Bt smart hub - free upgrade

Posted by: hifi-dog on 31 December 2018

just renewed my contract with bt and upgraded to super fast fibre and new smart hub. Compared to hh5 the smart hub (hh6) is a more relaxed presentation and the music flows better. The fibre and new master socket will arrive next week so here’s hoping it will be even better!

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by hifi-dog

Interrogating my bt smart hub since my g.fast came live on the 2nd it consistently shows 136 down and 16.9 up. 

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Hi for G.9700/9701 services - marketed as G.fast - then those speeds are fine - your are almost certainly syncing to a Distribution Point where the fibre connects rather than a Cabinet  - and so your DP will be typically closer to your house ... and for those speeds i suspect less than 250 metres...

Just keep your cabling well away from your Naim and sensitive equipment like turn tables and radio receivers - one of the  downsides of G.fast is that it can be a bit of a leaky RFI generator.

 

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by hifi-dog

Cheers simon. The main socket is the other end of the room (4m)  with a short 2m cable to the hh6 then Ethernet to the nova. 

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by Ravenswood10
Camlan posted:

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.

No issues here with FTTP. Installation took 2 hours and that involved drilling through a wall, putting the GPON in a hall cupboard, installing the HH6 and using a cherrypicker to connect to our pole. It’s been totally reliable since installation back in the Summer. Frankly anything is better that the dropouts and periodic Kbps speeds we were getting before. Long may it continue!

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by Ravenswood10

I should have added that I still have broadband via my old copper line which is still connect - although it’s obviously appreciably slower.

Posted on: 05 January 2019 by Simon-in-Suffolk

FTTP is intrinsically reliable.. your speed is effectively determined by your backhaul contention as opposed to any sort of line lengt, and so will significantly vary on your location. Your ONT is the equivalent of a twisted pair modem, and  converts the fibre into twisted pair for your broadband router. 

It is worth remembering that broadband services are contended and shared and are typically asynchronous and different from dedicated fibre direct duplex accesses. GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) fibre networks are shared contended networks, but are significantly cheaper than dedicated fibre accesses.