Bt smart hub - free upgrade

Do you really mean fibre? Ie Openreach blow the new fibre to your house and install an ONT (the fibre equivalent of a modem) in your premise which you connect your new HoneHub 6 to? If so congrats... I have had in the last few weeks finally Superfast Broadband enabled in my village and now to my house which is twisted pair to the new village cabinet and fibre thereon... and that has given me over 1300% improvement in internet bandwidth... very pleased indeed

Ah I think I’m getting what you’ve got but I’ll ask the engineer Wednesday...

BT's current promotions use the words that sort of indicate that its all fibre, its not.   I only checked it out yesterday after Mrs-B received the www-add.     It would not let me place an order after it checked what I have, indicating I've already got it.    What I have is fibre to the local cabinet (FTTC) & its so called 'copper' from the cabinet to the house,  distance aprx 280m.  

I’m about the same distance from the cab also...still I’ve got a new hub and £10 a month less so happy either way!

I am about 700m to the cabinet via the wiring route.. the cab is a Huawei one which has benefits  in terms of crosstalk mitigation  affecting distance performance ( uses fancy DSP known as vectoring) ... my average layer 3 bandwidth is 45 Mbps down and 9 Mbps up .. however I do have BT installed premise wiring with correct twisted pair cabling (not dissimilar to Ethernet cable, but 3 instead of 4 pairs) to my dsl NTE and made a great improvement.

If you have a BT line, you can see expected performance ... dslchecker.bt.com     

It looks like I now have 145 down and 29 up..

I'll have to renegotiate my deal with BT

hifi-dog posted:

It looks like I now have 145 down and 29 up..

The maximum BT offer with the FTTC service is 76Mb/s down,   so is that result using one of the www speed checker's such as Ookla, BT's own speed checker or are you looking at the estimated speeds from dslchecker.bt.com

In my experience you can get a lot of variations,  the www checkers tend to agree  more or less,  but some of the numbers from BT Wholesale that I've seen in the past make no sense with impossible numbers. 

 Up to about 9 months ago I got close to 80Mb/s,  then for no apparent reason (according to BT) I started to get around 67Mb/s at best, sometimes less than 60Mb/s.   That is significantly less than the dslchecker.bt.com 's 68Mb/s lower estimate for my property,  but the same checker shows my line was tested a few weeks ago & that showed 79Mb/s.   

I should be complaining,  but complaining to BT is not advised if you value your sanity.    The thing is the line remains stable & connected 24/7,  so I live with what I've got.     

That’s taken from the hub itself ...

In my experience speed measurement can be somewhat hit and miss. I have BT FTTC and the smart hub is showing 67Mb/s and Ookla speed test some 10Mb/s less than that via ethernet albeit using a bridged Airport Extreme.

If you have not got FTTP then you should not be getting 145Mb/s and if you have, you should be doing quite a bit better than that. 

Interestingly I have been advised by a couple of Openreach Engineers to avoid FTTP at present (not that I am being offered it, that is another story) as it can be somewhat unreliable and requires an Engineer visit for any fault whatsoever.

In conclusion, I agree with Mike-B regarding BT's latest Broadband advertising, very misleading.

Just checked on gslchecker and it says I now have G fast at 147.8 down stream and 19.5 upstream. The engineer fitted a new g.fast master socket and did something in the cab up the road. It’s fibre to the cab then boosted copper to me so he said..

Just renegotiated my BT contract which involved me arguing with them about the definition of our 'fibre' service.

It may be fibre to the box but it goes through copper wires after that and gives us about 2Mb/s at home.

I'm not paying a 'fibre' contract rate for that.

Bruce

hifi-dog posted:

Just checked on gslchecker and it says I now have G fast at 147.8 down stream and 19.5 upstream. The engineer fitted a new g.fast master socket and did something in the cab up the road. It’s fibre to the cab then boosted copper to me so he said..

OK  now the 146Mb/s speeds make sense ........   I don't have G.Fast availability yet,  the extra pod box has been added to the area cabinet but the required wiring change is on hold waiting for other work.

Ah,  G.Fast, that explains it, you must be in one of the pilot areas you lucky man. Hell will probably freeze over before that comes to North Wales particularly as they will probably suspend it if the Huawei 'scare' continues.

After years of lobbying Libby (previous head of BT customer services) and their new head of CS as well as our local MP we finally had FTTP via poles delivered along our lane in the Summer. No blowing fibre here, just a fiber in a jacket taken from a pole manifold to my new huawei Echo GPON terminal in a cupboard and there via Ethernet to a new HH6 for FTTP. It’s been blissfully stable since installation and I’m paying what I did for 2 Mbps copper. They keep trying to offer me 150-300 Mbps but 50 is such a revelation I frankly don’t see the point in faster speeds and the price hike  as I don’t game or download 4k movies. 

Have moved from BT to Truespeed a few weeks ago and now get 190 - 200 Mbps up and down because it is ftp. The cost is about £2 a month more than BT was charging for 5-7 Mbps. Only downside is that the wifi built into their modem is crap, much worse than a HH6, but a £50 Linksys router sorted that. They even give free broadband to local schools and village halls.

Move to rural Somerset and join the information superhighway. 

Guess it’s like rural Norfolk but warmer!

Just rang virgin, the 150 mps was running real slow......they increased to 200 mps and reduced the price of our overall tv, phone and broadband by £15. Not sure why but perhaps because from their end we had a reboot......its spookily fast.

Well really pleased with my new rural Superfast broadband service.. its only taken 4 years of county council lobbying  and gaining EU funding clearance to get our village connected .. yes further up my lane a few remoter farms and houses have  FTTP, as the Superfast FTTC service would have dropped below 30 Mbps. My daughter also has FTTP in her new house in a village a few miles away, it was the only option.. but from all accounts FTTP is the one to go for if you can, it’s very reliable and clearly doesn’t suffer from interference or ionospheric noise which can affect FTTC.

My FTTC service seems to have settled now and risen to around average sustained throughput of 45 Mbps down and 9 Mbps up, with very little latency ( latency can be a hidden issue on longer lines Superfast ) and at over 700 metres between me and the cab that is impressive... vectoring DSP technology clearly makes a huge difference.. a really worthwhile improvement over earlier non vectoring enabled FTTC cabinets.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Well really pleased with my new rural Superfast broadband service.. its only taken 4 years of county council lobbying  and gaining EU funding clearance to get our village connected .. yes further up my lane a few remoter farms and houses have  FTTP, as the Superfast FTTC service would have dropped below 30 Mbps. My daughter also has FTTP in her new house in a village a few miles away, it was the only option.. but from all accounts FTTP is the one to go for if you can, it’s very reliable and clearly doesn’t suffer from interference or ionospheric noise which can affect FTTC.

My FTTC service seems to have settled now and risen to around average sustained throughput of 45 Mbps down and 9 Mbps up, with very little latency ( latency can be a hidden issue on longer lines Superfast ) and at over 700 metres between me and the cab that is impressive... vectoring DSP technology clearly makes a huge difference.. a really worthwhile improvement over earlier non vectoring enabled FTTC cabinets.

 

I can't say I'm not a little jealous, Simon, particularly as, with Welsh government funding, Open Reach went to the trouble of running fibre up out road, literally within inches of some properties, only to abandon it when the funding suddenly ran out. We now have the farcical situation where some of the cables have been in place for 2 years, but nobody can use them!

Ah Chris, I sympathise, and that was my fear  here... so I kept close as parish councillor to the director of Suffolk Better Broadband who was leading the SCC infill programme.. of which Openreach won the tender to provide infrastructure on a joint funding basis... there are other players out there, but where payback is over a very long period, it appears most other shirk away and it’s Openreach who steps up.. 

We were 18 months late in the end..and what is frustrating when all the Openreach fibres and twisted pair cabinet remapping is done, so the local link infrastructure and backhaul to head end  is in place, if all the impacted service providers don’t play ball and invest in their headend link connections.. and this is often at your nearest big town/City unlike your nearest exchange as used for ADSL.. then the whole cabinet or series of cabinet activations can be delayed for everyone.. and this was part of the delay for me.. 

Worth being aware that the device you use to measure speed can have a major impact on the result. Many older devices such as earllier model iPhones will report far lower performance due to their dated technology. 

There is much voodoo spoken about measuring speed.. a client device like a PC or iPhone can’t reliably do this.. there are simply too many other variables.

The only reliable way to determine your adaptive DSL based broadband speed is to log onto your NTE, modem, broadband router etc, and see what your link layer sync speeds are. That is your true network speed.. anything else is either your home network, ISP backhaul or other internet related conditions. 

Fibre services like G.Fast, Superfast (VDSL) as well as traditional ADSL Broadband all use DSL technologies.

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

There is much voodoo spoken about measuring speed.. a client device like a PC or iPhone can’t reliably do this.. there are simply too many other variables.

The only reliable way to determine your adaptive DSL based broadband speed is to log onto your NTE, modem, broadband router etc, and see what your link layer sync speeds are. That is your true network speed.. anything else is either your home network, ISP backhaul or other internet related conditions. 

Fibre services like G.Fast, Superfast (VDSL) as well as traditional ADSL Broadband all use DSL technologies.

Voodoo,  you can say that again.   I actually feel sorry for the average broadband customer, bombarded with promises of 'super' speeds & buy our fibre,  it all smacks of quack doctors, snake oil pedlars & back street spivs.      The promise of this & that line speeds seem to be the vendors premise but how is Mr & Mrs Joe Muggins going to find out as none of the www speed checkers can agree & even the vendors own speed checkers don't work.   

I've just run a few tests on my service  using BT's own BTW were I get some numbers that are clearly so wrong its laughable -         372.95Mb/s down  16.92Mb/s up   &   37.13ms latency

www.dslchecker.bt.com show the last observed test at 79.99Mb/s  down & 19.99Mb/s  up.   Again it raises doubts with both down & up links ending with a .99 number

Ookla                                                   9ms  70.27Mb/s down  18.56Mb/s up

broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk      13ms   72.18Mb/s  down   19.02Mb/s up

Which                                                  17ms   66.9Mb/s  down    18.6Mb/s  up

So its obvious BT is all wrong,  the other tests sort of agree  & are probably in ball park terms about right,  but it does raise concerns & its not achieving the 80Mb/s download speed that BT including their dslchecker say my line should get.

Despite all this,  the service I get is rock solid & it does all I need without problems including streaming HD TV.      I should sign off as "Confused.com"  but thankfully I know a little about how this stuff works,  but I do feel sorry for the average customer.   

...........  rant over    

Mike, the dslchecker illustrates a range of max and min speeds for your line conditions, your home wiring to NTE, and most importantly physical line length. I also think this a link layer speed. It is also now shows a maximum recorded sync speed with your profile... however I am not sure how useful this is, as this typically will be higher than your optimal speed. 

Therefore by definition if it is link layer speed, it has to be less than all the round trip layer three services you quote predicting throughput... I think because dslchecker is more a technical illustration it’s not promoted for genereal consumer use as it could mislead. It also doesn’t take into regard the type of bandwidth service you use.. here you tend pay more for better sustained throughputs.. with BT they call this their ‘plus’ variant, other ISP use different marketing terms.. and I suspect this is down to your assigned QoS in your ISP service type backhaul VLAN.

Now even given this, those speed estimator apps you use are all approximate, and depends on how busy they are and what is happening on your link So sure one could average as you have done for three different estimator providers over a week, and take the average for a more representative speed.

However as far as broadband access speed goes, the sync speeds in your modem or router are the only truly reliable ones. It often makes me smile when people sometimes complain of slow broadband, when actually their broadband link speed is really healthy, however there is congestion between their ISP and the internet service that they are accessing that is slowing things down... almost certainly if you an inter day variation here this is the cause... 

BTW not sure where that 372 number came from... it looks spurious.