, damm i live beside the only spot on my street with a spot for one ><

also whats gonna happen after fttc, how fast can i go? if most people are 500m away whats the max speed?

and can anyone see bt linking up the final few yards to everyones house in the uk with fibre aka fttp?

i mean if fibre is coming to towns up to the cabinet at least, surely they cant keep using copper past 5 years? or at least build more cabinets so everyone is clsoer to one for 100mb?

virgin are going ahead with 200mb and bt could match them but they stop short of your house with lovely fibre by about 500m

1,700 people doesn't sound like much of a town?

Generally each street or cul-de-sac etc has a green cabinet. That is very much a generalisation though. In reality, it is a mess. Sometimes you'll get homes in the same street/cul-de-sac/etc using two completely different green cabinets. This is more a reflection of BT taking advantage of, where possible, the point-to-point nature of twisted pair telephone lines. It's not like when Virgin Media light up a street with CATV where everyone on that street must share the same piece of coaxial.

For more modern homes, which were generally built in a "stack'em'n'pack'em" cramped housing estates fashion during the New Labour housing bubble, there will be one or two green cabinets depending on the size of the estate.

 

[Gzero]

1,700 people doesn't sound like much of a town?

Generally each street or cul-de-sac etc has a green cabinet. That is very much a generalisation though. In reality, it is a mess. Sometimes you'll get homes in the same street/cul-de-sac/etc using two completely different green cabinets. This is more a reflection of BT taking advantage of, where possible, the point-to-point nature of twisted pair telephone lines. It's not like when Virgin Media light up a street with CATV where everyone on that street must share the same piece of coaxial.

For more modern homes, which were generally built in a "stack'em'n'pack'em" cramped housing estates fashion during the New Labour housing bubble, there will be one or two green cabinets depending on the size of the estate.

Oh that reminds me, Virgin are now convinced they can get me as a customer, yet I haven't noticed any major work done near my street.

If they can add space for me, will I be likely to notice BT fitting the fibre as well?

 

[bigredshark]

Bigredshark or anyone else with enough knowledge, care to make any predictions about how BT and VM will advance their infrastructure over the next 5 years? I assume BT will just keep deploying FTTC, but can VM do anything other than just trying to fiddle around with the current infrastructure trying to get higher speeds out of an aging network?

Very difficult to know really. I suspect, and it won't be good news for most people, that it'll be incremental rollout of FTTC to the rest of the country by BT and a slow upgrade to 200mbit DOCSIS3 from Virgin.

Both these strategies have problems. I can't see BT getting more than 100Mbit out of VDSL in the next 5 years (and 60Mbps is likely more accurate) so they'll loose the headline speed battle. But they are rolling it out at least and they have the advantage that their backhaul network is in reasonably good shape so if they can provide the access medium then they won't need to contend it too heavily.

Bandwidth costs aren't changing much in the next few years that I can see (the carriers are investing heavily in capacity so will want to pay that off) so download caps are here to stay for the medium term unless people suddenly become willing to pay more.

Virgin have different and opposite problems. A access medium which will do for a few years yet (I don't like the nature of 200Mbit DOCSIS3 and it'll push virgins last mile network to the edge of capacity in my opinion but it's technically possible) but a backhaul network which is desperately short of capacity (I've given up trying to get any serious bandwidth circuits from NTL business now, they just don't have the capacity) and is still fragmented from the days when they were separate companies. Virgin surely aren't connecting any more homes soon, they're still suffering the financial consequences of their last role out a decade ago.

Virgin are maybe marginally better off as their problem is technically easy to fix, just expensive. BT have both technical and financial considerations but are probably better placed to tackle them.

To summarise, I suspect that in towns and cities most people will have access to something like 40down/2up in the next 3-4 years and in the countryside ADSL2+ will get rolled out fairly universally.

It's not the best news and not the worst. Before the usual mob turn up complaining how we're years behind country x and this country is a disaster please stop and actually consider how you'd do anything about that. If it was possible as a private company to deploy 100Mbps FTTP in any sort of financially viable way on any kind of scale somebody would be doing it. I've spent substantial time preparing technical proposals for it myself but the costs are simply too much when the majority of the population doesn't see a reason to pay more than £20 a month for ADSL/10Mbit cable. If you've got some miraculous business plan which makes it profitable then let me know, I can build the network...

 

[bigredshark]

virgin are going ahead with 200mb and bt could match them but they stop short of your house with lovely fibre by about 500m

Because that last 500m would cost more than twice as much again, laying fibre in conduits is easy, but they don't generally go to the premises so the civil engineering costs of those last meters are huge compared to getting it to the cabinet. So who would you like to pay for it?

 

[bigredshark]

Can't be, there's 220 houses in my street and a cabinet outside my house, but there's another near the other end of the street. It depends on how they were layer down, but the typically go by distance not address

Are you sure there arn't any already near you?

Umm, virgin also stop short of the house by afew meters, copper can handle a GB/s over short distance, so why bother with fibering every house in the country?

Very simply, because copper is very distance limited, so it has to connect into fibre pretty quickly and connecting copper to fibre requires a powered device (which doesn't cost pennies - look up the cost of media converters) but more importantly requires power, which means every interconnect requires a power supply and the ability to dissipate the inevitable heat that power supply produces.

It's not practical to convert copper into the home to fibre for the backhaul under the pavement outside every house so it has to reach to a cabinet to be converted, which means cabinets every 50 meters (not much less expensive) or longer reach copper (like VDSL) or hacky broadcast cable systems (DOCSIS3 or Virgin).

Given these options, FTTH makes much more sense if you have to install from scratch anyway, even if you do point to point it's good for 10s of gigabits up to 70km and if you do broadcast style with PON the splitters don't require power.

 

[G1BB0]

one thing I feel we all have to bare in mind is how far we have come in a very short space of time technology wise.

once you actually see the size of the BT network for example and the amount of plant in the ground its pretty daunting maintaining it let alone updating it/replacing to meet the new demands and technology.

all of this has got to be good for us consumers tho in the long term

 

[Gzero]

Didn't know fibre degrades

You could say the same about the national grid, but we seem to be able to deliver power almost anywhere in the country.

 

[Rroff]

When's your contract up?
Any decent LLU providers on your exchange?

I'm wondering how other ISP's take advantage of this upgrade. It would be nice to go from 15mbps to 22mbps on my O2 connection if this cuts out the noise on my line.

Although I still wouldn't sign up for BT's new package, it isn't a good deal no matter how many numbers they throw around, they simply do not care about keeping a good capacity of network available for their home/residential customers.

With my current provider O2/Be, they are doing ok, struggled here and there before (mostly just fibre breaks) to keep levels such that those who care never notice a dip in speeds and service.

I think it's working for them as they sign more and more 'light' users.

FTTH is a dream at this stage though.

Strictly the contract is up... but BT messed up the WBC switch over (profile data was jammed during transfer from the old system to oneview) and someone then messed up further and re-provisioned it as a new order hence new contract - but strictly we aren't actually in contract but I'm not sure after the last lot of hassle I have the energy to argue the toss.

The only LLU providers here are.... AOL, Talk Talk and Orange... not exactly great chorices and they only do 8Mbit LLU here not ADSL2+ :S

Thing is a lot of the time BT are pretty good - formerly I had sub 10ms pings to most UK hosts, 7+MBit/s speeds no downtime, no packetloss, etc. now I have 30+ms even with fastpath mode on thanks to some **** up and during peak times traffic management makes a right mess with slow speeds and the "naughty" user "virtual" pipes seem over congested... which leads me to another moan... they claim we used over 100gig last month but the router only shows 72gig combined up and down for the whole month and its pretty accurate.

 

[bigredshark]

Didn't know fibre degrades

You could say the same about the national grid, but we seem to be able to deliver power almost anywhere in the country.

What? Degrades in what way? There are ways in which various types of fibre do degrade both physically over time and over distance with regard to transmission but both are largely solved by using better quality fibre.

And power delivery is a little bit different from data transmission.

 

[G1BB0]

wasnt referring to fibre, I meant the copper/alli/lead (yes there is still some lmao)

and I am sure fibre degrades in time to some extent

at least fibre isnt as scrappable so should deter the thieving ***** gits

 

[bigredshark]

wasnt referring to fibre, I meant the copper/alli/lead (yes there is still some lmao)

and I am sure fibre degrades in time to some extent

at least fibre isnt as scrappable so should deter the thieving ***** gits

Yeah, cheap fibre tends to become slightly brittle over time and more susceptible to breaks. Of course that's fibre's major downside, much easier to break and much more of a pain when you do - anybody can patch up a copper cable, re-splicing fibre is a specialist job...

 

[G1BB0]

nah they have a tool now that auto lines up/splices, still a technical job but by all accounts easier than remaking a 500 pair joint and cheaper to replace a length of fibre over copper

apparently 50% of engineers are getting trained up on fibre so personally I cant wait

 

[Gzero]

Bad news for those who were planning on going with BT, the same limits from the ADSL2+ service are imposed on this new 'faster' product:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/20...and-isp-packages-to-restrict-heavy-usage.html


Oh and I was making a remark to G1BBO about fibre is more durable than copper hence the

Yes I know there are still going to be joints here and there that are copper, but at least now when it's wet there are less factors to interfere with people's phonelines.

Oh and don't get me started on BT's engineer callout system (money making scam) xD