Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT) The UK government has today hailed the completion of its superfast broadband project as a success – the scheme that has now brought 24Mbps to 95 per cent of the country by almost entirely handing the contracts to monopoly provider BT. Clive Selley, CEO of BT's broadband infrastructure division Openreach, described the …
Few days ago a friend in a small town in Spain asked my advice, should she go with the 500Mbs fttp installation recommended by the ISP or could she get away with their cheaper 300Mps offering.
Here's me in UK only just got upgrade from 2Mps and that was by a lot of nagging to Openreach and threatening to escalate it to the Ministry of Culture and Sport (who are the branch of government who are actually responsible for these targets.)
Italy is rolling out FTTH by 2020 in the plain from Turin to Venice where a large part of the population lives in small towns and detached houses... these areas, although wealthy, was deemed "market failure" for short-term investment exactly because of the costs to cable so many houses, so the State stepped in. Open Fiber won the bid, it will build the network and will be able to lease it wholesale for twenty years, albeit the fiber network itself will be state-owned. Sometimes, you need a long term investment to build the future.
"Italy is rolling out FTTH by 2020 in the plain from Turin to Venice where a large part of the population lives in small towns and detached houses."
I live part of the year in a National Park in Italy. We don't have fibre and probably won't get it ever. However unlike the UK I don't have much of a beef with that because we have a 4G data connection that is unlimited and runs at 76Mbps. Other European countries seem to have got their act together on the delivery of communications.
The density in towns and cities is very high, the density between towns and cities is very low. You can cover most of the population very easily.
Spain has the most entries in this table.
when I was on holiday in Mallorca a year ago, I saw quite a few adverts for fibre internet.. for less than I pay in the UK for 36Mb/s (on FTTC, but long phone line, so I only get 6M up) I could have had 300M. I was very sad.
although it has probably boosted BT's margins by sweating their copper assets, this only benefits them in the short term.
I'm on 100mbs right now as it was a free upgrade from 50mbs.a couple of years ago when I had 50mbs. Virgin offered me an upgrade to 100mbs for an extra £2 per month. What I found was that when I did a speed test I was getting around 50-60mbp. I know traffic and how far away you are from the exchange can play a part in this. But what I had discovered that my laptop had a wireless card that could only receive 64mbs max. Meaning if 100mbs came down the line, depending on the day, I would only get half of it. So I downgraded back to 50mbs. 24mbs will be fine for equipment today but these companies should be informing their customers about whether their equipment can receive these speeds in the first place. I don't think my playstation 4 can receive 100mbs with ethernet cable in and it surely is poor wireless because of the poor wireless card that's in it
I suspect it's down to the length of time it took to reach the goal, and 24Mbps was once considered 'superfast'. Bear in mind that'll be a minimum, although there's no guarantee the providers can give that of course.
In fact I think once it was touted at 10Mbps or more? Or was that different roll out target? I'm sure someone more knowledgeable will be along soon.
1: Exactly which locations fall into the 5% 'less than 24mbps' category and can BT provide this?
2 Can I detail several known locations which definitely do not provide 24mbps broadband?
All area West of Holland Park, London W11 and W14 and East of the Olympia Exhibition center - specified as less than 5mbps with average 2mbps **
Some area in Parsons Green and Walham wards, London SW6 - specified as less than 7.5mbps with average 3mbps
Some area in Munster ward, London SW6- specified as less than 5mbps with average 2.5mbps
Some areas around Henley on Thames (Wargrave, Remenham etc) which have broadband under 1.5mbps.
I am presuming that in many of these cases they might have upgraded the fibre to the cabinet, but not done anything to upgrade the cabinet to premises lines, which are for many still the same very old copper cabling.
** In this case BT actually suggest that you use Virgin as they say they have no plans to upgrade FTTC or FTTP.
All above provable by BT Wholesale line checker at http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com (warning: Flash required to make the app run)
I moved to a flat in a major town you've heard of, inside the M25 recently.
No Virgin available. BT checkers all told me that the best I could get with VDSL ("fibre") was 6Mbps.
Sod that, I didn't even try.
Bought a Huawei 4G router, and a cheap data-only SIM. Can easily get 30-50Mbps throughout the peak periods and it covers the house. No line rental, no stupid charges, no installation cost, 30-day contract (though I could get it slightly cheaper if I went for a 12-month contract, or I could just retain the ability to change the SIM to someone else at any point, which I prefer). Even the latency is low enough to game over.
Plus it's battery backed, I can carry it around in my pocket, and certain services (e.g. video from Netflix / TVPlayer) are unmetered and don't count towards my data allowance (which I rarely get close to anyway).
Rather than a £50+ a month for a TV + landline + broadband deal, on an 18-month+ contract, involving engineer visits and boxes and wiring, I have broadband + I use a mobile phone anyway (or WhatsApp or Skype or whatever I want) + free streaming TV on a month-by-month contract that I can change to any provider I like.
So far, it's been two months and I can't fault it. It also means if I go for a long car journey, I get to take it and connect my laptop the other end, etc. on the same package. Hell, it even has European roaming for free too.
I don't get how BT are supposed to be competing against that with their current offerings. Some woman from a broadband company that the letting agency want me to use phoned up and couldn't compete either. And if I am ever skint, I just cut it off and carry on with the paltry data on my mobile package (because I rarely use data from my phone) and "top it up" next month instead.
Hell, I bought a bigger antenna for it since then, given that it's saving me so much money.
The base package is 50Gb / month. If you go with Vodafone, 50Gb/month is £30 (was £25 over Christmas) and you can pay a few extra quid and exclude all Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon Video, Google Play etc. (i.e. all the big-name sites) from such data usage.
To be honest, I have a steam account with 1000 games. I don't pull anywhere NEAR that as you just can't play that amount of huge games that quickly and keep them all up-to-date.
Sure, you have to be on the right package, but the right package can be £20 a month if you buy a year's contract and buy it at the right time.
Sorry, but with install charges, line rental, etc. any home broadband is significantly more expensive and there are fixed-line ISP's out there giving you less than 50Gb a month without any possibility of exclusions!
Agreed on the net neutrality thing but on a mobile network, I think you'll find it's always been there. For a long time, anything like Skype etc. was dialled down compared to other access, presumably because it's competitive but you could reasonably argue that the real-time requirement isn't suited to what should be "data sent in the gaps" between their own real-time data (i.e. phone calls).
Nowadays, not so much of that goes on, but if I was unhappy I could move to any other provider in seconds. Grab a SIM, slap it in. However, data usage limits are growing all the time (even if you exclude the "unlimited" offers) so it's not really a huge issue at the moment, I feel. Three do a package where only TVPlayer and Netflix are excluded - I can quite easily guess which company most people would go with, whichever one bundles the most. Nobody is going to just subscribe to a service purely on the basis that their ISP doesn't count it against them... it's the other way round, especially on mobile. They'll just move their number to a provider that doesn't penalise them for preferring a particular service.
Not sure why you got downvoted ...
But I have to agree I have the three contract myself, and I like the unlimited data on netflix and amazon etc... but what if i wanted to watch youtube, or twitch etc etc Three have actively limited my choice of what content I can consume. worse will be when they only support certain paid for streaming services ...
The only reason I can't massively argue with the option, is that it was added free to my accounts.
I go with three as I detest Vodafone with a passion now, and no other service is worth considering in my area :/
I applaud you. When 5G comes in, we the unloved should all show BT where to stick it. Having got fed up of waiting for a fast fibre connection from BT I've had to get Virginia Media in. They talk a good game but the service is so unreliable I'm positive they are quietly remapping customers to slower switches (Traffic shaping) until you complain then they temporarily move you again. As with all the other providers they just keep putting up their prices but we are not gaining the rewards. I have TalkTalk with a landline that I need and broadband for just under £20pm but this is only able to provide 5.7Mbs so I also have VM just to provide what is supposed to be 100Mps for £25pm. I can't get rid of the VM and their unreliable service because when working as it should it's stilla million times better than TalkTalk/BT.
I'm seriously considering investigating your solution of I can move some of my reliance on the terrestrial link to cellular. Just need to check out signal strength and reliability properly
I'm astonished at these figures. Where I live in East London a huge swathe of customers only get the 2Mbs to 6Mbs you mention. As you've said checking the checker confirms your exchange is enabled but your cabinet isn't and other than that there are no further plans to bring it to you unless you are prepared to foot the thousands of pounds cost. Before, it all seemed to be about "the mile to the exchange". Since fibre took that excuse away, Service provider staff seem to blame BT and BT seem to blame local authorities. I feel our regulators are serving someones interest but not mine when I see these so called achievement claims. I bet proper checks at the premises by the regulator via an online survey to all subscribers would give us the truth. In a nut shell.... Rubbish
Yeah I think its a bit fake percentages, apparently our cabinet is fibre enabled but because we're over 3miles from the cabinet we can't get it. Instead we're stuck on 3-4mbps which is useless when you buy a PS4 Pro and Sony expect people to be able to stream everything, not to mention developers who can't be bothered finishing a game before release and then offering a 20Gb update once you've got it home.
I'm on up to 24Mbps and it's at 18-20 which struggles to stream Netflix.
50Mbps is still slow and i'd called that average as I can get that speed just using 4G on my mobile phone at home and I'm talking rural North Cambridgeshire.
The town I lived in was upgraded to infinity 4 years ago but BT decided not to upgrade the cabinet in the town centre (they only non-infinity location in town)
I live in a rural UK location. We had notification recently that we should rejoice because the "Rural Broadband Initiative" has just delivered (three years late) "superfast 24Mbps broadband" to our area. They seemed disappointed when I declined the offer, as did almost everyone in the area.
The reason is simple, the telephone exchange is in the centre of the village, most of the residents live within a very short distance of the exchange hence DSL is 22Mbps for most users. A 24Mbps connection is as much use as eyebrows on a fish. There's also the issue that the "Rural Broadband Initiative" seems to be a synonym for "Political Face-saving Exercise". The job was given to a company that installed a microwave link on a hill near the village then ran fibre alongside existing phone wires. The price for a connection is an install fee of several hundred and rental of £160 a month, it's capped. The DSL service has no connection fee, no limit and costs £14(ish) a month.
To make "superfast" broadband real it has to be superfast, it has to offer decent data capacity and it has to be priced at less than rip-off levels.
Well privatisation did kill off BTs fibre optic development. We did submarine cables and all sorts of stuff. In 1990 we could have made a 2.4Gbit FTTP over 10Km of fibre for less than £100 in terms of component cost. But hey, they didnt do that sort of thing any more apparently.
I don't know how many lines are "exchange only" (XO) but AFAIK there are no plans for anything faster than regular broadband for these (we get a tardy 6Mbs...)
We don't have anything BT Openreach recognise as a cabinet (it seems our concrete pillar doesn't count...) so its a bit more than a mile to the exchange.
This situation exists everywhere - town and country alike - and there's still no plan that will actually work...
@Neil44 I was on an exchange connected line in rural North Yorkshire (in fact only 300 or so cable feet from the exchange from what I can remember from the old number you used to be able to dial that would tell you). However, North Yorkshire county council was one of the first authorities to do a deal with BT to enable fast broadband to the every exchange in the county. One of the provisions of this deal was that there had to be provision for exchange connected lines (over a third of the premises served by my exchange).
The solution BT came up with, was to install a cabinet outside the exchange to connect all the lines to, so that they could then utilise their FTTC product. Why they couldn't just put a rack in the exchange, and call it a cabinet, and mount the equipment there, I don't know. However, I did end up with 70Mbs actually delivered, so happy enough with the solution.
So, don't believe BT if they say there is no solution available. It might be that they don't chose to enact it when not contractually obliged. Point them to the Pateley Bridge exchange, which had this problem, and they resolved it there.
"Why they couldn't just put a rack in the exchange, and call it a cabinet, and mount the equipment there, I don't know. However, I did end up with 70Mbs actually delivered, so happy enough with the solution."
I wondered this and looked it up. It took me a while to find the answer. Apparently they aren't allowed to, as they think VDSL in the Exchange would interfere with the in Exchange plain old ADSL (RF leakage etc).
Makes you think the better solution would just be to get everyone over VDSL and ditch old ADSL completely (certainly for that Exchange) and if people don't want VDSL speeds just put them on a slower contract at the same price.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
