BT's relic-grade broadband

Author
Discussion

megaphone

10,696 posts

250 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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Decent BB would be at the top of my list if I was looking at a new home, I'm on Virgin cable and will hate to have to leave it when I do eventually move.

MintyChris

848 posts

191 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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Oh no only 4mb...If that's all you have to worry about your doing well in life. To be fair I'm not sure what you expect to receive when sending a signal over a lengthy and aged copper wire.

Remember BT is a private company or more accurately a group of private companies. They are under no obligation to give you super fast broadband and realistically the only way your going to get decent speed is for them to lay fibre to you, which they would do if you were willing to pay for it...

Personally the best hope for remoter locations or atleast premises far away from their exchange is wireless broadband, which is currently undergoing trials.

bimsb6

8,034 posts

220 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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So what are virgin offering you ? A big fat nothing , but you are not slagging them?

petemurphy

10,108 posts

182 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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just moved to a village - took bt 8 weeks to get us a new line so had no phone or net. they can do what they want being a monopoly. now got 2mb wahoo

shockingly bad company

Atommad

127 posts

179 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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MintyChris said:
Personally the best hope for remoter locations or atleast premises far away from their exchange is wireless broadband, which is currently undergoing trials.
It's beyond trials. Were now on wireless BB, it's excellent compared with the dreadful BT alternative which runs at 1Mb/s on a good day.

TRB

2,269 posts

136 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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I would take living in the sticks over fast broadband every day of the week.

mattley

3,024 posts

221 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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petemurphy said:
just moved to a village - took bt 8 weeks to get us a new line so had no phone or net. they can do what they want being a monopoly. now got 2mb wahoo

shockingly bad company
They canna change the laws of physics.

Look on the bight side, you don't need YouTube, you've got a nice view.

I'm only being slightly facetious here, there are real physical and fiscal constraints when it comes to rural broadband and sometimes it's one or the other until technology takes the next leap and I'm not sure that will happen in any practical sense for a long time.

mph1977

12,467 posts

167 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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petemurphy said:
just moved to a village - took bt 8 weeks to get us a new line so had no phone or net. they can do what they want being a monopoly. now got 2mb wahoo

shockingly bad company
BT do not have 'a monopoly' on telecomms, what Openreach have, however, is a universal service obligation to provide line plant.

no phone or net ? is this village also out of reach of all 3/ 4 physical ( 02, voda, 0range and 1-to-none )mobile networks as well ?

anonymous-user

53 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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Have you looked to see if you can get radio broadband in your area though the likes of VFast?

mondeoman

11,430 posts

265 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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NPI

1,310 posts

123 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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graphene said:
Having had cable internet for 10+ years, now looking to move house. According to BT's availability checker the possible new home can offer 4mb (no virgin there, obviously). I don't think I have ever had less than 10mb and rock 50mb at present. Hell, I think the mobile gets close to 3-4mb, on a good day.
What are you using it for? As long as you actually get better than 2mb you should be able to stream video OK, and for all normal email / browsing it'll be more than adequate.

mattley

3,024 posts

221 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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mondeoman said:
That article gets rolled out a lot and it it only holds up with a st load of hindsight.



Had BT been allowed to maintain their monopoly and had Cochrane got his way then the urban/rural divide would be either wider than ever and all our phone bills would be massive.

In all fairness to Cochrane he accepted the result and built an excellent fibre infrastructure for BT at a backbone level but neither he or Maggie really had a clue that rural broadband would ever exist, let alone be an issue.

onomatopoeia

3,469 posts

216 months

Tuesday 18th March 2014
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graphene said:
Now, I didn't expect to be able to get speeds up to 100mb, but other than remote villages, I imagined 8-16mb to be, broadly, the minimum standard.
I don't know why you have that expectation, other than a failure to understand the technology and physics. ADSL is line length limited, the longer the line the worse it gets. A copper pair is never going to provide the same performance as cable, but VM won't pull their finger our of their arse and cable the whole country so people in the Highlands and Islands can have 100Mbps broadband, for some reason. Possibly that reason is economic, the same reason BT haven't upgraded all 700 or so DLEs and the tens of thousands of cabinets to FTTC yet. Perhaps the government should impose the same universal service obligation on VM as it does on BT (Openreach).


Basically, if your internet connection is important, then choose your next house taking this into account or pay for a private circuit and appropriate backhaul.

littleredrooster

5,523 posts

195 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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Don't get me started. I'm absolutely bd-fking furious that BT have utterly failed to deliver their charter to deliver broadband to the British population.

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.

And yet they will spend 370 bd-fking-million quid to monopolise MotoGP racing to their network on a sole-supply network deal. No-one else can have it, and I can't get it because the fking infrastructure doesn't give me the opportunity.

Useless bd tts; I'd love to confront some/any of the money-wasting motherfkers on a live fking TV programme and get some proper answers.

Stupid, backward, money-grabbing bd-fking lady-parts!!!





...and breathe...

Edit to add: yes, we do have broadband; all 0.5 meg of it provided no-one else is using it at the same time, at which point it drops to below the 128k ISDN line that i used to have.

Edited by littleredrooster on Wednesday 19th March 00:53

TheEnd

15,370 posts

187 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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Movin' to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches.

theboss

6,878 posts

218 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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Check for the possible existence of commercial or community based wireless service providers jn the area - I live in the sticks and buy a commercial WiFi based service which provides 25Mbps of symmetric, uncontended bandwidth at low latencies, plus the BT based 3Mbps ADSL as a backup. If costs about £100/month which is a lot less than putting fibre into the place.

Siscar

6,315 posts

128 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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Just be grateful you live in the UK and not, well, any other country I am aware of. I was talking to a customer in NZ last night about the lack of any Internet connection in places, and having an apartment in Australia in the middle of Sydney it's amazing how much you pay for how little compared to here.

As for the USA, well there is a reason why they lag us in Internet usage and are massively behind in ecommerce....

petemurphy

10,108 posts

182 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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mph1977 said:
BT do not have 'a monopoly' on telecomms, what Openreach have, however, is a universal service obligation to provide line plant.

no phone or net ? is this village also out of reach of all 3/ 4 physical ( 02, voda, 0range and 1-to-none )mobile networks as well ?
yes thats true they dont have a monopoly. i asked plusnet for a line. only through bt. i asked sky for a line. only through bt, oh look only bt can provide a line. thats not a monopoly is it.

god forbid i want a telephone line living in the uk. in that remote area of oxfordshire. next to oxford a centre of research. in our first world country.


petemurphy

10,108 posts

182 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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mattley said:
They canna change the laws of physics.

Look on the bight side, you don't need YouTube, you've got a nice view.

I'm only being slightly facetious here, there are real physical and fiscal constraints when it comes to rural broadband and sometimes it's one or the other until technology takes the next leap and I'm not sure that will happen in any practical sense for a long time.
no but they can provide a line in less than 8 weeks seeing as our neighbours have lines. its kindof their job. i'm not on some remote island. oh and their engineers can turn up when they say they will rather than me missing an entire days wage waiting for them for no reason. s.

onomatopoeia

3,469 posts

216 months

Wednesday 19th March 2014
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graphene said:
Have you always been this grandiose or could it be a result of working for too long with/at BT?
I have no connection with BT or any other part of the telecommunications industry, other than having a normal BT domestic telephone line at my house. I don't get my broadband from BT internet (or plusnet which are also BT, or any other supplier that advertises on the telly).

In the interest of clarity, I did work for Unitel (one of the original PCN mobile licence holders) for a few months 23 or so years ago while they were still trying to build their network, so once upon a time I did work in the industry, albeit for a competing network.