OT: fast fibre for West Sussex

Hah! Stirling Council have set up their firewall so you can't read stuff on their own blogs from inside their own network!

Owain

The announcement stated that businesses, schools and hospitals would be getting full fibre broadband.

And they are literally the only people that need it. Fibre to the Cabinet is an excellent solution for 99.999% of the population - but of course the politicians don't understand it and the media won't understand it.

we had a company offer FTH throughout the village. Problem was that they wanted £90 per month rental. I can't see private individuals wanting to pay that.

Rather a Luddite attitude. Like no-one will ever need more than 640k of memory, or a faster connection than ISDN, which were prevailing notions a couple or three decades ago. New uses of bandwidth will arise when they are possible.

Apart from which, as VDSL penetration increases we are going to see more and more crosstalk.

And who'd painstakingly run copper pairs instead of fibre to every house if we didn't already have them?

Is that 99.999% of the population that have access to FTTC?

Andrew formulated on Thursday :

Virgin are in the process of putting fibre into our village and several others around here. They provioned an access point at every house, just at the front garden boundary. It has caused absolute chaos on the roads and has been going on for 6 months so far. From what I have seen, take up has been very limited, nothing like enough to pay for the cost of the work done. Our road was one of the first to be completed, but we are also close to the local exchange, so ADSL is quite fast anyway and a fraction of the monthly cost of fibre - so we at least, see no reason to upgrade.

I met someone who lives in an isolated house (although not on your scale) who said he'd be very happy with FTTC - so long as the cabinet was in his utility room :)

Well there is FTTN (-node) where there's a little box on the telephone pole (or wherever) that connects to the fibre (I assume the fibre is slung from the poles) if he's too far from the cabinet.

Virgin don't do FTTH AFAIK. Its done using the coax to a cable modem still.

They do in areas covered by "project lightning" several villages round here have/are being covered by it, they were all outside the original cable company roll-out, if they'd do it a year before BT finally gave us FTTC I might have taken them uo on it, but as they arrived a year after I'd got FTTC I'm not that interested.

Still uses DOCSIS, but RFoG instead of coax (radio frequency over glass).

I'm sure people pay more than that with the TV bundles for movies and sport . They are likely paying £30 a month for their smartphone too. I don;t believe there are many provate individuals in the county, most live with other people, friends of mine that rent flats in a hourse pay £2

The same kind of thing was said about ADSL replacing dial-up access some years ago. When the bandwidth becomes available, people will find uses for it.

I wonder how well they'll maintain it?

This street had Virgin cable early on. Very poorly maintained. Door missing from one of their cabinets nearby - an eyesore. Probably an irate customer trying to find out what's happened to his feed.

But most of the problems seem to be with the 'other end' not being able to keep up - rather than your local end.

I would happily pay that and more!

There's not much in the cabinets, a patch panel with the fibres from the head end, and empty tubes to each house ready to be blown, nothing powered.

The worst virgin coax cab round here in on the corner of Toolstation car-park, twice it's been reversed into and left laying on the ground

FTTC is a good option from the suppliers point of view, since it reuses existing assets. Given a clean slate it would not be a good place to start.

You only need to see the rate in growth in domestic uses for broadband in just the last five years to see that VDSL and ancient copper circuits is rapidly going to run out of puff.

That would be a sensible compromise where we are - about 3km from the nearest cabinet, but only 15 properties (including several business users) needing connection. So a whole street cabinet might be overkill.