Internety thingummies, question.

Might be fibre to the cabinet (FTTC). That's what we have, gives 35Mbps or so. Fibre from the exchange to the box I can see down the road, and the old copper connection from the box to the house.

When we had it done, a BT Openreach girlie had to come over and install a new modem. But perhaps these days the modem is built into the router.

Correct, FTTC is 'Fibre to the *cabinet*', it still runs over the normal telephone wire pair to the house.

See above, FTTC uses the existing pair, you just plug it into a VDSL router as opposed to an ADSL router (some routers do both).

Start simple and work up. I.e. first get a wired connection to the router running properly and fast (should be much faster than before now he has FTTC). Next try the new router's WiFi with nothing else extra, check where coverage is OK, or not. Then if needed add the Homeplug thingies.

BT is fibre to the nearest (green) box in the street. Whereas before it may have been wire to the exchange which for many people would have been Km long and which were possible installed 50+ years ago its now fibre to the nearest box with only the bit between the box and house being wire.

I'd probably take the view that the IP is not providing the service they contracted to provide, and if they wanted ongoing payment they would need to do so.

NT

That's correct.

They use the existing phone line. Its only fibre to the street cab. Its copper thereafter.

They are crap when more than two are on the network

Because it's only fibre to the cabinet, then twisted pair to the house.

Virgin usually use coax (plus twisted pair for phone) to the house, but it sounds like your area may be covered by Virgin's Project Lightning which *is* fibre all the way to the house.

If you have any extensions, it is important to use a filtered faceplate. If you don't performance will be adversely affected by reflections from the TAP connections.

Homeplugs may work OK, but they are not known for being reliable.

A completely different matter.

How much extra is that costing him? 'Normal' ADSL should be OK unless he lives a long way from the exchange.

...which someone will dig up with a hoe or just a kick. They don't even bother to secure their roadside cabinets.

Because it's FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) as others have noted.

Homeplugs are regarded as the Spawn of the Devil by some, due to the radio interference.

I think BT recently offered me an 'upgrade' to a higher speed. For more money, of course. But the last one I had which doubled the download speed made zero difference (that I could see) in practice. Most things seem to have 'the other end' as the bottleneck.

BT (specifically Openreach) do need to do this - but they've already done it. Once there's a cable into the house, they can connect it at the cabinet to FTTC (VDSL), back at the exchange for plain broadband (ADSL), or just connect it to the exchange for a phone line with no broadband. If you change from one to the other, they will change the relevant connections at the exchange and/or cabinet with no need to visit the house. Now if you order FTTP, that's a different matter as you'll need a different type of cable (fibre rather than copper) and Openreach will need to visit the house. Or if you need a line where there isn't one already (a new house, or a second line), they'll need to visit to install it. Since Virgin are setting up a new service and don't have lines into anyone's house, they'll always need to visit - the first time. But if you then get a different service from Virgin they probably won't need to visit to make the change.

Mike

homeplugs are the work of the devil ..........

I suspect I'm only paying for 37.5 or whatever it is. That's plenty for now. Specially considering that 20 years ago, that was pretty much teh fastest international circuit you could get.

It's DIGITAL you didn't really expect it to work properly did you ? .....

The Natural Philosopher explained on 28/07/2018 :

They work just fine for me, when I am out of range of my wifi. So I am puzzled as to why his pair of Homeplugs didn't work, didn't even show up on his devices at all.

Andy Burns wrote on 28/07/2018 :

Could be, they covered the entire village with it, not long ago.