BT's relic-grade broadband

[Hooli]

Our new place in the country gets about 2-2.5Mb down, it's enough for normal surfing.

[trashbat]

littleredrooster said:

They have taken several thousand-bd million pounds of MY money as a taxpayer to provide an infrastructure which hasn't happened - at least not yet to the rural communities like ours.

If you have that much money, you should have implemented your own telecoms infrastructure for the good of all mankind, but you couldn't be bothered could you, you lazy tightwad tt.

OP, ignore the checker, ask your potential neighbours what they get. I live in a large village/small town, and before ordering, it claimed I'd get 4MB. I get 16, and the only thing that stops me getting fibre is I'm directly connected to the exchange - no fibre to the cabinet if you don't have a cabinet.

[Siscar]

The 30Mb unlimited service I get in the countryside here for so little money I can't remember what it is (£10, £15) is far better than the 3Mb, 100Gb capped service I get in the middle of Sydney for $85 a month.

[bimsb6]

petemurphy said:

dress it up how u like its an inefficient monopoly. yes it perhaps needs a gov/monpoly to provide the infrastructure the same way the post office has to deliver to small villages but the argument here is BT are ste and holding back the UK and are not up to the job.

a quick google and many agree

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/festival-of-bus...

There were other companies bidding to provide fibre networks accross the uk but all have pulled ! Says a lot about the returns expected from the reqd investment .

[btsidi]

Siscar said:

The 30Mb unlimited service I get in the countryside here for so little money I can't remember what it is (£10, £15) is far better than the 3Mb, 100Gb capped service I get in the middle of Sydney for $85 a month.

AFAIK Australia has its bandwidth limited as there aren't that many pipes to the other hubs.
This should change wiht similar upgrades to the Pipe Pacific cables

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable

[bimsb6]

btsidi said:

AFAIK Australia has its bandwidth limited as there aren't that many pipes to the other hubs.
This should change wiht similar upgrades to the Pipe Pacific cables

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable

A mate of mine moved to new zealand , he reckons most people over there use dial up still !

[WinstonWolf]

markiii said:

how far as the crow flies you are from anything is irrelevant

its the route the copper takes. Bridges, railways, major trunk roads, canals, rivers e.t.c all cause the routes to be longer than ideal

likewise depending on how old and thick the copper is will determine how well it transmits a signal.

add the 2 together and sometimes illogical places get crap speeds.

Its not however viable for BT to rip out all of the copper and replace, it is unfortunately in that regard a profit making company not a charity

Yup, I'm 200M from the closest cab but due to the route the cable takes in my street I'm connected to a cab almost 1KM away. FTTC and I get about 16 meg from it. Thankfully I've also got Virgin cable so I have decent resilience and speed when I run them load balanced

[GetCarter]

I get about 6mb here in a remote part of the Highlands of Scotland, and in two weeks I'll be in a very posh recording studio in London, where they get 2 mb.

[Hackney]

I have Virgin broadband at home and can't fault it.
Which makes the drop to BT even worse when I go and visit my mum.

At home my phone hooks up to the wi-fi as soon as I'm in range and runs half a dozen devices at once.
At my mum's she gets the laptop out every couple of days and it's OK but we can never get a signal from the wifi even standing next to the router. I called BT who kept trying to tell me it was the phone.

We checked online and the area is advertised as getting 5Mbps, but when you talk to them they promise no more than 1Mbps for the address and were surprised we saw 1.2Mbps. At home we get 30, no problem.

Virgin have laid cables down the street and wouldn't charge connection.
BT can't do anything.

[Burrow01]

0000 said:

Burrow01 said:

FTTC will make a big difference if you are close enough, but to be honest if you are a software developer and slow broadband costs you money, you need to take that into account when moving house - fast broadband is not universal, there is enough in the news about it for it not to be a surprise....

If it really is important, rather than a nice to have, then you need to look at satellite broadband or check the 3G coverage if you really want to move there.

FTTC only makes a difference if they upgrade the local cabinet, not just the exchange. Satellite broadband means high latency and a dish when I'm renting, 3G isn't reliable enough and gets subject to all sorts of weird network setups. I get 6Mbps down, it's ok but I'd pay quite a lot more if I could. Moving house is quite an extreme step but it is on the cards, I've spent years looking.

Why would they not upgrade the cabinet if they are already doing the Exchange - they have rolled out FTTC in my county (with a subsidy to BT from the government) and there are now only a few pockets of isolated locations that cannot get decent speeds.

Government has stumped up another £180,000 ( which is quite a bit for a few houses..) to get to these places.

Ref the Satellite - you said you were a software developer and needed the speed for your work, if its mainly download then the latency is not a big issue (it will be much faster than a rubbish ADSL link)

3G is fine now if you get a decent signal - not sure what you have experienced with reliability or strange network setups - couple of weeks ago I used a basic MiFi dongle from a hotel room and it was connected for 134hrs with no problems.

[Siscar]

btsidi said:

AFAIK Australia has its bandwidth limited as there aren't that many pipes to the other hubs.
This should change wiht similar upgrades to the Pipe Pacific cables

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable

Yes, I have a lot of experience of this, we run servers here and in Melbourne, Aussie customers in the latter, updates between the UK and Australia in our day, their night. People living here and there and travelling between. Generally Australia is pretty well served but it's expensive, many times more so than here.

bimsb6 said:

A mate of mine moved to new zealand , he reckons most people over there use dial up still !

A bit of an exaggeration depending on where they are. We are doing an implementation for an organisation there with users all over the country - there's a mix outside the built up areas, but again fairly expensive and slow.

But that's a lot of the world compared to the UK, we have very good connectivity at cheap prices, it may not seem great but there are few places in the world doing it better right now.

[juice]

Could be worse...

I pay $115 a month for 8mb.

[Spoof]

I'm out in Lyon, not in the middle of the City either, paying a lot less than my BT Broadband in the UK.

Back in the UK, its around 8 mb/s, peak times like now, it sometimes struggles streaming HD.

Out here, I've just run a test and my 200mb Orange seems to be working very well.

[bimsb6]

Burrow01 said:

Why would they not upgrade the cabinet if they are already doing the Exchange - they have rolled out FTTC in my county (with a subsidy to BT from the government) and there are now only a few pockets of isolated locations that cannot get decent speeds.

Not all cabinets are enabled when the exchange is, for various reasons , there may be no power available within a reasonable distance , if the cabinet only feeds an industrial estate , if the cabinet is full and cannot be replaced with a larger shell or there are insufficient customers fed from a cabinet to make it viable to fit a £30,000 fibre cabinet !

[Stedman]

Spoof said:

I'm out in Lyon, not in the middle of the City either, paying a lot less than my BT Broadband in the UK.

Back in the UK, its around 8 mb/s, peak times like now, it sometimes struggles streaming HD.

Out here, I've just run a test and my 200mb Orange seems to be working very well.

Is it weird to be envious over someone's internet connection? Well anyway, I am

[Murph7355]

Stedman said:

Is it weird to be envious over someone's internet connection? Well anyway, I am

But he also has to put up with the French every day

(Rural location here. Currently getting 7-8mbps. Costs twice as much as my old 10+mbps service in a town, but is perfectly adequate and the upside of everything else about the location is considerable.

Fibre would be nice, but won't lose sleep over it. There are times when you simply have to accept that the economics of large infrastructure for small numbers of people simply don't stack up).

[Spoof]

Murph7355 said:

Stedman said:

Is it weird to be envious over someone's internet connection? Well anyway, I am

But he also has to put up with the French every day
.

That is true.

[Greedydog]

bimsb6 said:

Not all cabinets are enabled when the exchange is, for various reasons , there may be no power available within a reasonable distance , if the cabinet only feeds an industrial estate , if the cabinet is full and cannot be replaced with a larger shell or there are insufficient customers fed from a cabinet to make it viable to fit a £30,000 fibre cabinet !

I get about 2mb and live about 2 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. My 'local' exchange (not that local which explains the ADSL speed) has recently been upgraded to fibre. My cabinet won't be being upgraded so no fibre for me. BT have stated there are not enough lines connected to it so it's not economically viable, gallingly there is another cabinet 70 yards from my house (MUCH closer than my cabinet) which will be. Given that Openreach choose which lines are routed to which cabinet and have therefore created the situation, which now apparently can't be easily changed, it's a bit of pee boiler. Apparently there are 100's of pockets of folks in similar situations nationally but the infill is being left to government initiatives to subsidise the work. I'm told I'm lucky as the Scottish initiative has indicated my postcode is on the list.... in 2017. The whole thing is a farce.

[bimsb6]

Greedydog said:

I get about 2mb and live about 2 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. My 'local' exchange (not that local which explains the ADSL speed) has recently been upgraded to fibre. My cabinet won't be being upgraded so no fibre for me. BT have stated there are not enough lines connected to it so it's not economically viable, gallingly there is another cabinet 70 yards from my house (MUCH closer than my cabinet) which will be. Given that Openreach choose which lines are routed to which cabinet and have therefore created the situation, which now apparently can't be easily changed, it's a bit of pee boiler. Apparently there are 100's of pockets of folks in similar situations nationally but the infill is being left to government initiatives to subsidise the work. I'm told I'm lucky as the Scottish initiative has indicated my postcode is on the list.... in 2017. The whole thing is a farce.

No it's not it's a business ! And you fall into one of the exceptions i listed , you could try for fibre on demand once the other cab is done ? Which would give you fttp rather than fttc .

[MitchT]

I have BT Infinity which normally delivers 35Mbps but it fell off a cliff last Saturday and has been at about 0.96 (download) ever since. I've finally managed to get an engineer booked (for Monday afternoon).