Optical Broadband Upgrade.

Good for you George !!!

My home is close to the local exchange & I get around 16mbps over wired connections.  This is great but it seems we are at the end of the waiting list for getting optical,  the more remote & slower speed areas (rightfully) get it first.

I have just got an e-mail from Open Reach (BT) that I can get optical later this year. Whoopee-do!!!  but I will not get it for free & is the extra cost worth the gains considering I already get faultless iRadio & rarely take notice of any slow issues except downloading HD tracks.     

I know someone else who was offered a free install by BT, his best ever speed was about 2mbps & running a business from home was proving impossible. It solved his problems & avoided the need to move the business to a separate location.   

A few things I did not understand with his installation, maybe some knowledgeable forumite can fill in the gaps:

The house is still wire connected & is about 1 mile to the cabinet where I believe the optical to wired connection is made. What is the maximum wired length that still provides the advertised potential speeds of optical?

He has an extra box in the house in addition to the new hub - not sure what it does - but with his BT-TV box & cables it looks a mess (the engineer was not top of the class for cable dressing)

I was told by a telecoms guy he probably has the BT HH4 but the HH5 does not need the extra box.  I wonder is that correct? as I would not accept any extra box just to get higher speed I probably don't need anyhow.   

Anyhow,  back to Chez George,  keep us posted on how it turns out. 

We considered fibre but were told by a BT Openreach installer that due to our location relative to the street cabinet there was no real speed advantage over wired. We use a broadband accelerator, which has helped the speed quite a lot.

Our 12 month contract with EE expires next week, so I rang them earlier to see what price they would offer if we renewed for another year. We will pay £132 upfront for the line rental, and then we get broadband, anytime calls to uk landlines, 1000 minutes to uk mobiles and 1000 minutes to European landlines (useful as we have relatives in Italy) for the princely sum of £4 a month. That's got to be a bargain. I'd have been happy to continue with paying the £11.75 per month we have paid over the last year, but when they suggested £4 I couldn't say no. 

Mike, it's correct that the HH5 does not need a separate modem. I have a HH4 which needs a  modem which I am happy with as I prefer to use my own router. Also I have the modem next to the entry point at the front of the house and then run some 50m of cat6 to my router at the rear of the house where. I am about 400 metres from the cabinet and with Infinity 2 I get a consistent 75mps and have a ping of around 8-9.

Gerry

Junk the whoopee-do ...... just had another e-mail from Open Reach 

............  technical problem yesterday whilst using a new email system. The issue led to a number of people receiving inaccurate information about fibre. Please ignore any emails you have received from Openreach in the past 24 hours and accept our apologies for the confusion this might have caused.

   

Dear Mike,

This is odd, because I am very close to the exchange, and was told that I'd get about 16 mbps, which I never have quite, on the conventional wired service here. It varies between about 14 and 11. But it is very good and almost totally stable. 

For some reason it seems to drop on iTunes radio after a few weeks of the router being booted up. All I do is reboot the router and all is well for another few weeks!

But I am far from being an obvious priority case. But offered no charge for the installation, which I have to be at home for to let in the engineer for, I was hardly going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I already have a discount on the monthly charge for unlimited BB as I haggled about twelve months ago, when the contract was coming to an end. The charge was reduced to the next level down but the service left as unlimited. Possibly they examined my actual download usage, and decided I was within the lower bracket, and so not expected to regularly exceed the restricted limit. I do not know. 

I did not have to start a new contract, and so all I need to do if I want to finish is give a month of notice. 

I'll let you all know how it goes. 

It is crazy over-specified for my needs, and I doubt I'll make use of more than a tenth of its potential ever!

But if it is stable and does not require rebooting every few weeks, then I'll be content! The BBC Proms are coming up and most of it with the optical BB doing service.

A nice prospect for the summer evenings!

Also I may well set Skype up again so as to talk to my Aunty who is either in the Bahamas or Norway most of the time. That would be nice again. I never had a good enough BB service before this house to guarantee a good Skype signal. Rarely could get more than a few minutes before the call dropped ...

As they have to do something with the terminal box, I'll get it fitted in a better place a bit higher up, so I don't have to grovel in the corner on the floor to plug into it! I am sure I can choose the spot where it goes on the wall ...

ATB from George

Optical gives you 16mbps?  That sounds really slow.  What is considered high speed in the UK?

Agreed Kevin,  16mbps is really slow - for optical - I get that with wire & that is what George is talking about. 

The fastest optical service numbers currently advertised is 152mb

This is from a cable company that provides complete TV, www & phone package services & I understand this is optical all the way into the property. It is limited to the more populated areas, some remote isolated out in the boondocks peeps don't get it

We get 76mb from the national telecom company "BT" & the other providers that lease their network.  This system has optical up to a local neighborhood distribution cabinet & wire to the properties. 

The national phone network is provided by BT & their current advertised speeds are 17mb for the basic wire all the way service.  

But it depends how far it is your your property to the exchange,  remote villages & isolated properties will be hard pushed to get half that speed.

Our nice politicians (bless em all) have commited to get all the country on high speed (optical) before the next election in 2015.  This is via the national BT network service so will be optical up to a local distribution cabinet & existing over/underground wire from that point - 76mb is the current maximum.

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I just got back from a trip to US & was surprised on the slow speed services I got in the hotels. Its was no better way back when I was a regular visitor for work pre 2009,  I really expected it to be improved since then.

SF was painful,  not just slow but dropouts as well

Believe it or not, Furnace Creek in Death valley was the fastest

However when I was on my buddies home system in Minneapolis its was impressively instant,  forgot to ask what speed he gets,  will do so next time I e-mail him.

Download speed isn't that important to me after you get past 15 ( I get 52 down in Switzerland and 16 down in France ).

What is more important is upload speed ( NAS to NAS copy from Switzerland to France ). I get 6 in Switzerland.

I live in a backward third world country between the jungle and the sea and this is my internet speed - more than 43mbps download and more than 20mbps upload. 

As of YESTERDAY its all irrelevant anyhow !!!!

At 7am it was slow & hesitant, then around 9am it all went off & the steam wireless news (radio to you youngsters) said that BT had taken a massive hit & a large lump of the country is out.  

Then they said it was fixed & all OK ????    

err ??? waddabout me,  no phone no www - cell call to phone indictaed engaged & the hub was missing the BB light.

Call to nice peeps in Kalkutta very helpful with testing to confirm its a line fault - except that the earliest we can get a man with a toolbox is TUESDAY = totally #*x#ing useless.  

Meanwhile I'm hooked up to a neighbor using FON & that drops out every other minute. 

I replaced my HH4 with a HH5 over the weekend, broadband OK but no phone line. 

Last thursday morning the BT engineer turned up nice and early to instal the Optical BB, and sadly a big fault was detected on my phone line, so progress could be made. 

The fault is now fixed, but the OBB will have to wait for another day, when BT and I can line up the ducks again!

ATB from George

Yes, the engineer was very quick. He had detected a fault on the cabinet on my line at eight in the morning and by ten past had called in and was fixing a signal generator to my line to fault trace. Within half an hour he was back, and deeply apologetic that he could make no progress, or even fix the fault there and then. Fortunately the access to the line is exterior and it has been sorted out with much clearer quality on the phone line, and still old style BB ... My line was sending on fourteen other lines as well as my own!

I said that the engineer had no need to apologise. He did not make the fault after all!

ATB from George

George I have experienced in the past when upgrading to a new bb provider or service that the home line checks can be quite helpful in and of themselves.  In your case they found a misbehaving piece of hardware that probably had been mucking up your service for a while.

I have fiber here in the States, and on their 'standard' service get about 35mbps down and 25 up.  I could pay for faster service but at this time can't see any reason to.  Probably the most bandwidth intensive thing we do is stream video from Netflix, the iTunes store, HBO Go, etc.  I am sure that 35mbps is quite adequate.

One 'feature' that the fiber company sells on is that with fiber you are not 'sharing' bandwidth with your neighbors.  They claim that with bb cable your neighbors use can slow you down, but not so with fiber.  I have no idea if this is true or not.

As far as I know contention is still relevant in the UK.

The fibre rollout is primarily FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) i.e. you still have to contend for bandwidth with your neighbours on the way to the cabinet. It was a government decision largely made on cost grounds. A number of European countries have opted for FTTH (Fibre To The Home) which is more expensive in the short term.

A new date for setting up the optical broadband is now arranged, and I'll report the effect here when it is done.

One of the benefits of sorting out the fault on the line last time is that the phone is now crystal clear!

I did a speed test of my current conventional BB connection that showed a connection of 20 MB/s and upload at 0.8 MB/s.

I am hoping that the optical service will yield a really good Skype connection.

ATB from George

The engineer who will fix the optical BB up is calling at 1 pm tomorrow. He rang to enquire if he could call earlier ...  phoned earlier this evening,

Will report how it goes! We are doing a 06:30 start at work so I can get back for the access ...

ATB from George

Contention exists everywhere on the internet globally... It's the nature of a public network such as the internet and not specific to the UK.. 

But in the UK the term used for direct broadband fibre access is generally referred to FTTP (fibre to the premise) and starts usually from around 100Mbps

Simon

To be clear - this is fibre optical to the cabinet about 75 metres from my house - wire from the cab to me.. Quite good but optical connection to the residence will presumably be the next upgrade.

ATB from George

George so that is a Superfast ADSL type service such as BT Infinity FTTC. At 75m to the cabinet I would have thought you should be able to get 80/20 or pretty close to it if you want with absolutely minimal dropouts.

Indeed if offered in your area FTTP will give further speed improvement for a price.. I would have thought though 80/20 will keep you going for several years. 

I have to make do with just above 4Mbps, and that's with me tweaking. some of my neighbours in the village are less than 1Mbps.

Enjoy..

Simon

Dear Simon,

What I cannot believe and it has already cost them a load of effort because of a faulty wire connection, and that the upgrade is gratis.My current speed for download is already 13'/6 [unit] so perfect even for video streaming, just on wire to the cab ... I am promised four times faster ...

All I really want is a good upload speed for skype.

Download is already un-blemisjed by drop-outs even on Hi-res Radio Three.

ATB from George

I've just re-read what I posted. You're right it's not very clear. I was referring specifically to the comment Bart made about the situation with his fiber company in the US where they promoted the fact that you don't share the pipe.

In the UK contention on the FTTC services can be a real issue. Since more customers have come on stream the quality i.e. bandwidth and latency, have deteriorated on the 80/20 service at our UK office. BT promised FTTP with 333/30 but the rollout was shelved; despite a contract being in place, when BT cut their FTTP target last year. I wasn't and am still not very happy about it.

Took only minutes to fit a new socket with integral filter.

After half an hour to let it settle the download speed is 73.7 MBS, and upload is 9.2 MBS.

Amazing!

The upload speed is almost two thirds of my previous download speed!

Very pleased. Apparently I can expect these speeds to improve a little bit over the next few hours and days ...

ATB from George

PS: BT rules in my experience. Gratis upgrade.

Yes, just wait until the burn-in is complete. Leave the system downloading long HD movies when you're not using it to accelerate this process .