Rural Broadband
Discussion
tokyo_mb said:
Up in Shropshire we have no more luck. Local area served by three cabinets. We are on the furthest cabinet from the exchange, and approximately 6.5km from that cabinet. Meaning that Connecting Shropshire have decided it would be uneconomic (they say £0.5m) to bring FTTC (for about 300 homes). Now investigating whether the local wireless broadband provider can get line of sight into our valley (as we don't even have 2G, let alone 3/4G mobile signal). If not, we could be stuck with <1Mb for some time.
Here in rural north Oxfordshire, we are over 5 miles from the nearest exchange but have just had a new cabinet installed with fibre for far fewer than 300 homes, in fact less than half that in my village. No 3G here either so I've been using an O2 boost box which struggled as my broadband was less than the 3mbps recommended to make it work, the result, every time I received an email it would make the person sound like a Dalek or drop the call.The arrival of fibre in the past week or so has made such a difference.
Scuffers said:
that sounds like a building management problem to me?
No - a street management issue. There's so much else running up and down the pavement alongside Westferry Road they apparently cannot find room for another cabinet / to re-site the existing cabinet! Scarcely plausible in the shadow of Canary Wharf (One Canada Square for the pedants).Scuffers said:
As an aside, is this house on it's own? 6.5km from a cab is highly unusual?
We're a farmhouse, but by no means the only one in our part of the valley -- I can probably see a handful of houses in the immediate area... We are in one of the less densely populated areas of the Shropshire Hills. The majority of the homes served by the cabinet are in a nearby village between 3 and 4km from the cabinet. The cabinet itself is just under 3km from the exchange - so it might be considered fairly impressive we get ADSL at all.Connecting Shropshire's project manager was just this week interviewed on BBC Radio Shropshire and said that £0.5m was considered too expensive to upgrade a cabinet that serves only 200 premises. I appreciate his point, but BDUK (and Connecting Shropshire) seem not to have been very focused on alternative technologies to enable them to reach more remote locations - whether that be wireless broadband, mobile broadband, FTTrN or FTTP.
Reading up on FTTrN (which I understand to be in pilot) it seems so called "superfast" speeds would only be possible within 1.2km of the remote node/cabinet - so in an area like ours it seems several remote nodes/cabinets would be required - which leaves me sceptical that they will go down that route.
Makes me pine for my 100Mb FTTP connection in Tokyo a bit - especially when I could have even had Gigabit fibre for not much more money. Amazing connection/service - moved terabytes of data a year for about £35-£40 per month with little apparent throttling/service disruption.
Scuffers said:
With respect, what do you expect them to do?
Fundamentally I have a problem with how the money has been allocated.If BT (or anyone else) were prepared to get anywhere near with fibre and paying a single digit thousands to get it to my house were an option, I would take that option - but it's not an available option as far as I can tell. What I will likely end up doing is exploring with the local line of sight provider whether they can get to us (and then hope they have a sustainable business model).
Scuffers said:
bit late to this thread!
in rural leicestershire here, some 3Km from the BT remote exchange, and still on ADSL MAX (up to 8m).
currently get 5.5m (profile speed) which is not too sad, the biggest PITA is upload speed is fixed at 374Kb/s.
talking to others in the village, some were only getting 0.5M, but mostly this was down to s
t house wiring, once sorted, using decent filtered master sockets etc, most get 4-6M.
as an area, we missed out on the upgrade to ADSL2, and were not scheduled for anything other than what we had, so we approached the county council about BDUK rural BB provision, but because of some pretty questionable antics by a company called gigaclear, the BDUK route was blocked for us, so we had to go to Openreach direct as a village and pay for the installation of FTTC in the village, this cost us some £15K (raised by the village putting their collective hand in their pockets), it get's installed in the next few weeks.
This should give us 'up to 76M' - and looking at the lengths here, most should get the 76M.
It's been an interesting journey, the politics have been quite an eye opener, (some very questionable stuff is going on in the background that really does nothing to help.)
theory goes, current Openreach FTTC is V17a profile, although they are currently looking to roll out G.Vector (http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/bt-extend-uk-vectoring-trials-fix-fttc-fibre-broadband-speeds.html)
There is also talk of them trialing Profile 30a, (200Mb vs. 17A at 100Mb) but it looks like they are going to skip this and go with the G.Fast in the future.
Anyway, be nice to get onto FTTC, just a shame we had to pay for it to be installed when there was supposed to be government money to pay for rural broadband.
As an Openreach engineer, I go to a lot of places and mainly working in rural surrey and Hampshire lately.. I would advise anyone to ditch their extensions/wiring and just have the one master socket in the house and use network plugs if needs be, a lot of speeds as mentioned can be lost through poor extensions and old 'star wiring' in the house in rural leicestershire here, some 3Km from the BT remote exchange, and still on ADSL MAX (up to 8m).
currently get 5.5m (profile speed) which is not too sad, the biggest PITA is upload speed is fixed at 374Kb/s.
talking to others in the village, some were only getting 0.5M, but mostly this was down to s
t house wiring, once sorted, using decent filtered master sockets etc, most get 4-6M.as an area, we missed out on the upgrade to ADSL2, and were not scheduled for anything other than what we had, so we approached the county council about BDUK rural BB provision, but because of some pretty questionable antics by a company called gigaclear, the BDUK route was blocked for us, so we had to go to Openreach direct as a village and pay for the installation of FTTC in the village, this cost us some £15K (raised by the village putting their collective hand in their pockets), it get's installed in the next few weeks.
This should give us 'up to 76M' - and looking at the lengths here, most should get the 76M.
It's been an interesting journey, the politics have been quite an eye opener, (some very questionable stuff is going on in the background that really does nothing to help.)
theory goes, current Openreach FTTC is V17a profile, although they are currently looking to roll out G.Vector (http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/bt-extend-uk-vectoring-trials-fix-fttc-fibre-broadband-speeds.html)
There is also talk of them trialing Profile 30a, (200Mb vs. 17A at 100Mb) but it looks like they are going to skip this and go with the G.Fast in the future.
Anyway, be nice to get onto FTTC, just a shame we had to pay for it to be installed when there was supposed to be government money to pay for rural broadband.
tokyo_mb said:
Scuffers said:
With respect, what do you expect them to do?
Fundamentally I have a problem with how the money has been allocated.If BT (or anyone else) were prepared to get anywhere near with fibre and paying a single digit thousands to get it to my house were an option, I would take that option - but it's not an available option as far as I can tell. What I will likely end up doing is exploring with the local line of sight provider whether they can get to us (and then hope they have a sustainable business model).
(you can buy VDSL ethernet extenders that will work up to ~3-4Km over single twisted pair, is there somewhere near you that has service - like a neighbour on the highway who could host an internet connection for you?)
Edited by Scuffers on Thursday 12th February 09:52
tokyo_mb said:
Fundamentally I have a problem with how the money has been allocated.
Exactly. Connecting Shropshire are awful. In our little Shropshire town (Shifnal) we waited and waited. BT did a poster campaign telling us fibre was coming etc etc. Leaflets through the door offering deals for signing up. £millions spent no doubt.But we never did get broadband, BT and the money are long gone. A look on the availability checker now informs us that the exchange is enabled for fibre but we cannot place an order as our cabinet wasn't upgraded. That cabinet serves half the town.
Scuffers said:
??
Not suggesting youre wrong, but there has to be more to it than that?
Just how far away from the old distribution cabinet are you, and how far are you off the (public) road?
If you'd like to take up the fight there are 250 people who have all wasted days on the phone to BT on our quest, and will happily buy you a drink for sorting it out. Not suggesting youre wrong, but there has to be more to it than that?
- if* they have an FTTC cab alongside the old distribution cab that serves your house, then you should have *some* service available?
Just how far away from the old distribution cabinet are you, and how far are you off the (public) road?
Scuffers said:
worth reading the goverment doc's on this:
https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk
The idea was OK, the issues are that each county are doing their own interpretation of the programme, and that process is wide open to some questionable practices.
Because of competition rules, government money can't be used to subsidise where there are commercial services, which is fine, BUT!
some councils have viewed commercial services as being when somebody makes a vague statement about their future plans to cover an area, thus effectively ruling said area out of BDUK.
this is what happened here (Northamptonshire), a supplier suggested they would roll out services, so NCC walked away, the problem then is that we (as in the villages concerned) were left with nothing.
Said company started doing presentations for their services, but having scuppered BDUK, you can imagine the offer, (quite apart from the technical challenges etc).
Here, we (as a village) had to go to Openreach ourselves and negotiate the costs for them to run FTTC to the village, (much as NCC would have done to come up with the funding gap), and have now paid them to install FTTC (from money raised by the village), this get's installed in March.
As you can imagine, we are less than impressed that we were basically forced down this route because of the game-playing by others, in the next village (under 2 miles down the road), they are getting FTTC paid for from BDUK because Leicestershire CC did not fall for the scam and included them in their BDUK roll out plans.
(you can probably tell I am still a bit bitter at the whole saga!)
Out of interest, what was the cost of BT installing FTTC in your village?https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk
The idea was OK, the issues are that each county are doing their own interpretation of the programme, and that process is wide open to some questionable practices.
Because of competition rules, government money can't be used to subsidise where there are commercial services, which is fine, BUT!
some councils have viewed commercial services as being when somebody makes a vague statement about their future plans to cover an area, thus effectively ruling said area out of BDUK.
this is what happened here (Northamptonshire), a supplier suggested they would roll out services, so NCC walked away, the problem then is that we (as in the villages concerned) were left with nothing.
Said company started doing presentations for their services, but having scuppered BDUK, you can imagine the offer, (quite apart from the technical challenges etc).
Here, we (as a village) had to go to Openreach ourselves and negotiate the costs for them to run FTTC to the village, (much as NCC would have done to come up with the funding gap), and have now paid them to install FTTC (from money raised by the village), this get's installed in March.
As you can imagine, we are less than impressed that we were basically forced down this route because of the game-playing by others, in the next village (under 2 miles down the road), they are getting FTTC paid for from BDUK because Leicestershire CC did not fall for the scam and included them in their BDUK roll out plans.
(you can probably tell I am still a bit bitter at the whole saga!)
Reason for asking is I run an annual fundraiser in our village and, rather than diverting proceeds to out of village charity as we've done for the past few years, I might lobby to raise funds for FTTC instead.
dotty said:
As an Openreach engineer, I go to a lot of places and mainly working in rural surrey and Hampshire lately.. I would advise anyone to ditch their extensions/wiring and just have the one master socket in the house and use network plugs if needs be, a lot of speeds as mentioned can be lost through poor extensions and old 'star wiring' in the house
Dotty, you're not by any chance doing any work around Liss? If so any idea when cabinet 1 is going to be upgraded? Cabinet across the road has been upgraded but no sign of ours being done and nothing to say when on the various coverage checkers and no joy from Hampshire superfast bods eitherschmalex said:
Out of interest, what was the cost of BT installing FTTC in your village?
Reason for asking is I run an annual fundraiser in our village and, rather than diverting proceeds to out of village charity as we've done for the past few years, I might lobby to raise funds for FTTC instead.
as you can imagine, there was quite a bit of horse-trading to come up with a figure.Reason for asking is I run an annual fundraiser in our village and, rather than diverting proceeds to out of village charity as we've done for the past few years, I might lobby to raise funds for FTTC instead.
to put this in context, here is a small village of ~110 houses, couple of farms, and a few home based SME's.
the start point was some ~£50K, (really not sure how openreach came up with this, my guess is that it was based on the one-off cost to run the fibre from nearest town (some 8Km away).
Now, obviously that was unrealistic, as it took no account of what else is on the ground.
next village down from here is in the next county (Leicestershire), and their FTTC is being rolled out under BDUK, the service for this actually runs past here (main duct route goes right past us.)
After some toing and froing, they came back with a programme based on running it in at the same time as LCC's BDUK rollout, based on the funding gap formula that's used for BDUK (ie, they work out the gross cost, then subtract what their standard business model would invest on said group of users, and the remaining figure is the funding gap).
What we ended up with is a figure of £14,800 (+vat that's reclaimable).
We (as a village) all then put our hands in our pockets, (some 80% of households contributed).
At the moment, we have paid the first 50% on order (back in October) and the remainder is due on completion (as in in service).
Now, this should have all been included in BDUK - that's what the programme was setup for, BUT the problem is that each county council does their own thing and Northamptonshire have made a right mess of it, as you can imagine, we had many conversations, letters, etc trying to get them to sort it out, but all roads lead to the same brick wall, even our MP did everything he could NOT to get involved (what does that tell you?).
It all somewhat sticks in our collective gullets when the adds on TV at the moment and what actually happens on the ground are poles apart.
Well I ended up purchasing a WiBE router - got a great deal on BNIB from Ebay (older HS7 model, although some people reckon this provides a more stable connection than the newer HSDPA+ 21Mbps HS21 model).
Have only just set it up but initial results look promising...
Prior to this was usually getting 2-3Mb/s downstream. Will keep testing at various intervals and try the router in a few different locations but very pleased so far. (for comparison can only get 0.5Mb/s through telephone line)
Have only just set it up but initial results look promising...
Prior to this was usually getting 2-3Mb/s downstream. Will keep testing at various intervals and try the router in a few different locations but very pleased so far. (for comparison can only get 0.5Mb/s through telephone line)
alfa aficionado said:
Seems fairly consistent over past 36hrs.
Late last night was even up as high as 7Mb/s. So far I'd definitely recommend looking into the WiBE router as a possible access option in rural areas (provided you can get some form of 3G coverage, according to the network operator's maps)
Brilliant. Tempted by one myself.Late last night was even up as high as 7Mb/s. So far I'd definitely recommend looking into the WiBE router as a possible access option in rural areas (provided you can get some form of 3G coverage, according to the network operator's maps)
alfa aficionado said:
Seems fairly consistent over past 36hrs.
Late last night was even up as high as 7Mb/s. So far I'd definitely recommend looking into the WiBE router as a possible access option in rural areas (provided you can get some form of 3G coverage, according to the network operator's maps)
We've lived in a couple of places in Shropshire. I think the problem is that there are so many smaller villages the money doesn't spread well.Late last night was even up as high as 7Mb/s. So far I'd definitely recommend looking into the WiBE router as a possible access option in rural areas (provided you can get some form of 3G coverage, according to the network operator's maps)
That said, if you do life in the middle of nowhere, far from a major centre, then you are less likely to be a commuter, and more likely to work from home, like me.
Where we were at last, BT offered us 0.3mb. However, thankfully, we had a line of sight to a mobile mast.
I got an Acer phone for £130, and hung it in an upstairs window, where we'd get 4-5 bars of 3G. I ran that to a Mac which had internet sharing, and that to a router which shared it. We got a 3 sim and paid for 'All You Can Eat' data on a year contract at about £25 a month.
We got consistent 10mb, and up to 12mb.
Ping was slower though, around 100ms.Where we've moved to now has 2.5 meg which is just about liveable with. However, we are promised fibre at the end of next month according to Shropshire's Openreach link.
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