Broadband downgrade - advice please
Posted by: djh1697 on 27 December 2017
Advice please..... I am thinking about cancelling my superfast broadband, switching to standard BT broadband, and getting a discounted mobile phone? However, how does Tidal streaming work? what about movie streaming? I only wish i could trail it to see what it is like. I have 4k Netflix movies, will standard broadband be ok? BT estimate the speed will be 3Mb, I am getting around 30Mb (Talk Talk) at the moment. Money is tight 
BT have not provided a date for faster fibre in this area.
Hi Simon, I do recall the VM team running the cable through the under road duct, 3 guys & a lot of push/pull work for just 2 houses. The cable was the kind of diameter you mention & judging by diameter of the loops they had around the the road, it looked rather inflexible. I had assumed it was multicore and/or fibre.
Mike-B posted:Hi Simon, I do recall the VM team running the cable through the under road duct, 3 guys & a lot of push/pull work for just 2 houses. The cable was the kind of diameter you mention & judging by diameter of the loops they had around the the road, it looked rather inflexible. I had assumed it was multicore and/or fibre.
Mike-B posted:Simon-in-Suffolk posted:Do you know what virgin use? Is it wide diameter LDF?
Inside my neighbours house they used Welco WF100 satellite grade coax. No idea what is used from cabinet to house. He gets nowhere near 5Gb/s, last time we talked I think he said it was 200Mbs, he is just happy they finally fixed the dropouts.
Just to be clear, what I was saying is that the coax from the point where the fibre ends to the house could support 5Gbps, which is what a friend who used to work for VM told me. But of course their current top commercial offering is much less. I think 300 Mbps is the current top offering and there is a lot more to it than the performance of the coax, including contention in various parts of the network.
But my point really was that VM could deliver IGbps if it wanted to without pulling out the present access network and putting FTTH in instead.
The in house coax is nothing like the stuff they use in the access network, but I don't know what the spec is I'm afraid.
best
David
Hi Gazza I'm a Superhub 2ac customer so I don't know what if anything has happened about the Superhub 3 problem. It's stopped me from going for the 300 Mbps package though!
best
David
I upgraded earlier in the summer, asked for a 2ac after reading some negative comments on the Hub3, but the engineer told me that they had stopped installing 2acs, and were ONLY installing Hub3 models now. I have never had a problem with it. It works very well.
Hi David, to your point it might be the backhaul on the local virgin network is not up to the task if they offered significantly higher bandwidths to their customers. I know how BT do it and it tends to be future proofed at the local access level, but I have no certain idea how VM do it... they might suffer from having older local access infrastructure with greater contention challenges......
Counter intuitively FTTH can be preferable to install in distributed rural and semi rural areas, as opposed to urban, suburban and small village clusters were cabinet distribution is optimum. Where properties/businesses are very dispersed, or where there is extended low density linear housing along a road FTTH starts to make a lot of commercial sense from the distribution provider, and FTTC less so... and of course FTTH uses a different access network than the FTTC network, I don’t think anyone in the UK is providing direct fibre access from the FTTC cabinet...although it is a capability.
Ok had a quick look there a few specialist ISPs providing a FTTP On Demand (FoD) ... (fibre from cabinet to premise service) on the BT FTTC network, but it appears rather pricey.... and David, if VM offered fibre access from their cabs as opposed to using DOCSIS, then it would be to my mind a kind of FoD service....