BT Infinity Fibre -v- Standard BT broadband

[George111]

clubsport78 said:

bimsb6 said:

[quote=M4cruiser
they want another £7 per month for Fibre, which supposedly goes up to 50Mb. That'll be 2.5Mb then, at the same ratio.

It doesn't work like that .

Bimsb6 is indeed correct.

If you are getting a slow speed on ADSL (which uses copper cabling all the way to the BT exchange, which is probably miles from your home), switching to Fibre (known as FTTC or Fibre to the Cabinet) will likely give you a decent speed gain and will be well worth the £7 extra a month. (Fibre runs between the Exchange and the green cabinet in/near your street and then it is still copper cable to the house). The Fibre cable is more resilient and can handle much better throughput / low latency over long distances, hence the speed improvements they are able to provide. This is especially true if you are located close to the green cabinet where the fibre terminates.

If you are still getting rubbish speed with FTTC on what BT state should give a 50Mb connection, then it is more likely that you have an internal cabling issue in your property. If it still exists when you connect the router to the Master Test socket then you have reason to complain to BT and an Openreach engineer should visit to run some tests/repair as required... If the issue goes away then there is an issue with the extension sockets in your house and this will need repairing or just make sure the router is in the master socket.

This ^^

I can't believe there is anybody still using ADSL when they have the option of FTTC. Even the reduced latency is worth paying for.

[M4cruiser]

George111 said:

clubsport78 said:

bimsb6 said:

M4cruiser said:

they want another £7 per month for Fibre, which supposedly goes up to 50Mb. That'll be 2.5Mb then, at the same ratio.

It doesn't work like that .

Bimsb6 is indeed correct.

If you are getting a slow speed on ADSL (which uses copper cabling all the way to the BT exchange, which is probably miles from your home), switching to Fibre (known as FTTC or Fibre to the Cabinet) will likely give you a decent speed gain and will be well worth the £7 extra a month. (Fibre runs between the Exchange and the green cabinet in/near your street and then it is still copper cable to the house). The Fibre cable is more resilient and can handle much better throughput / low latency over long distances, hence the speed improvements they are able to provide. This is especially true if you are located close to the green cabinet where the fibre terminates.

If you are still getting rubbish speed with FTTC on what BT state should give a 50Mb connection, then it is more likely that you have an internal cabling issue in your property. If it still exists when you connect the router to the Master Test socket then you have reason to complain to BT and an Openreach engineer should visit to run some tests/repair as required... If the issue goes away then there is an issue with the extension sockets in your house and this will need repairing or just make sure the router is in the master socket.

This ^^

I can't believe there is anybody still using ADSL when they have the option of FTTC. Even the reduced latency is worth paying for.

Due to the long term speed problems, we have played with the internal bits quite a lot. As a recent test I plugged the router in to the master socket, and unplugged everything else, and got 0.6mb first time, then 10 minutes later 0.8mb.

I then plugged everything else in 1-by-1 and included moving the router back to an extension socket, and overall it didn't change a lot. The best I got was 1.71, and that was on the extension! The best at the master socket was 0.95.

I think the problem is with the wiring between the house and the cabinet up the road - which is why I don't think it's worth upgrading.

BT have also fitted an "accelerator" inside the master socket. - That worked for a couple of weeks.

[George111]

M4cruiser said:

Due to the long term speed problems, we have played with the internal bits quite a lot. As a recent test I plugged the router in to the master socket, and unplugged everything else, and got 0.6mb first time, then 10 minutes later 0.8mb.

I then plugged everything else in 1-by-1 and included moving the router back to an extension socket, and overall it didn't change a lot. The best I got was 1.71, and that was on the extension! The best at the master socket was 0.95.

I think the problem is with the wiring between the house and the cabinet up the road - which is why I don't think it's worth upgrading.

BT have also fitted an "accelerator" inside the master socket. - That worked for a couple of weeks.

I can't remember the legislation now but BT (or your phone line provider) are obliged to investigate a voice line fault with much greater urgency than a data line fault, so if your line suffers from intermittent static or pops and bangs, you'll get a line test and an engineer to visit pretty swiftly. Might be worth a go ?

[clubsport78]

M4cruiser said:

Due to the long term speed problems, we have played with the internal bits quite a lot. As a recent test I plugged the router in to the master socket, and unplugged everything else, and got 0.6mb first time, then 10 minutes later 0.8mb.

I then plugged everything else in 1-by-1 and included moving the router back to an extension socket, and overall it didn't change a lot. The best I got was 1.71, and that was on the extension! The best at the master socket was 0.95.

I think the problem is with the wiring between the house and the cabinet up the road - which is why I don't think it's worth upgrading.

BT have also fitted an "accelerator" inside the master socket. - That worked for a couple of weeks.

I imagine BT have given you what is known as an i-Plate or possibly a pre-filtered faceplate. This may help, but is unlikely to make huge differences in my experience...

I appreciate that it sounds like you are paying for an 'up to 8Mb' ADSL package (known as ADSL1). If you go to the BT website and put your details in here: http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/bro... what speed does it say that you should get? 8Mb as an average speed or only 1 or 2Mb (maybe less)?

When you are connecting to the Master socket, it is important that you are connecting to the Test socket, which will mean unscrewing the bottom half of the Master socket faceplate and connecting the router into that. This will mean that the other extension sockets are disconnected for that time, but will at least allow you to test the connection without any possible internal interference from the other extensions that you have.

If the BT website says you should get an average of 8Mb and you are getting the poor speeds you are, even when in the Test socket, then it is an external cabling issue (possibly change the RJ11 cable between the socket and router for good measure and the filter adapter if you have one). Keep on at BT as many times as need be until they find the issue. I deal with over 250 remote worker broadband connections in my line of work and sometimes I have had BT Openreach engineers out 4 or 5 times. They tend to find it in the end! Having 'Business grade' broadband packages can help put pressure on them in this respect.

If the BT website says that you will only get 1-2Mb average on ADSL, then it sounds like you should get the fibre. Even if you are paying for 'up to 8Mb' at the moment for ADSL, due to your physical distance from the BT Exchange, you will never see that as you are just too far away and the line length and attenuation too high to ever be able to provide it (hence the 'up to' caveat).

[page3]

George111 said:

This ^^

I can't believe there is anybody still using ADSL when they have the option of FTTC. Even the reduced latency is worth paying for.

We are! FTTC is estimated to be between 9mbps and 27 Mbps. This range is so huge it's absolutely useless in allowing us to make an informed decision if to "upgrade". We'd be tied in for 18 months so it's not even an option to go back to adsl if necessary. Current ADSL is around 15mbps. Hugely frustrating situation!

[clubsport78]

page3 said:

We are! FTTC is estimated to be between 9mbps and 27 Mbps. This range is so huge it's absolutely useless in allowing us to make an informed decision if to "upgrade". We'd be tied in for 18 months so it's not even an option to go back to adsl if necessary. Current ADSL is around 15mbps. Hugely frustrating situation!

It sounds like you have a situation where, whilst you can get FTTC, you are still a long distance from the cabinet where the Fibre terminates and the average speed you can get is therefore similar to the ADSL speed you currently have (due to a long copper cable run still being in place from cabinet to property). I would be 99% sure that you'll at least get a slightly higher speed with FTTC and the connection is likely to be a bit more stable and resilient, but the gains may not be great in your case, as you have noticed.

[Blown2CV]

clubsport78 said:

page3 said:

We are! FTTC is estimated to be between 9mbps and 27 Mbps. This range is so huge it's absolutely useless in allowing us to make an informed decision if to "upgrade". We'd be tied in for 18 months so it's not even an option to go back to adsl if necessary. Current ADSL is around 15mbps. Hugely frustrating situation!

It sounds like you have a situation where, whilst you can get FTTC, you are still a long distance from the cabinet where the Fibre terminates and the average speed you can get is therefore similar to the ADSL speed you currently have (due to a long copper cable run still being in place from cabinet to property). I would be 99% sure that you'll at least get a slightly higher speed with FTTC and the connection is likely to be a bit more stable and resilient, but the gains may not be great in your case, as you have noticed.

i'm 1.5Km from my cabinet and I get 24Mbps over FTTC. Not amazing but better than i was receiving with ADSL2+.