OT: my broadband

[Bill Wright]

Fat lot of good it will do.

Bill

[Martin Brown]

Out of curiosity what speed *do* you get on a fixed line ADSL? (with or without the bell wire hack)

I have carefully tweaked mine up to ~5Mbps at the range limit ~3.5km from the exchange and on the wrong side of the beck. It isn't quite stable but I would rather have the speed and the odd reboot than a rock solid ~3Mbps that cannot support HDTV streaming.

Three round here can support >5Mbps but data charges sting a bit.

We are lucky - a neighbouring village has aluminium phone wiring and some of them barely get 256kbps on ADSL "broadband".

Up in North Yorkshire we have a superfast broadband initiative that spends its time giving flashy but unconvincing powerpoint presentations to councillors and pretending they are doing "good work" whilst merely haemorrhaging taxpayers money to BT cherry picking the easy bits.

[ARW]

You do not live in Doncaster and Rosie Winterton is not your MP so why send a letter to that newspaper?

[Dave Liquorice]

That's pretty much the best I can get at about the same distance. Looking at various speed/distance graphs on the 'net that's about as good as it'll get.

No reliable 3G signal of any sort around here. Even 2G to be useable is upstairs, correct side of the house, by a window.

A mile and bit down the road into the village and further from the exchange it's a similar story.

The whole BDUK "tendering" process stinks, nothing you can make stick but with only two bidders one of which gave up leaving just one (BT, what a surprise) questions ought to have been asked.

BT are only interested in FTTC, that works reasonably well in built up areas but get more than a km or so from the cabinet and you are down to ADSL2+ speeds. And all technologies are more or less the same from aboout 3 km out. Plot 1.4 km circles around the cabinets on a rural area and it's pathetic:

As for funding from The Rural Community Broadband Fund, many small community groups are very reluctant to progress their palns as BT aren't letting on what they are going to do in any given area.

[Tim Streater]

Why?

[Martin Brown]

Actually round here it looks like they are going to be malevolent and target FTTC against those village that have invested heavily in experimental and expensive DIY microwave link and tranceivers.

[Martin Brown]

The older cables in rural areas are a pretty severe constraint on signal quality. They have been DACsing grannies out here since about the mid

90's to avoid putting in any new real copper circuits.

If you are on the aluminium wires they don't admit to having then you haven't a hope in hell as the old joints rectify the signals.

It reached a stage last year where they were breaking one existing subscribers connection for every new ADSL they installed. They had to truck in BT engineers from Lancashire for a blitz to get things back to some sort of normal last summer. Some friends were off for a month. (ISTR you get some puny compensation after two weeks)

[Tim Streater]

Sorry, I suppose what I meant was, why would fibre slow down after a km or so, but now having had my coffee and with more careful re-reading of Dave's post, I realise that's not what he meant.

Still, here we are some 2.5km from the exchange and a smidge over 6Mbps with 9db of noise margin. I still think that being careful with the house wiring (i.e. as little as possible and no bell wire) helps a lot.

[Broadback]

It's not only BT that play silly b*ggers. Cable stops just down the road, look at my post code and it tells me it is available, it is not. Virgin, or whoever it is called now, no intention of extending their cabling even though there have been two housing developments beyond me over the year. I can only get just over 3Mbps here, no chance of any improvement.

[Mike Barnes]

Bill Wright :

I feel sorry for people who live close to large towns or cities and can't get decent broadband. But I have less sympathy with those who live way out in the sticks. ISTM that poor communications comes with the territory (literally).

[Adrian]

IKWYM, but it doesn't _need_ to be _this_ big a difference.

We're in the sticks. We get about 1.5-2mbit ADSL. We're lucky, compared to many in the village.

BUT - that's largely because our exchange is still just about steam- powered. They're ripping out more advanced kit from other exchanges, to upgrade it yet further.

How about letting some of that ripple down a bit? There is a council project to improve broadband speeds - yet our exchange hasn't even got a whiff of an initial date to do anything.

Seems to me that a bit of priority adjustment wouldn't hurt. It can't be THAT hard to put a couple of guys onto moving some of the kit that's coming out of urban exchanges, instead of presumably skipping it.

[Adrian]

Should add... It's the same with mobile. We have no signal. At all. On ANY network. Where we can get a signal, the data is GPRS. And that's in the nearest town - a fairly big-name tourist attraction on the edge of a national park.

Meanwhile, we get battered for ads for 4G.

[Martin Brown]

The point is that the government have set a completely unreasonable standard and tilted the playing field to the point where only BT need bother to apply for doing any of the work.

The base level for national coverage should be a BRAS of 4Mbps - enough to stream one channel of HDTV which is what most consumers seem to want. However, there are plenty of villages where even streaming radio is out of the question and some so bad that bonded ISDN would be faster!

It will soon be the case that the haves on Infinity will have enough bandwidth to stream 20 HDTV movies simultaneously whilst the have nots are lucky if they can get some grossly indulgent Flashy corporate websites to load at all without timeouts and impossible delays.

There may not be much point if the rural wiring is screwed to blazes as much of it has been by decades of underinvestment. There is now a donut of have nots around most towns that have FTTC installed. It is only worthwhile for BT cherrypicking the right parts of town.

They set the standard at 2Mbps so that they would not have to do anything that might improve the service to the difficult to reach. It would make a lot more sense to use some of the grants to subsidise directed 3G infrastructure along small village ribbon developments.

[Mike Barnes]

Broadback :

Same here - the cable stops only 15 metres from my frontage. Cable service is "available in our postcode" so they keep inviting me to sign up, then cancelling the order when I do so.

Fortunately I get 19 Mbps with ADSL.

[Brian Gaff]

Do these web sites take into account where the helpdesk is based and the abilities of said persons to make themselves understood to a British standard Englishman or woman I wonder. It might also be of help if said customer service rep was able to think rather than follow a script that contains all the steps you already tried. Brian

[Artic]

Bill Wright scribbled...

What part of "not enough customers to make it finacially viable" do you have problems with?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oddly enough the people who cant get decent broadband are simply those who live a long way from the exchange.

That might mean they are miles from anywhere, or simply that they are miles from the local exchange. There are people on the outskirts of MAJOR towns who are in exactly that position in suburbia.

ALL FTTC is is an 'exchange in a cabinet'; that is supposed to be closer to you.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If they gave me way leave to dig up the farmland and shove a fibre optic cable to the exchange and I gave BT wayleave to stick a green cabinet in my garden, which there is bags of room for, then about 50 people with crap broadband could get pretty damned good broadband.

[John Rumm]

While not an ideal solution in any sense, one way to mitigate a little is to get a pair of ADSL connections and stick a load balancing router on them. It won't improve streaming ability, but it makes overall throughput for a household better.

[The Other Mike]

The diversion of resources to rural broadband is already slowing down the rollout of superfast broadband in urban areas.