Use the Wholesale checker to see if your exchange is listed for FTTP. (Not FTTP on demand). If it's not, like ours, then your might be waiting a while...
Depends what speeds your choosen ISP offer. Openreach install "1 Gbps capable" FTTP, what you get depends on your ISP and how much you're prepared to pay. B4RN, Gigaclear et al, install their own fibre and provide their ISP at a nominal 1 Gbps.
I also have a PS2 keyboard permanently plugged into my PC, and the keyboard sits, tucked behind the mini-tower for those odd occasions when the USB keyb and mouse are having a sulk.
Or maybe even 70 Down, and 20 Up ?. Unless of course you live in the cabinet :-)
OpenReach just recently ran in fibre (and termination boxes) to all the telephone poles in the street.
I'll likely stick with BT as it's been the best of all I've had. And I intend keeping a POTS line - still have one non cordless phone which should work regardless of mains.
Sky, TalkTalk, Vodaphone, Zen, apparently all do
Openreach FTTP covers 3 million UK premises, which will hit 4.5 million by March 2021 and then they expect to cover 20m by the "mid? to late-2020s" so there'll be a bigger market share fairly soon.
Owain
Yes - just checked back my emails.
Their site refused to accept we had FTTP.
When I emailed, their offer was significantly more expensive than BT, had a set-up fee, and longer lead time.
Although we don't actually use it, BT included a phone connection. Nice to be there for emergency use and spam calls.
At the time, Sky did not. Nor TalkTalk. Zen was more expensive. Plusnet didn't either - we used to have ADSL (appalling speed though it was) through them and would have just allowed it to be switched over. If they had done it.
On top of being less expensive, and would anyway have been our choice, BT also had a substantial cashback offer at the time.
It happens that Theo formulated :
So I would simply have to switch to VOIP on my FTTC connection?
Who are your ISP?
A cheap option is a BT Homehub 5a installed with OpenWRT:
It's actually a decent little router, and putting OpenWRT makes it a very flexible beast. Downside is it's not preconfigured for your ISP and you'll have to do a little setup. I think it'll do ADSL and VDSL so you can set it up before you switch over.
Wifi performance is respectable but not top of the range.
It appears VDSL speeds are slightly less than some other models. There are apparently some VDSL firmware tweaks that can be done to improve that. I don't know if that only affects the top end of the speed range (ie 76 dropping down to 70Mbps or whatever).
Theo
It was called ICUK but name has changed to CIX, I have been with them without problem for around 10 years so no real incentive to change.
A hum may not of itself be a problem but it is usually indicative of a ground loop, which can be.
carriers
Agreed hum is normally down to a damaged cable and some form of connection, damp, to ground. Mind you having said that the hum seems a bit louder than normal ATM but the ADSL2+ has a download sync speed of 6902 kbps and S/N ratio 7.2 dB which for 3 km of line is pretty damn good.
With a 7.2 dB S/N ratio I'm tempted to force a resync to see if it'll go over 7000 kbps which I never ever seen.
<later> Flipin' 'eck 7435 kbps 6.1 db S/N ratio using carriers up to 1.4 MHz. Be interersting to see if that stays stable overnight. Recent "Normal" was around 6500 kbps 3 or 4 dB S/N and 1.2 to 1.3 MHz, a few years ago it was nearer 5000 kbops...I think some one in Openreach has been fiddling, this last week there have been a few NO CARRIER resyncs on the line in the wee small hours. I can't imagine they are poking about in cabinets/joint posts at that time of night. Maybe they have been upgrading the line card firmware? NO CARRIER resyncs are very rare normally.
Not all ISPs do, however there is now good choice of those that do. Even when getting ours a while back there were probably half a dozen that did then.
Sometimes it takes a while for the openreach databases that indicate what services are available to be updated and indicate that FTTP is live
- so you may find with new installs that many can't actually identify a service they could provide for.
That's usually the main driver for Openreach to in install FTTP - basically when (like here) the cabinet network is unable to support FTTC at the location)
You would expect premium tier ISPs to be more expensive than mass market operators like BT, this is hardly news.
Each to their own. You would have to pay me to accept broadband from BT!
That's not always the case. If the FTTP was an openreach install, then yes any ISP that can purchase connectivity from openreach can provide the service.
There are a number of fibre installers other than openreach though, and some will only deal with a preferred ISP. Some also sell to a range of ISPs.
For example I have one customer in Basildon that is on a symmetric
100/100 fibre service provided by a local area fibre installer that only covers a few towns in Essex. However the customer's ISP is TalkTalk business (who to be fair seem massively more competent then the retail out). Virgin, EE, Gigaclear, and others all install their own fibre as well.
True - but Openreach did update their database fairly quickly.
Even when I contacted some of the ISPs, they either didn't understand, or their internal systems were not checking the Openreach database, or something.
Our cabinet was showing that some properties it supplied had pretty good broadband. But others, sometimes literally the house next door, had appalling speeds (like us). Openreach decided to install FTTP capability for every house. Since when we have seen them installing FTTP for, I'd guess, at least half the properties we can see from the road outside our house.
I actually got a map, checked the broadband claimed for every property, and marked them all up. There was no sense to it at all. Especially as all the ducting is in tiptop condition, properly installed, and with good access.
Looking back, it appears that someone made a few mistakes either with the original installs, or how they recorded the information.
The people who did the work were excellent. Friendly. Worked hard and long hours. Came from up to several hundred miles away as well as some locals.
Afraid the few ISPs which at the time would offer FTTP were either much more expensive or unimpressive outfits. A&A, for example, were more expensive and had a download cap.
The companies that came out well were Openreach (once they made their decision to go ahead), BT, and Plusnet. Our annual renewal with Plusnet had only just been done when the FTTC option appeared. Despite their T&C saying we were stuck with them, Plusnet did agree it would be unfair and agreed a refund. They were very pleasant to deal with.
It seems to be a regional thing, but there was actually quite a good map like that for our area:
But often, these things are only as good as the data.
It could also be that not al properties were supplied from the same cabinet.
Yup, ours were good. The install of the actual fibre along the street seemed to be mostly the work of one chap working for KMCO, on his own. He climbed each pole in turn, pulled along and fixed the next segment of wire, and then every few poles installed a junction box ready for the drops to the properties. He came knocking on my door to ask if he could park on our drive and climb the pole buried in the hedge in the garden.
You often get what you pay for in service though. Of the more budget providers, Plusnet tend to be somewhat better in that respect than the big four.
I already had and account with IDNet so it was much easier to go with them so I kept my static IP etc. They were initially slightly more expensive than BT for the 160/30 service, and noticeable so for the
330/50 - however their prices fell to about the same after a few months.Plusnet did participate in a FTTP trial, but then decided not to offer it as a service for some reason.
Yup they are usually not too bad, although not as good as they once were with 24/7 support etc.
That is pretty much what I did - using OpenStreetmap (or something) and checking status for each property!
I think it was actually persuasive - made it really obvious where neighbours had ultrafast and "might mange 6 Mbps if you are really lucky".
Definitely the one cabinet. Still the one cabinet feeds all of us.
I can see that there might be reasons but in the nearly-a-year we have had no significant issues. The very occasional few seconds of dropping out. And, though better than they used to be, I still dislike their routers.
That was something of a surprise - I think I found out they had withdrawn between news we were getting FTTP and it actually arriving.
Thinking about it, I did have to send email to chief exec's office (or whatever) because their drone-level did not have the authority. But, as I said, once we explained, they were excellent.
'Tis funny how experiences vary enormously. But I would never, ever, ever, have gone with TalkTalk. Especially now Play-DiDoh Harding has re-demonstrated her utter ineptness for, well, everything.
Of the bundled ones, their routers are better than some IME. Having said that, you don't necessarily have to use the bundled router.
Although that is one area when the quality of support staff becomes more apparent. If you phone them with a technical question using a third party router, and a computer that is not a windows PC, many just refuse to even engage in conversation!
I recall a while back trying to to get VPN remote access to an office setup for someone. In the end I concluded that their sky router was blocking all VPN traffic. Then we had the fun of swapping the router since they will not disclose the account login details that they preload into the router before supplying it. (fortunately it leaks them onto the ethernet on power up, so if you are ready and waiting with wireshark you can grab em!)
Yeah, I remember in the very early days of the talktalk "free" broadband deal, someone had got stuck with completely non working broadband, and could not get them to fix it. I had already checked, and the router was not getting DSL synch, so it was obviously a physical line fault, yet she spent hours on the phone to them (at premium rate) trying to get them to fix it. It was always the same story, "Have you re-installed your OS", or go away, do this and then phone back. Next call she would get someone different, "oh, we don't support Macs"...
There was just not a path through the tech support scripts that would accept "just ignore the effing computer, concentrate on why the router can't get DSL sync, and send openreach out to fix it!" In the end she got Mr Dunstone's direct email from somewhere, and pointed out she had so far spent £700 on their premium rate line not getting anything fixed and she wanted out of the 18 month contract, plus a refund! (she got out and got about £500 back). Ported to plusnet, where obviously it still did not synch, and they had an engineer out in a few days who fixed a problem with the line before it entered the building and it all started working.
Indeed the above put me off fairly permanently.
The client who ended up on their business service kind of got there by a roundabout route, first by going to a specialist ISP that did EFM services, when that was the only (really really expensive - like £360/month for 30/30) way to get anything useful in the area). IIRC that was provided by Gamma (a fairly decent B2B ISP). Then a couple of years later they had the option of a deal to go to 100/100 fibre at about £180/month - but they did not mention on the ISP actually doing the connectivity would be talktalk). However to be fair its been rock solid reliable, and the actual infrastructure is installed and managed by another outfit that specialise in B2B fibre.
er stupid question. Was the POTS working? If not it's far easier to report that fault and get it fixed which invariably fixes the DSL than try and report a DSL fault.
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