How Fast Is 2018 Broadband

HI Finkfan,  I used to pay for 24/7 calls anytime but noticed that £8.75 (or whatever it was) for 2 or 3 calls during the week was not a good deal.  As the basic BT BB+phone includes "free" phone at weekends,  I changed my contract to that basic minimum.  Now we both use internet connection for cell phones when at home during the week which is "free" (up to something more than we ever use) & included in the cell phone package.  

After 10 years of 2mbps (and that's on a really good day) I've moved to BT's 'fibre to the premises' with download speeds of 70mbps and upload of 40mbps. I have to say that it's a revelation from both a work and play perspective. Downloading 4K to my TV takes seconds as opposed to weeks and I can now actually work from home without drop-outs! Not cheap though.

I can only dream of the speeds most of you have. Like Bruce earlier, on a good day we get 2.5mb/s or sometimes 3.5mb/s or even dropping to 0.5mb/s when it's wet (thankfully not recently).
BT are not providing fibre to our rural community but, Gigaclear will be in about 12 months time, at which point, 1gb/s allegedly becomes available (hopefully).

Mike-B posted:

HI Finkfan,  I used to pay for 24/7 calls anytime but noticed that £8.75 (or whatever it was) for 2 or 3 calls during the week was not a good deal.  As the basic BT BB+phone includes "free" phone at weekends,  I changed my contract to that basic minimum.  Now we both use internet connection for cell phones when at home during the week which is "free" (up to something more than we ever use) & included in the cell phone package.  

Mike-B. I just renewed both my Mobile and Broadband last week with EE and like you removed my 24/7 anytime calls which were costing £7.50 a month as my mobile has unlimited calls this is not a problem but they did throw in free landline UK calls at the weekend.

The only calls I made with my Landline were to relations in Australia which was free with the 24/7 package but we have agreed a UK mobile to Australia landline rate of 8p a minute this will be considerably cheaper for the three or four call a year that I make to Aus. 

Broadband and Mobile contracts seem to be very competitive in the UK at the moment the first mobile I had installed in 1985 for the company MD cost £1700 to supply and fit the equipment plus £50 a month line rental then a £1 a minute for calls, monthly bills were always around £500 so I am quite pleased with my new mobile contract of £10 a month for unlimited minutes and texts plus 5gb of data how times have changed. 

We have a farcical situation where there is fibre less than 100m from our house, and less than 10m from out neighbours, yet neither of us have the option to connect to it since the pot of Welsh government money ran out. The Open Reach estimate of when we would get a connection was counting down steadily last year, until the deadline passed, and was then promptly reset to ‘never’. As taxpayers and line subscribers, I think we have reason to be pretty miffed that infrastructure that we have paid for has just been abandoned in the road. 

Hi Mike and PCD 

like you both my fibre package includes line rental and evening/weekend calls. But I’d happily give up the evening/weekend calls option for a saving every month. I have a mobile contract with EE which seems to be the best provider in my area, with unlimited mins and texts. My deal isn’t as good as PCDs though! 

Why don't you use Whats App or similar to make calls to Australia, Video also if you want to and doesn't cost a penny just your broadband if from home. We use to speak to friends and relatives in Oz and the States

Same goes for FaceTime video or audio. 

I (we) have family calls to Aus, NZ, USA & South Africa on a regular basis & use a mix of Whatsapp, FaceTime & Skype depending on the other ends preferences & if video is required.  I also make business calls to SA & annoyingly it had to be by regular phone,  finaly after too many years I have them converted to Skype for planned meetings incl inter SA offices.    Phone bills,   whats they ??   ???   

Pev posted:

Re Truespeed - they give you a dedicated fibre line to your premises and thus zero contention. Their web site is a bit light on technical detail but it's worth a Google (a link would breach Forum rules). A nice touch is that if they connect your village, the local school and village hall get free broadband forever.

Hi Pev, I have looked Truespeed, and they offer broadband internet as opposed to direct Ethernet fibre internet access from what I saw... the speeds look like GPON as opposed ethernet speeds, and if so they would use splitters on the fibre. You of course get your own fibre and that will be un contended to your property to the aggregation point... if its GPON that will go back to an aggregation point where usually passive splitter(s) are used, and such fibre connections are significantly cheaper than direct fibre to the exchange router.. Direct Ethernet fibre access is when you have a private fibre that goes back to the major pop/exchange. It’s typically what larger customers use and is no where  as cheap as broadband and will priced typically on fibre length. GPONs (with splitters often upto 64x)  use asynchronous speeds, direct Ethernet fibre access is duplex and is the same speed  in both directions. GPONs/PONS will typically have contention in the backhaul and the ISP typically then requires a fair use policy, and Truespeed has exactly this. A full dedicated uncontested to pop router fibre, the use is irrelevant, there is no need for fair use, and such commercial dedicated internet accesses are typically heavily used.

Yes the connection model looks like that used for PON setup with FTTP On Demand... I know BT Open Reach is also offering thisnow  to ISPs now.. this allows customers to club together to get a PON built for their community / location  to reduce install costs for customers sharing that PON.. and once the PON is built others can connect to it at a minimal install rate. 

Beachcomber posted:

Bruce Woodhouse posted:

We have been told no way we will get an upgraded service or fibre. Maybe satellite is the only option?

I'll have to settle for our 2.5Mb/s. On a good day.

Bruce

You lucky lucky bastard.  I get 1Mb/s, plus non-optional dropouts.  BBC iPlayer is pretty much a no-no.

I have used Satellite, you definitely pay for what you get as it can get very congested at peak times and grind to a crawl on cheaper packages. If you can get passed this, the other consideration is the latency (round trip to the geostationary satellite. Around 650mS.) this means your router typically an accelerator built (to convert TCP to UDP) and other caching acceleration but it can cause less than ideal conditions with IPSec tunnels and other very secure connections.

blythe posted:

I can only dream of the speeds most of you have. Like Bruce earlier, on a good day we get 2.5mb/s or sometimes 3.5mb/s or even dropping to 0.5mb/s when it's wet (thankfully not recently).
BT are not providing fibre to our rural community but, Gigaclear will be in about 12 months time, at which point, 1gb/s allegedly becomes available (hopefully).

Blythe, if you are not part of a commercial build location provided by BT, Virgin, CityFibre or equivalent, then you will most likely be covered by BDUK. This is is where the council/gov subsidises the build cost for commercial providers and councils often go to tender with providers to build fibre to remote locations. Install costs have massively reduced in very recent years.

You should contact your Parish Councillor or County Council for status.. and you may find you are included in a rollout over the next 3 years.. however this info will need to come from the County Council.

its what I have used in my rural location, and our BDUK subsidised build is scheduled to go active later this summer and our rural cabs as well as some PON (FTTP) install are now in place (quite exciting) ... it did take lobbying and patience to get funds assigned and be included in coverage though... your Parish Council might already be on the case.. as always your local community/Parish Council  might need to get organised to make things happen.

Gov info on BDUK..

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/broadband-delivery-uk

Thanks Simon - I did say that BT are not providing fibre to our rural community but, Gigaclear will be in about 12 months time, at which point, 1gb/s allegedly becomes available (hopefully).
Yes, the parish council are indeed now behind this and the information relating to Gigaclear installing FTTP in about 12 months came from their web site.
I've also been in touch with my local MP who has been brilliant and is firmly behind us all getting fibre in his constituency.
It's just that we were told "fibre is on its way" 6 years ago. Had we known just how long this was actually going to take, we could have bitten the bullet and paid for something ourselves rather than keep on putting up with rubbish connections.
I currently use an EE 4G mobile connection (large antenna on the roof, connected to the router fitted with a SIM card), however, it often drops to 3G and on occasions, even 2G which is useless too.

Have Fibre, which is mismarketed as it ‘Coax to the Home’, originally provided by Cablevision in suburban Dublin, which was bought by NTL, then UPC/Liberty Media now Virgin Media. During UPC’s ownership they completely upgraded the cabling & service. So for the last 3 or 4 years, have had 360 Mbps down and 36 Mbps up, which is real and obtainable. See Speedtest screen, over 802.11ac WiFi to iPhone 6S, taken back in 2016,

It comes to me as part of triple play service for TV with a recording HD STB and Voice (in-built SIP line) with included International call package for €98 a month.

It means you can stream IP based TV from Netflix, Amazon Prime without issue, BBC iPlayer takes some DNS setting adjustment, along with US TV services/content. IP radio & Music streaming is not a problem, whether Tidal Masters or FLAC streaming through Roon, Qobuz. File downloading is also not a problem, and ‘Working at/from Home’ is possible either occasionally or fulltime, with many staff/personnel having as good as office/business connections for individual use.

The broadband on its own, if you have Sky for TV with a dish, is circa €65 a month. So not cheap.

Now broadband in other parts of Ireland is patchy, and various Government attempts for Rural programs. There is a mixture of Fibre to the Cabinet, Microwave & Satelitte based connections. I did recent see adverts from Vodafone for 1Gbps service, outside of Dublin, but with post promotion pricing of €95 a month.

I believe Virgin Media will be looking to offer higher speeds and a 4K TV offering in 2019, as they are removing legacy analogue signals transmitted over the Cable network, to free up bandwidth, akin to Digital rollout of terrestrial analogue TV.

But then, to get the high service/good provision you do need to give the Service providers the ability to invest IMO. If you just pay the minimums and beat them up on price, “nickel & dime” them, their ability to invest in infrastructure is greatly reduced, plus provide a good service, and laying Fibre optic cabling, upgrading cabinets, backend servers is not a cheap process. The days of state owned services are long gone, and they have to be run as profitable businesses and investment cases to improve services have to have a ROI justification.

Simon.

Simon, interesting, so you have direct fibre to your home CPE, but they call it coax?  Bizarre, sounds like a trades descriptions offence if the case. However broadband coax distribution networks can be very effective..  using unbalanced copper coax here as opposed to balanced (aka twisted pair) copper can have higher throughputs over medium distances.  Obviously just about all types of broadband accesses use fibre on the backhaul these days. I note the huge asynchronous  ratio ie 1:10... that is usually not a good idea as can  cause tcp latency issues when there are many concurrent flows which is more likely with higher speed accesses where you tend to use link more .. certainly will limit its effectiveness other than for basic consumer consumption uses... is that normal or just having a bad day?.. 

Agree about investments, but governments can have a role to play subsidise a degree of universal access where pure commercial interests would be less likely to succeed.

No, described/sold as Fibre Broadband, but delivery over Cable, no Fibre-optic in the network provision. I only used the CPE as a cable modem, with Firewall router and 802.11ac WAP being mine.

Eir, former semi-state POTS, is trying to deploy FTTH, through FTTP &  FTTC options, but delivery outside metropolitan areas through to rural areas has always been a struggle, remember only a population of 4 million or so, hence investment cost vs # of subscribers & subscription revenues is a different model - but if you only pay minimum fees you can’t expect world class service provision.

Download to upload speeds has always been a 10:1 ratio, again this will be different to ADSL services, and higher upload speeds are not required for domestic usage, as most content is southbound. Different for businesses & Commerical usage, however not experienced any concurrency issues as often initiate multiple download sessions as well have many devices connected.

Simon

Good to hear your async ratios aren’t causing issues. I guess if most consuming over the link as opposed to serving then fine... after all that was the rationale in the early days in design consumer async access.. its I guess use cases vary now and more people serve, like streaming camera video etc..

Yes RoI, much of the population is concentrated in a few large urban conurbations (albeit much smaller than many of the UK conurbations), but remoter locations have the same challenges in the UK.. at least the RoI has smaller land mass . Good thing GPON build outs are massively cheaper now they were just  a few years ago.. and fibre is quite happy suspended between posts perhaps under rural low voltage distribution power wiring .. as is the case in my location. I was talking to a BDUK engineering architect the other month... and he was telling me that FTTP in remote locations say using 64 way splitters can be significantly cheaper and significantly more effective to deploy than using a low density FTTC distribution, even if the cab uses vectoring, where the accesses are remote and distributed or low density linear along a lane or equivalent. As soon as there is a cluster with a hamlet or village then FTTC comes more viable again.

i forgot to say in the UK G.9700 based services are starting to be deployed to provide high speed balanced (twisted pair) copper access from the distribution point... kind of equivalent to unbalanced coax distribution. I think speeds around 220Mbps one way.. I think it marketed as G,Fast Ultrafast Broadband... anything like that in Ireland are you aware?

I am under the impression that 10:1 or 20:1 down:upload ratio is the norm with consumer broadband - certainly family and friends with whom I’ve discussed seem to have that, and those are the only ratios available from the two providers where I live for their wired service, regardless of package chosen. Those in the few areas lucky enough to have fibre can apparently have an down:up ratio of  5:1. 

The  higher speed VDSL ratios are smaller say 1:4. But yes it appears some of the cheaper higher speed fibre GPONs can go to 1:10 with download speeds of around 330mbps with upload of around 30Mbps.... so I guess ultimately the difference between fibre PON Broadband (FTTP)   and dedicated synchronous fibre access, although some new higher spec/ value  PON services seem to be offering synchronous speeds. GPON access have to share the fibre so something has to give...and it appears it’s often the up channel and this I suspect ultimately governed by the physical PON topology deployed by the infrastructure provider.

Where I live the fastest VDSL is 100Mbps (supposedly!), with 200 just becoming available a few miles away in the nearest town - in both cases the upload max is 1/10th. Nothing faster available other than the very limited places where fibre is available to domestic premises, where up to 1Gbps download 200 Mbps upload. 

My 100Mbps costs £35 pm (plus telephone line rental).

In Simes_PEP's case it's DOCSIS 3.1 that his ISP is using, like VM in the UK and coax from the cabinet to the home is normal. The coax supports several Gbps so doesn't limit what is being offered as fibre broadband. The asymmetrical download and upload speeds are also normal, as per my VM offering if 200/10 Mbps.

best

David

David I think you might be confusing local access distribution technologies and what they provide. Virgin Media because of their heritage have a large CableTV distribution network so they use a broadband technology Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications, as you say currently DOCSIS 3.x which uses broadband technology to carry data by RF modulating, in this case un balanced copper coax between the distribution cabinet/point and the premise. Telephony providers, have a different access distribution network, such as BT and use  balanced twisted pair copper very much like your pairs in an Ethernet patch lead, using a different broadband technology called Digital Subscriber Line, xDSL (ADSL, VDSL G.9700 etc)

Both have strengths and weaknesses in terms of reach vs bandwidth vs degree of asymmetry etc.. both are simply broadband access technologies and choose which compromises to focus on.. G.9700 can provide theoretically  up to 1Gbps over twisted pair (balanced) copper depending on loop length, and DOCSIS3.1 can provide upto 10GBps over coax (unbalanced) copper depending on distance and other factors ... what actually is provided will typically be less from the service provider.

These broadband distribution technologies, these days will all use shared fibre from cabinet or distribution point into the backhaul.. and ultimately here become potentially contended, the extent of which becomes a commercial as well as technical matter. However confusingly in my opinion all these service providers call these various copper distribution technologies ‘Fibre Broadband’.. in the hope perhaps of keeping things simple for the consumer... but now a new term has had to be be invented for genuine fibre broadband to the premise called Direct Fibre Broadband. And with Direct Fibre services there other pay offs to keep things economic .. (Direct PoP Access vs PON for example) nothing is ever simple ... but most broadband services are working in a compromised environment where trade offs need to be made, and some in the consumer space use extreme asymmetry perhaps for marketing reasons and limiatioations caused by the degree of sharing in the access network to provide a given service.... but technically extreme asymmetry can bring its own issues for more advanced uses... but appears fine for standard consumer basic  consumption in 2018, but if I subscribed to such a service I would want to know the service prover road map for reducing this limitation... as before too long this will be the bottleneck... not the headline one way sync speed. This is why on some new broadband access networks we are starting to see very low ratios or even synchronous/duplex access.

Yep - Truespeed are are guaranteeing 200mbps both download and upload with no contention - roll on October when we are due to be connected.

Of course the proof of the pudding...

FWIW I have the VM VIP (ho, ho) package of TV and BB and I usually get well in excess of 100mbps - until it decides to stop working at all for a few minutes and the music drops out.

Which makes me think, I read that the new Uniti range (including the Atom??) stores/buffers 5 mins of music to reduce drop outs....  Well how about Naim building a dedicated box to store 30 mins or 1 hour of music, to totally remove the scourge of drop outs!?!

They could call it the Uniti Store, to rhyme with Core, which would also allow us Uniti chaps to build up multi-box systems like you lucky Classics fellows

Atom/Iota/Kan Stands posted:

..  Well how about Naim building a dedicated box to store 30 mins or 1 hour of music, to totally remove the scourge of drop outs!?!

I think they call it a NAS, or the Uniti Core.....