back to article More Brits have access to 1Gbps speeds than those failing to muster 10Mbps – Ofcom report

For the first time, the number of folk in the UK accessing speeds of 1Gbps is greater than those poor souls unable to get a meagre 10Mbps, according to an Ofcom report today. Although neither of those statistics should be read as an especially encouraging sign. The number of premises that cannot get 10Mbps fell by 150,000 …

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  1. jaywin

    Oh how I dream of a 10Mbps connection. Living, as I do, in the rural backwaters of Sheffield city centre. According to BT there's currently insufficient demand to upgrade ADSL speeds.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      To be fair, Sheffield City centre folk are still waiting to find out that the Beatles have spilt up.

      1. ForthIsNotDead
        Stop

        WAIT

        The Beatles split up?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: WAIT

          The who?

          1. Fuzz

            Re: The who?

            No, not The Who, The Beatles

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: The who?

              Hmm. The lowercase "w" was too subtle. Well done Fuzz for spotting the gag though.

          2. Cuddles

            Re: WAIT

            "The who?"

            I believe they're on first.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        To be fair, Sheffield City centre folk are still waiting to find out that the Beatles have spilt up.

        Only two of them were split up (by US drone strikes). The other two are still sadly whole, and in a Kurdish jail, according to the Sun.

        1. Aladdin Sane

          To be fair, The Beatles have no future in show business and guitar groups are on the way out.

    2. AndrueC Silver badge
      Meh

      According to BT there's currently insufficient demand to upgrade ADSL speeds.

      What they probably mean is insufficient residential demand. There's probably plenty of business demand currently being 'satisfied' by leased lines and the like. An interesting question would be whether those businesses would prefer to pay less for contended xDSL if they could.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I thought you meant the Beatles split due to...

        Sheffield's clusterfcuk tree felling contract.

    3. juice

      10Mbps

      You can get fibre speeds in some parts of Sheffield - I got mine switched on around 3 years ago! And from where I'm sitting, I can see the train station...

      Admittedly, Sheffield is something of a special case when it comes to fibre, thanks to the ill fated Digital Region initiative; the aftermath of that failure delayed the rollout for years.

      And while BT has recently been making more of a push, they've allegedly hit issues with a failed sub-contractor (https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/10/south-yorkshire-broadband-rollout-hit-main-bt-subcontractor-collapse.html).

      Either way, fibre is starting to appear in the city!

      1. jaywin

        Re: 10Mbps

        You can get fibre speeds in some parts of Sheffield - I got mine switched on around 3 years ago! And from where I'm sitting, I can see the train station...

        I know. There are houses about 50m away from my home (where there's insufficient demand) that have had it for several years. The difference? I'm inside the ring road, they're not.

  2. Flak

    Lies, damn lies and statistics!

    Looks great in the microcosm of little Britain.

    Compare those figures to pretty much any other country and they don't look good.

    I would also like to know how many of those who CAN get 1Gbps actually DO take that service. At 1Gbps, across the broad population the 'have nots' are more relevant than the 'haves'.

    1. OnlyMortal

      Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

      I have 1Gbps - Hyperoptic.com

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

        I have 1Gbps - Hyperoptic.com

        Out of idle curiosity, do you know what your contention rate is, and the upstream bandwidth for your local node? And what sort of speedtest results do you get at peak times?

        1. Tom 38

          Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

          I don't know exact answers for those Qs, but for my Hyperoptic connection are copper gigabit ethernet to the basement, where there is a chain of fibre optics going from building to building. They recently did a 10Gbps test on my estate on a single fibre, so I would imagine "plenty".

          Speedtests largely vary due to the demands on the speedtest servers; at a peakish time where I can still download at ~90MB/s, most pseedtest servers will only say around 500Mbps speed.

          Latency depends on to what and where; google services are around 0.1ms away, works DC is 2ms away, works on prem kit is about 6ms away (and works on prem -> works DC is ~5ms, for comparison). Not bad for £38/month

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

            > google services are around 0.1ms away

            For comparison, I get 0.55ms to 8.8.8.8 on a 500M symmetric leased line from a site in central London - from a test node located outside the firewall on its own public IP.

            So 0.1ms seems wildly fast; but it could mean Hyperoptic have a 10G link into your building and you're sitting directly on that. Cool :-)

        2. OnlyMortal

          Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

          AFAIK there's only one other flat on hyperoptic, based on wifi access points I can see. Might be more on lower floors (thick concrete between floors).

          On my iPhone 6S over wifi (not using their router btw) and speedtest I've had 489/395. Distance would be about 4-5 metres from couch to the Lynksys WRT 1900ACS with stock firmware (2.01?). The DD-WRT beta was terrible for wifi when I tried it.

          Wired with a MacBook Pro (2011) I think I've had ~700.

          Edit: There's no VM in the building so flats likely have Sky, since we have two LNB feeds per flat, and Sky Fibre.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

      I would also like to know how many of those who CAN get 1Gbps actually DO take that service.

      Extrapolating from Vermin Media data, I'd guess about 5%.

      1. ENS
        Go

        Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

        In the York Sky/TalkTalk/CF 1Gbps FTTH pilot, take-up was nearly 20% by the end of construction, and was trending >40%

        https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/10/talktalk-extend-940mbps-ftth-broadband-york-40000-premises.html

        https://www.cityfibre.com/news/york-city-case-study/

    3. J27

      Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

      It looks good compared to the US. There big monopolies basically refuse to upgrade connections unless absolutely forced to. If you compare to Europe and the richer Asian countries, yes. Britain isn't the worst, but if you consider population density there isn't much reason for less than 90% fibre penetration at this point in time.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Lies, damn lies and statistics!

      Compare those figures to pretty much any other country and they don't look good

      Actually they're pretty much in the middle as far as Europe goes. Not bad given that the top countries have a high proportional of apartment dwellers, where delivering fibre to the premises and distributing it internally is a lot cheaper & easier than delivering to individual houses.

      I live in rural France, I get 3Mb/s ADSL, but show up in the statistics as being able to get 20Mb/s because I'm covered by satellite connections, even though we know that no-one will see anything like 20Mb/s except at 4am when there's no contention.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can someone explain these numbers to me?

    From my understanding Virgin only go up to 350 and BT is up to 76 (FTTC) so where are all these 1Gbps connections?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      so where are all these 1Gbps connections?

      Primarily built in gigabit ethernet (or similar) in new build - sometimes houses, but particularly apartment blocks. Hyperoptic (see post above) are doing this, and I believe that SSE, GTC and others are offering this to developers. Bellway Homes seem to have a particular focus on getting gigabit broadband installed up front (although not necessarily in the majority of their new homes).

  4. Pen-y-gors

    Full fibre?

    I have 'full fibre' or FTTP as we techies call it.

    I pay BT residential for 300Mbps and, to be fair, that's what I get. Sometimes a tad more. Visible difference when chucking large files around the interwebs, but not so much day-to-day impact (I assume the bottleneck is upstream)

    We're just getting Fibre for our village shop from BT Business - 80Mbps. They offer 330 but at a silly price.

    Neither of them are actually offering 1Gbps.

    So is 'full fibre' the same as 1Gbps? If not, why ot? And how much will they charge?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Full fibre?

      So is 'full fibre' the same as 1Gbps? If not, why ot?

      If you've got a fibre optic connection, the fibre itself will easily take a gigabit feed. But it doesn't follow that BT or ISPs will have provided gigabit-for-consumers switches and backhaul, nor that the customer premises equipment is gigabit capable. You can argue that putting in gigabit all the way through would be future proofing, but since in population terms domestic users will not stretch even a 300 Mbps connection, why incur the often considerable cost and possibly technology risk of much more expensive equipment? On Vermin Media, they could roll out DOCSIS 3.1 and offer gigiabit speeds very soon - but that would require a D3.1 capable modem, which currently cost two or three times the cost of a cheap D3.0 modem. Commercially it doesn't make sense now. I saw some survey data the other day that indicated less than 3% of VM customers are on 300+ Mbps. Partly that's because not all local nodes are either capable, or have the bandwidth to permit this, partly its because the difference between 100 and 300+ Mbps is virtually invisible in day to day use for most of us. Once you've got to 100 Mbps, far more important are reliability and latency, and most ISPs and network operators have zero focus on those.

      And how much will they charge?

      As much as they possibly can. Looking at VM pricing, I'd speculate that a gigabit connection would be priced at around £75 a month, and possibly a £100 up front charge. BT won't be too far off that. Hyperoptic is a little bit cheaper, but that reflects that they're mostly building easy-to-serve small networks in new build situations - I suspect that Hyperoptic are still coining it in because they don't really have to market their product, where (for example) Virgin Media waste £300m a year on marketing, and VM probably pay out about half as much again on physical costs of churn.

    2. Tom 38

      Re: Full fibre?

      If you check out your fibre box, you'll see it probably has 4 access ports on it. BT will terminate the FTTH as a 1.2Gbps connection, which they then partition in to four, offering a max of 330Mbps for each connection.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Full fibre?

        BT will terminate the FTTH as a 1.2Gbps connection, which they then partition in to four, offering a max of 330Mbps for each connection.

        Not exactly.

        The fibre connection is GPON, which provides 2.4Gbps downstream and 1.2Gbps upstream. But a single fibre is split up to 32 ways with a passive splitter (a funky mirror). That is, up to 32 customers are sharing a single port on the Optical Line Termination device at the BT end.

        "send" and "receive" are simultaneous on this single fibre, since they use different wavelengths; but traffic to and from individual subscribers is timesliced.

        So it's not 330M per port; it's 2.4G total shared between up to 32 customers. *If* they all were using it simultaneously then you'd get 75M each - but that is extremely unlikely in practice. It would only be when 8 or more users are caning the link that you'd start to see degradation.

  5. Jim Willsher

    Last Friday my exchange (ESESS) got ADSL2+, so my download speeds increased from 8Mb to 12Mb. I feel truly privileged to be able to use such a fantastic technological improvement.

    Yes. 12Mb, Whoopie-doo.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Yes. 12Mb, Whoopie-doo."

      May I taunt you with the 231 Mbps my connection routinely provides?

      1. Jim Willsher

        You can, but although I work in IT I do actually enjoy living out in the sticks. i just have to get into the routine of downloading stuff overnight.

        Last week I was away with work, and my USA colleague showed me his speedtest.com results. On his fibre connection in Texas he usually get around 996Mb up and down. So that's a real world test.

        12Mb is still a 50% improvement for me though ;-)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Even with 100Mbps at home, I can still download a 10GB file more than 500 times faster than I can over my supposed 1Gbps connection at work. Even if I stay at work late ~ 11pm. And as I work at one of the top 10 universities in the UK, that should be a total f***ing embarrassment to the IT / network team.

          1. OnlyMortal

            Block youtube and facebook ;-) Similar problem here and I work for a large TLA IT company.

          2. Lee D Silver badge

            "I can still download a 10GB file more than 500 times faster than I can over my supposed 1Gbps connection at work."

            So you think they have no other users whatsoever?

            Likely their internal network is highly contended, 24 hours a day, in a university. Just because it says "1Gbps" doesn't mean that you have a direct 1Gbps feed to the Internet all to yourself.

            P.S. I run a school network on 100Mbps. It work absolutely fine for 600+ users every single day. The only complaints I get are people like yourself who say "Why does speedtest.com not say 100Mbps when I run it?". Answer: Because you're nowhere near the only person/service/computer sharing that.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Oh, they've got lots of users, I know they have. And they also have 30Gbps in total off the campus. I have 1Gbps to my desktop from the core segment, so that's the best I can hope for. And at 11pm, there's sod all other users in the building. If I run speed tests too and from various servers around the building, I get that 1Gbps consistently. No... this is something someone has set somewhere as a policy. Thou shalt not transfer files greater than 20MB, or something.

          3. defiler

            @AC

            Even if I stay at work late ~ 11pm. And as I work at one of the top 10 universities in the UK, that should be a total f***ing embarrassment to the IT / network team.

            Yeah. You'd think they'd be running backups and stuff offsite at that time of night. Bastards.

            Also, we used to head into university to download Quake mods en mass, at 11pm. We'd hammer the Janet connection as hard as we could. Besides which, nowadays we put per-device caps on the line to stop people being stupid and greedy...

      2. Tom 7

        Re Taunt

        May I taunt you with the 2.4Gbps fibre connection BT had in design a mere 27 years ago. We'd even tested 9.6Gb pieces successfully.. It would have been cheaper than copper for BT/Openreach to install and one fuck of a lot cheaper to maintain. And the tories flushed it all away.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Re Taunt

          May I taunt you with the 2.4Gbps fibre connection BT had in design a mere 27 years ago.

          No, sorry, I am untaunted. Whatever BT had in design but never saw daylight doesn't matter. And I'd suggest that even if we'd had thirty years of continuous socialist government we'd still be no nearer to seeing that as a product we could buy at a reasonable price now.

          1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: Re Taunt

            we'd had thirty years of continuous socialist government…

            Possibly, given the experience of nationalised businesses in the 1960s and 1970s.

            However, it is worth noting that the privatisation of BT and Cable & Wireless was a farce that got money for the treasury and made a few people very rich but did very little to encourage competition, rinse and repeat for most. I put it to you, sir, that successive British government cared more about their special interests than things like the public good or competition to which they were both playin lip service.

            Elsewhere in Europe privatisation was not even a twinkle in a minister's eys but deregulation of telecoms in France, Germany and elsewhere were dramatically more effective when they did come. And, once France decided that providing at least ADSL in all communes in the mid-2000s even France Telecom finally got round to it.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Re Taunt

              And, once France decided that providing at least ADSL in all communes in the mid-2000s even France Telecom finally got round to it.

              Oh yes? One of my colleagues gets 512kb/s ADSL, and only managed that because her husband works for FT and was able to get it installed on a line that officially wasn't suitable for service. France is no better than the UK, believe me (I live there).

          2. Tom 7

            Re: Re Taunt

            It could have been available within a year. We had tested devices using the same process that were far more complicated and the simple point to point fibre was a reality - we'd done TAT8 and PTAT already. The tories killed it in BT and once they'd done that it was impossible to do it outside - can you imagine trying to develop a product that BT would just say they owned whatever we did.

            BT could have had it working within a year - we had everything that was required.

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. sal II

    The devil is in the details

    What is not mentioned here is that the statistics are based on capability, not actual metrics.

    Meaning that everyone who has ADSL2 connection is considered to have 10Mbps+ connection, regardless of the actual speed delivered by the provider. Large swats of London can't get more than 5-7Mbps due to busy lines, can't even imagine how it is in the rural areas with aluminium cables and the like.

    Similarly everyone with FTTP is considered in the 1Gbps+ category, regardless of the actual ability of their provider to offer, let alone deliver such speeds.

    Re Hyperoptic - I used them 2 years ago with their 100Mbps offer and it was brilliant - symmetric (same upload speed) which is important to me (offisite backups) and never had issues with contention/throttling. They offer 1Gbps residential at an attractive, but IMHO it's an overkill and more of a barging rights/point with your mates, than actual need for it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The devil is in the details

      They offer 1Gbps residential at an attractive, but IMHO it's an overkill and more of a barging rights/point with your mates, than actual need for it.

      Too true. Other than when doing a multi thread download from a fast server, I reckon few residential users manage to max out more than about 45 Mbps, and even that's requiring multiple concurrent HD video streams.

      Another important point is the number of customers who are connecting over slow 2.4 GHz wifi that's often limited to an 802.11 standard that only allows 40 Mbps. And even over 5 GHz and an 802.11ac connection, a shortage of correctly configured, good quality MIMO capable routers and clients mean few people see much above 80-90 Mbps. This is particularly apparent in Virgin Media's user forums, where many people complain that they're paying for 100/200/350 Mbps, but that their wireless device doesn't ever measure speeds anything like that.

      If ISPs were properly regulated, they'd have to find out the customer's needs and sell them only what was appropriate, in the same way that lenders can be punished if they sell products customers don't need.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: The devil is in the details

        I reckon few residential users manage to max out more than about 45 Mbps

        Sounds about right. My provider keeps on trying to tempt me with 100, 200 or even 400 Mb/s but 50 Mb/s seems to suit me just fine. More impressed that they finally swapped the router so I now have 2.4G & 5G wifi and fewer problems with the VoIP that we all seem to have to have now.

      2. Cederic Silver badge

        Re: The devil is in the details

        Yeah, there's not really any point in me going for a one gig service, I only get around 700Mbps sustained through the wifi.

        Mind, getting 700Mbps upload to Youtube might make 4K movies viable at last.

  8. Peter Galbavy

    Every time the government find money to help the deployment or better broadband it basically ends up in BT's account and then does nothing. Until an audit shows it hasn't been spent, some of it is recovered and then the cycle starts all over again.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Price...

    10 is enough for most people really, what I'd like is just cheaper.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Price...

      what I'd like is just cheaper

      ZanzibarRastapopulous, you have chosen a dark path, one that leads ultimately to the eternal and deserved damnation that is Talk Talk.

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