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back to article BT declares ceasefire in broadband speed wars

BT is aiming to push access speed down the broadband agenda as the copper wires which carry data into homes swiftly approach their technological limits. The firm, which announced record profits last month, is maintaining its party line on fibre to the home, that it is a "UK PLC issue", rather than a matter for the national …

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  1. Duncan Robertson

    I feel the need.....

    Gents/Ladies,

    I live in rural North East Scotland and when I tried to get ADSL, BT didn't even know my exchange existed. I was sorely tempted to take a photo and send it into them, the postage to Mumbai would have been more expensive than BT Broadband though..... However, after much badgering, I now have a 6-7 Mbit/s connection seeing as hardly anyone else in the village has ADSL and I'm 150m away from the exchange. I'm the only nerd in the village!

    Up here in the sticks, BT have had a tendency to use Aluminium and install DACS in pretty damn near all lines. DACS made even 56k modems struggle - how long ago was that? My in-laws, who live just a hop skip and a jump away, firstly struggled to get DSL due to the DACS and now can only get 1.5 Mbit/s after it was removed. The cause? Mmmmm, could it be the Aluminium?

    I understand that FTTH would be extremely expensive, however so is the 21CN. I mean, do we not have to have the infrastructure in place to support all these fantastic new services through BT's shiny new boxes, before the content can BE delivered.

    The "new" BT Home Hub boxes are a bit of a piece of sh*t anyway. For starters, they don't support anything stronger than WEP. Whilst that might be fine for me up here in my rural Highland paradise, that's not exactly the war-driving capital of the universe, down in central Westminster might be just a bit different.... I sure as hell wouldn't want anything less than WPA2 with a long length non-dictionary based passphrase. Paranoid, yes. Sensible, yes. However, I once sat in a mate's flat with my laptop in Edinburgh and it picked up a wireless network. "Oooh, might as well grab some scuzz whilst we're here". Clickety-click, the prick had only left the default admin password on the router and NO encryption enabled. Sorry if you are reading this mate, I doubt it, but it was for your benefit in the long run I swear..... I sent a message ("Tut, tut, tut! Should have at least gone with WEP") to his PC using the NETBIOS name, enabled the default encryption and changed the admin router password. Bad, I know! However, it just shows that with a little knowledge, I could have hijacked his machine and made it a proxy for whatever I liked (<- insert dodgy illegal practice here) AND got away with it.

    Anyway, I digress and rant away. What I would like to see is all the ISP's and Telco's getting together and investing in the UK data infrastructure. With all this talk of convergence and data services, should they not be working collaboratively to enhance the position of the UK on the stage of the connected global economy? If the UK is going to outsource all the manufacturing, service and resource industries to countries like India and China, becoming a nation where innovation and ideas are our major export, then surely we need to concrete our position at the top of the digital food chain!

    Jesus I think I sounded like McSherry there <- those who know me, know what I mean!

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  2. Derek Foley

    Contention ratio

    Users should be more bothered about bottlenecks and contention ratios based on them "sharing" such a supposed great speed with 50 other people, which is no wonder sometimes web access seems like a 56k modem at peak times.

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  3. Derek Foley

    better upstream

    One major issue is the poor ratio of upstream for ADSL. The ISPs and telcos are worried about improving upstream capabilities for fear of killing the leased line market, which can spend up to £16k a year on 2mb both ways (up and down) (I'm sure this is the wrong figure now - this was the cost a couple of years back)

    I'm sure a lot of businesses are using ADSL instead because of the cost saving, but for us consumers, we really are more demanding in terms of data.

    Video phones would be the obvious killer app, or remote cctv monitoring, which is something I've tried, imagine having a decent webcam chat with a relative via your pc or console, without rubbish codecs designed for 56k modems.

    With 25k (which remember is approx 2.5k a second upstream) these things are just a dream without a decent upstream connection, and of course SDSL if you can get it is still out of reach cost wise for consumers.

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  4. Derek Foley

    Contention ratio

    Users should be more bothered about bottlenecks and contention ratios based on them "sharing" such a supposed great speed with 50 other people, which is no wonder sometimes web access seems like a 56k modem at peak times.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fixed ratios...

    ..aren't applicable any more with BT, they scrapped the contention ratio a long time back now, in favour of a guaranteed minimum speed. With the products aimed at office users having traffic priority at congested times.

    Most home users aren't bothered about upstream, the headline download speeds are more attractive to them - You can't have faster upstream without lowering the downstream (Max up for ADSLv1 is 1Mbit/s AFAIK).

    If users want un-contended, they should be prepared to pay for it, with high-end routing equipment to run a decent service costing more than your average users house, someone has to pay for it.

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  6. Mal Franks

    Would settle for getting 1Mbit/sec of an evening recently

    There seems to be quite few BT broadband users finding it very slow of an evening all of a sudden (as the BT support newsgroups will testify) including myself.

    During the day I get about 3 to 5Mbit/sec download speed or more, however come the evening it drops down to 0.4Mbit/sec and even as far as 0.1Mbit/sec. Strangely this slow speed only happens with port 80, switch to another port and its back to normal speeds. Around midnight normal service resumes.

    Date 13/06/07 20:02:02

    Speed Down 3249.26 Kbps ( 3.2 Mbps )

    Speed Up 372.75 Kbps ( 0.4 Mbps )

    Port 8095

    and

    Date 13/06/07 20:04:03

    Speed Down 215.91 Kbps ( 0.2 Mbps )

    Speed Up 373.46 Kbps ( 0.4 Mbps )

    Port 80

    Can't use BT's speed test as it claims that my IP address doesn't match the one allocated to my phone number.

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