Thoughts on FTTH?

[Bozebo]

Hi there, the place I'm renting next year with 6 flatmates (we go to uni together, Abertay) is having fibre installed for free by fibrecity. But I am completely unsure as to how well it will perform, when compared to something like Be Pro (what the hell have they done to their website!). I know the line to the property can handle speeds in excess of 100Mb/s (probably limited by the router's lan speed) down but I have no idea if the (currently unnanounced) available ISPs are even bothering to provide anywhere near that, I heard from some Americans that they paid over $4000 to have a line installed but the ISPs are only giving about 4Mb/s down and 480Kb/s up - what!

I am aware that it depends on which LLU services they will install (Virgin will probably get in there with their crummy 50Mb/s down)

The other issue is the fair user policy - there are going to be 7 heavy internet users on this line, if the policy isn't very unrestricted then we are going to be annihalated by our limited choice of ISP.

Well, anyway. Does anyone reading this have FTTH in Britain? And what is it like?
I suppose I missed the biggest benifit though; lower latencies - gotta love them latencies.

 

[muon]

Why would they only get 4Mb. Even if they were on an upto 8Mb service, surely it should max out.

 

[Bozebo]

Why would they only get 4Mb. Even if they were on an upto 8Mb service, surely it should max out.

Well, no. There is no "8Mb" fibre service, that number came from the maximum possible under adsl2, fibre is limited mostly by what the exchange is willing to provide to each line. Potential speeds of 400Mb/s down and 321Mb/s up can be achieved, but that would only handle say, 10 households per LLU - so they limit the speeds to cram more people on the hardware. and 8Mb/s copper lines are rarely maxed out. To get 8 Mb you need to be right next door, or have a fresh new line with no interference that is say, < 300m away.

 

[TheDogFather]

I'm confused, you keep going on about ADSL and LLU, this FTTH has nothing to do with either does it.

Until they announce a ISP who knows what they will offer but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't vastly better than offered elsewhere.

 

[Bozebo]

I'm confused, you keep going on about ADSL and LLU, this FTTH has nothing to do with either does it.

Until they announce a ISP who knows what they will offer but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't vastly better than offered elsewhere.

Nothing to do with adsl no (just making comparisons). But BT don't offer fibre in the exchange through wholesale, to get connected there needs to be an isp there with LLUs in place - currently that is only Virgin Media.

 

[Seft]

Dude your posts don't make that much sense. Anyway, the fibrecity site says:

Q: What services will I be able to get?
A: Internet speeds of up to 100Mbps

so that's about as good as you're going to get until more is announced. The other city being done is Bournemouth and there's nothing announced there yet.

 

[Bozebo]

Dude your posts don't make that much sense. Anyway, the fibrecity site says:

Q: What services will I be able to get?
A: Internet speeds of up to 100Mbps

so that's about as good as you're going to get until more is announced. The other city being done is Bournemouth and there's nothing announced there yet.

yeah I read that. The 100Mb/s limit is due to the NIC on the router (10/100/1000 Mb lan, it is 100) - they always talk up the connection as much as possible (the fibre line is 8 channel, it can handle way above 100Mb/s)

 

[tolien]

There's no LLU involved at all and Virgin Media definitely don't do LLU.

Whatever's available, you're going to have to talk to the fibre provider and/or the ISPs using it. I seriously doubt any of the established ISPs are going to bother versus Openreach's FTTC.

 

[Bozebo]

There's no LLU involved at all and Virgin Media definitely don't do LLU.

Whatever's available, you're going to have to talk to the fibre provider and/or the ISPs using it. I seriously doubt any of the established ISPs are going to bother versus Openreach's FTTC.

Openrech isn't operating in dundee, virgin media do... I was with them before when I had fibre at the uni accomidation but I had no control over the speeds and of course they had a business speed connection.
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/product.do?id=15208

And infact, fibre doesnt involve LLU so to speak, it is a different concept but the term LLU is still being used caus it involves the isp using their hardware in the exchange. Also, virgin do offer llu services, why did you think they didn't?

Anyway, so I guess nobody here has fibre and can summarise any problems for me?

 

[tolien]

If Openreach "isn't operating in dundee", where is your Orange ADSL coming down? An Openreach copper pair connected to either BT Wholesale or Orange LLU, per chance?

Also, virgin do offer llu services, why did you think they didn't?

Because they don't? They operate their own hybrid fibre-coax network and run an ADSL service via BT Wholesale.

I doubt anyone has your specific provider, no.

 

[Bozebo]

If Openreach "isn't operating in dundee", where is your Orange ADSL coming down? An Openreach copper pair connected to either BT Wholesale or Orange LLU, per chance?



Because they don't? They operate their own hybrid fibre-coax network and run an ADSL service via BT Wholesale.

I doubt anyone has your specific provider, no.

That was rather confusing (not as confusing as my first post ). orange has nothing to do with it, the orange service I have is at my parents home, I am moving to a rented student house in dundee with 6 others and our landlord has applied to the fibrecity programme where they install the line for free (has been done) - however there are currently no isps but virgin operating in dundee for the fibre, just wondering what people's experiences are in relation to fibre services as a whole. I hear bt's fibre should be 10Mb/s upload speed, but virgin's is only 1.3 :S that is barely enough for a family who don't do a lot of gaming - with 7 heavy users that is impossibly slow. It seems virgin do not offer copper LLU services, which I rather presumed; wasn't expecting a jump from wholesale to fibre. However I have been talking about "LLUs" for fibre because both services require their hardware to be available at the exchange. Yet, virgin are not putting any lines down in dundee - dundee city council have arranged for all premisis to have fibrecity lines (8 channel yeah! ) - yet virgin need to (and have for businesses) step in with their hardware to operate it. I know they are offering the service in bournemouth if it is applied for via fibrecity's correspondance and I am curious as to how awesome it may or may not be (for £50 a month :O yet it is cheaper to run than a copper service)

edit: Just as a note, right now I am at my parent's house with Orange through LLU (300m from exchange with 6.8Mb/s down and about 300 Mb/s up... when I am not throttled as they suddenly decided to do). In dundee, the copper line is still there - at the moment it will be with the old occupiers and the lease ends on 23rd August, when we are forced to get at least 3 months of a BT phone line paid for - we can still get a copper isp (Be are on their way... eventually == "6th June 2009") for 3 months at 721m from the exchange (though, of course it's not a direct route = and the exchange services many homes in our direction so the copper may be dire)

 

[tolien]

Maybe so, the point is that Openreach certainly do operate in Dundee. Virgin Media run their own network but none of this has anything to do with the FTTC scheme.

There'll be no LLU involved whatsoever. The relationship will be rather like most ISPs and BT Wholesale, i.e. it's all provided by the fibre operator and then handed over to the ISP at some convenient network point. You'll likely have to speak to the fibre operator to find out what ISPs are participating, but as I said I doubt many of the conventional ones will bother given the coverage.

 

[Bozebo]

Maybe so, the point is that Openreach certainly do operate in Dundee. Virgin Media run their own network but none of this has anything to do with the FTTC scheme.

There'll be no LLU involved whatsoever. The relationship will be rather like most ISPs and BT Wholesale, i.e. it's all provided by the fibre operator and then handed over to the ISP at some convenient network point. You'll likely have to speak to the fibre operator to find out what ISPs are participating, but as I said I doubt many of the conventional ones will bother given the coverage.

Ah, that is good news in some ways. Thanks for clarifying the situation.

I reckon I will go with a whole-sold version - might get a better service in relation to fair usage and the likes (at least, bt are evil with their copper).

So I guess I am to wait until fibrecity send us some pamphlets ^_^

edit:
you know a lot about the dundee+fibre+openreach-specific service. Is there info readily available in articles or do you work close to the industry? (don't have to say anything or whatever...) Caus I've dont a bit of googling but the articles and websites I find seem to have steared away from the fibrecity related news and are going on about openreach which puzzled my whole understanding of what is going to happen. Should I expect my postcode to respond as being an available fibre area once the isp's sites allow the package to be selected? (virgin do, but er, hmm...)

 

[Dist]

I hear bt's fibre should be 10Mb/s upload speed, but virgin's is only 1.3 :S that is barely enough for a family who don't do a lot of gaming - with 7 heavy users that is impossibly slow.

The upload speed is perfectly fine for gamers, the majority of games do not even require much in the way of upload speed. Anyway, VM are planning on trying out increased upload speeds, reaching up to 10Mb (which will proberly be for their 50Mb service).

 

[Bozebo]

The upload speed is perfectly fine for gamers, the majority of games do not even require much in the way of upload speed. Anyway, VM are planning on trying out increased upload speeds, reaching up to 10Mb (which will proberly be for their 50Mb service).

Ah good, caus I'd rather be with virgin. And no 1.3 Mb/s is not enough for seven gamers :S at all.

Thing is, they don't really care if you have 7 heavy users, we would pay more if it they allowed a better service - the fup probably doesn't relate to 7 heavy users either

I have another issue... The quality of their routers will probably be pathetic, if they can't handle enough connections, the performance will be deteriorated. Say there are 7 people on xbox live, that is over 15 connections per person just for other clients, then another 4 for xbox live services, then around 2 or 3 for connections to the game publisher's servers, we will probably have our desktops on too, and maby a laptop or 2 will be around - thats another 5 or so connections per windows, then with skype, msn, steam, xfire etcetera there are another 30 connections per box. So the router needs to be capable of handling well over a thousand tcp connections at once. I may have that requirement all wrong though <_< but we shall see. Probably end up getting a second hand office router with gigabit lan ^_^

 

[Dist]

over a thousand TCP connections? you cant seriously expect an ISP to give a FREE router to cope with excesive heavy usage like that. By all rights they dont have to supply a router at all, they could make you pay for it, but instead of being thankfull for at least getting something free you complain.

If you want a decent (yet still cheap) router, just buy a linksys WRT54GL, put tomato on it and set up QOS to prioritze traffic to how you want it. Then just buy a gigabit switch and plug that into the router.

 

[Bozebo]

over a thousand TCP connections? you cant seriously expect an ISP to give a FREE router to cope with excesive heavy usage like that. By all rights they dont have to supply a router at all, they could make you pay for it, but instead of being thankfull for at least getting something free you complain.

If you want a decent (yet still cheap) router, just buy a linksys WRT54GL, put tomato on it and set up QOS to prioritze traffic to how you want it. Then just buy a gigabit switch and plug that into the router.

I shall see what I can do. Gigabit ethernet might be overkill, it depends what the prices are (I already have a 100 megabit one). But anyway... the router is built into the fibre modem, so we can't really use another - what I may be able to do is plug our router into that, and er... do something? subnet? what would that be, and would the horrible "free" one bottleneck it?

And anyway they are far from free, the service is £50 a month; they just dress up the router as being free - if it was good I would be happy to pay good money. Also, the amount of bandwidth on offer is almost useless if the router can't allow many connections through it - few individual networking tasks within the home require 50Mb/s down stream (considering they don't want you torrenting etc), so there is nothing excessive about our household's requirements - if we were a typical family then a router that they supply would be fine for the usage. But I guess the issue with the whole router thing is just marketing.

Though of course; the fibre line is free, which would normally be the most expensive part. So I am heavily greatful for them to that. (still very late considering other countries' fibre progress)

edit:
looked at the linksys WRT54GL, thanks a lot for the suggestion

edit again:
you know I might build a custom router, fetch an atom board and some fast ram, with a fast nic or 2... shove untangle on it. Probably cost about £250. Apparenlty most places sell the new version of the WRT54GL that doesn't work with most of the linux customisations, still seeing what I can do about it, might get one second hand.