OT Fibre connection

Dave Plowman (News · 2022-06-08T13:37:45+00:00

Out of interest. I have FTTC. Only one person (me) using it. Tests say itis at full speed - approx 80/20 mbps.Would I get any real life improvement with full fibre? Considering theywill likely install it free in the near future, but restrict the possiblespeed to what I have now - or more likely worse.

Jun 08, 2022 Last reply: 4 years ago 45 Replies

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Martin Brown 4 years ago

I get pretty close to my claimed maximum speed on the 100M guaranteed (150M usually available) except at the busiest times of day.

When I had the 500M service on trial I only got to about 300M but it is rather hard to find servers that can deliver bulk data fast enough to keep up so I'm not sure I wasn't seeing a limitation imposed by server end throttling back rather than my connection bandwidth.

It didn't seem worth paying extra for the 500M service when it only doubled the nominal 100M throughput at a few very fast sites. The factor of 30x improvement was more than enough for me.

Main thing that has changed for me is that ping times are now down from

40-60ms interleaved ASDL2+ to <10ms and likewise with DNS lookups.

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John Rumm 4 years ago

Try torrenting a large file - then you are not limited by peer bandwidth in the same way.

The games platforms like Steam also seem quite good at sending stuff at a "fire hose" rates as well...

In the past I would get a new game on half a dozen DVDs, spend a few hours letting the machine digest all that, then the run the game. It would then announce it needed to do an update and wanted to download

67GB! Which would then take about a fortnight! (allowing for the fact I would need to throttle it a bit to allow other things to still work). Now with FTTP, it can quaff that kind of download in 30 mins. So it is quicker to buy as a download rather than physical media since it will install faster.

Well that is advertising for you. :-)

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Andrew 4 years ago

If the cable is in any way 'recent' (1970's oneards) then it will be SWA armour protected and gel filled. The weak link is where tappings are made to service each property from the multi-core under- verge main cable.

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Martin Brown 4 years ago

It is recent in the sense of being post war. I'd guess 1950's cable from the state of the bit they dug up in front of my house. The junction policeman's helmet was half full of water and sounded like maracas when the guy shook it. Amazing really that anything worked at all.

The reason why they dug it up was that most houses further down the village had noisy lines and virtually no internet speed at all <256k.

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John Walliker 4 years ago

Would that have been paper insulated or the new-fangled PVC? I can remember seeing GPO people working on paper insulated lead sheathed underground cables maybe around 1965 to 1970. When they finished work the enclosures were sealed by sweating solder onto the ends. Around the same time there were plastic joint enclosures where they fused aluminium foil onto the pvc cable sheath with a big blowtorch and then resin bonded onto the aluminium.

John

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Dave Plowman (News 4 years ago

I'm talking about downloading a file etc from a site. My browser shows the actual download speed.

A pure test shows mine always near close to the claimed speed.

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