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.
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 …
COMMENTS
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Monday 30th April 2018 14:18 GMT AndrueC
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.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 09:11 GMT 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!
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 21:38 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:04 GMT 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'.
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:53 GMT 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
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 07:48 GMT 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 :-)
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Monday 30th April 2018 15:06 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 8th May 2018 08:44 GMT ENS
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/
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Monday 30th April 2018 20:10 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 20:44 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:34 GMT 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).
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:24 GMT 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?
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:56 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 07:59 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:58 GMT 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 ;-)
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Monday 30th April 2018 14:32 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 15:29 GMT Lee D
"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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 17:15 GMT 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.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 08:21 GMT 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...
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Monday 30th April 2018 15:50 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 16:03 GMT Charlie Clark
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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 20:49 GMT 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).
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 08:53 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 13:55 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 14:06 GMT 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.
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Monday 30th April 2018 16:06 GMT Charlie Clark
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.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 15:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Price...
AC because Talktalk customer
I was a Tiscali customer originally and when Talktalk took over the price remained the same for 10+years making the fairly average 5-8 Mbs i was getting acceptable. So I kept procrastinating a move to a better ISP, even after the debacle of being offered compensation for the data breach which after reading the terms would have actually cost me money or been useless.
Since 2017 the basic ADSL speed has dropped to 2.1Mbs and the cost was raised to be the same as Fibre.
After receiving yet another new microfilter and having to explain to tech support that I've already been through their tests IBit the bullet last month and upgrading to a different ISP and full fibre "guaranteeing" a ~34Mbs service.
Lets see how it goes.
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Monday 30th April 2018 16:13 GMT GrumpenKraut
Re: Price...
> 10 is enough for most people really, ...
I had 10/1 before and thought of it as OK-ish (though upstream sucked a bit). Now I have 50/10 and it's a different world. I'd HATE to go back.
Still, I'd never state that 50 or even 100 is enough "for most people". Even if it is enough for many, there are people who can use pretty much any bandwidth they can get. If you cannot figure out what a use case for 1 GB would be, just think "company".
Cheers, GrumpenKraut, who has a use case for "silly amounts of beer".
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 06:54 GMT TonyJ
Re: Price...
"...I had 10/1 before and thought of it as OK-ish (though upstream sucked a bit). Now I have 50/10 and it's a different world. I'd HATE to go back..."
Same here - I went from 512kbps to 1Mbps and eventually all the way up to 3.8Mbps ADSL.
Then FTTC arrived and I jumped to around 69Mbps. In a house that streams a lot of TV (Netflix etc) as well as gaming consoles and streamed music, all concurrently, it works a treat and I'd shudder at the idea of going back, not to mention it'd kill the entertainment for the family.
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Tuesday 8th May 2018 10:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Price...
> 640K is enough for most people, right?
It was in 1980, and right now 10mbps is enough for most people. I'm not saying it will be forever, but the push to high speed is ignoring reliability and the simple need that most people have for it.
30 quid a month is a lot of money, I think some people just don't appreciate that it's over a grand every three years.
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Monday 30th April 2018 15:00 GMT adam payne
That figure has been falling steadily from 1.6 million (6 per cent) in May 2016 to 1.1 million (4 per cent) a year later and downwards to 925,000 (3 per cent) as of the latest data captured in January 2018.
"Nevertheless, there are still too many people in the UK who cannot get a decent broadband connection," the regulator said (PDF).
You can make stats say anything.
I get 9Mbps. It's so speedy my other half streams video while i'm trying to shoot things online and kills my gaming experience.
Thankfully fibre has finally come to my part of town. Thanks BT / Openreach it's only taken you four years to do this part of the town.
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Monday 30th April 2018 19:10 GMT Pascal Monett
You're obviously not watching TV on the same bandwidth.
I've had an SFR line at almost 11Mbps for the past decade. No complaints on downloading or gaming, but as soon as TV was on, everything was hopeless. Not only did TV not work perfectly (image freezing for a second now and then), but downloads were hobbled and gaming was a nuisance.
it was such a nuisance that I reinstated our satellite dishes so I could keep my bandwidth for gaming.
Best idea I've ever had.
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Monday 30th April 2018 20:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
I've had an SFR line at almost 11Mbps for the past decade. No complaints on downloading or gaming, but as soon as TV was on, everything was hopeless. Not only did TV not work perfectly (image freezing for a second now and then), but downloads were hobbled and gaming was a nuisance.
No surprise there. I tried to get an SFR DSL line. After 2 months of excuses, promises to ring me back that never materialized, they finally cancelled the order because my line wasn't "suitable".
I called in at the Orange shop the next morning, and less than 8 hours later I had 2Mbit/s DSL, lately increased to 4Mbit/s.
SFR used to be good, but now it is the French TalkTalk. I've just cancelled my mobile phone from them as well, constant price increases for no additional services.
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Monday 30th April 2018 21:52 GMT Lorribot
Stop using Superfast
We need to stop counting connections by the type of connection or the misleading names the retailers give them.
Superfast is a definitive tern, how evre I have a superfast connection (FTTC) and is neither super or fast.
It is faster (a comparitive term) than standard ADSL but is not superfast (a definitve term).
Standard (ADSL 2+) has a top speed of 20Mb/s so I would expect any "Superfast" connection to be in excess of that, say atleast 35-70Mb/s.
My own faster connetion is 13Mb/s down and 500kb/s up and has some big latency numbers,on standard i was 2Mb/s.
If you bought a superfast Porsche and got it home and found it only went as as fast as a standard Fiesta you would onto trading standards pretty quick, and yet, we all accept this misuse of words to sell the snake oil that is broadband in the UK.
Broadband retailers should only be able to charge for the speed they supply not the technology used to deliver it, nor the or the marketing rubbish they use to peddle it.
We may then actual see Openreach et al get off their sorry arses and start rolling out new green cabinets so people can get decent speeds as advertised.
Why do the new houseing estates being built not have at least new FTTC cabinets in the middle or evenn FTTP. Why is not a planning regulation? Why people on new estates waiting for spare capacity at exchenges a year after the houses have been built.
This is the moronic reality that governmant and planning department allow to continue and is within their remit to fix.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 09:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Too much "mines bigger than yours"
Most people will get by just fine with 10-20Mbps to the home.
More than 70-100Mbps is a waste for "normal" residential use. Indeed this should be 10Mbps most of the time, not just at 2am when the other 50 houses have stopped sharing it.
ergo, we should be raising the baseline availability to 10mbps for all, rather than raising the bar to datacentre capacity fiber to the home for the few.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 10:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Lies damn lies and statistics. 'coverage' is as ever a figment of OFCOMs imagination. An exchange might have been upgraded to fibre years ago but almost certainly not all its cabinets will be, Openreach will have absolutely no plans for upgrades. The standard response on the fibre checker is that it expects 'the customer' to explore funding options. Fibre cabinets might be full with no possibility of Openreach increasing capacity, again OFCOM believes there is coverage and service to every property then it is obvious that is not the case.
Openreach has ducts full of what must be by now billions of pounds worth of copper. Plus if your road is 'served' by Virgin, then Openreach will often choose to not provide any fibre infrastructure and then you are locked into a monopoly provider.
Until fibre coverage is genuinely universal, from infrastructure from Openreach where a selection of ISP's can provide a service to an end customer then there is no competition, there is no service and there is price fixing.
All promoted by those cretins at OFCOM.
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 10:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
We get about 50mb in Preston. I'm actually moving to IdNet shortly to see how that compares to Plusnet and if it's worth paying for.
The annoying part is my parents live miles from civilisation and theyre getting better broadband than me shortly (about 300mb I think).
I'd love to get FTTP, but I can't justify the cost :(
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Tuesday 1st May 2018 11:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
10Mbps that's blistering speed!
....to me anyway. Unable to achieve 5Mb/s.
I used to be able to get 8Mb/s. However, year on year since the growing spread of broadband it has slowed and slowed, lines that once would easily get 5Mb/s on a bad day now fail to muster even 4Mb/s on a good day. And upload speeds, well now they're non-existent.
Also was promised FTTP by the end of last year and despite "plans moving forward" and that being reflected in the Openreach fibre checker. Now, they've missed that deadline and apparently doing nothing. This is despite allegedly getting a grant in the local area to do so! So where the fuck has that money gone? As I see it, someone's bloody pocketed it (or they spent it supplying one person with Gigabit)
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Wednesday 2nd May 2018 13:42 GMT ntevanza
Lessons from Germany
Just switched from 16/2.5 (measured 14/2.5 for years, but had fallen to 7/1) to 50/10 (measured 70/20).
To repeat, I switched from 7Mbps to 70Mbps down, measured. *I generally can't tell the difference*. That's because I had impeccable latency before, sitting, as I am, on a global hub.
My real and not very original point is that downlink speeds don't mean a cold damn. Be careful what you wish for. Goodheart's Law says that if you fetishize downlink speeds, or allow politicians to do so, you will end up with a shit service. Our job as techies is to encourage enlightened debate about the real requirement here.