Your broadband speeds are up by 6Mbps, boasts UK watchdog Ofcom

Bah Virgin Media were and probably are hopelessly oversubscribed in my area, to the point of it being a criminal offence to sell that which you knowingly cannot provide. Virgin weren't interested in their network's integrity. Expected customers to wait MONTHS for router capacity upgrades, which were the issue. This is after waiting HOURS and lots of hassle to find out what was on their network engineering database the whole time - they oversold capacity. So they waste significant money on support (sent engineers out when it was a capacity issue? Clever). Everyone else over the years has said it's a postcode lottery. That lack of integrity and oversight is the problem, not the technology. Toothless watchdog, of course, is the real problem. Politicians box-ticking as usual.

Re: The latest round of insanity

I presume you are running your router etc. off a UPS. Depending on your router's power input spec. it may be possible to power it directly from the UPS and avoid the battery eating 12v->240v->12v conversion between UPS and device.

No I think he is referrring to the battery in the street cabinet, and worrying about its potentially short up - time in the event of an AC supply failure, and comparing that with the much bigger battery in the main exchange. (Not PBX; that is a Private Branch Exchange)

Re: The latest round of insanity

Eh? Since when is Zen's Fibre 2 (up to 76Mbps/19Mbps) just £25? I just checked as it seemed too good to be true and I was about to recommend everyone I know move to them - and it's actually £25.00*

per month when taken with £17.00 monthly line rental, which isn't the same contract at all. I believe in separation of service leading to better quality of service as one is free to leave. BT leading the monopoly market has caused us idiots (OK, not us, the people in the market who AREN'T Reg readers) to go for all this triple-play scam marketing. They don't get that only FORCE will, er, force ruthless capitalist entities to provide customer service. The companies that profit from this ignorance are utter scum because it's part of the horrible ignorance-culture we have in the UK. Which affects voting, as obvious recent events have revealed. So the last thing society should tolerate is people so dedicated to maintaining the ignorance of others that it becomes a massive part of the UK economy. But it arguably has. So this detail about line rental in the price is important.

but has anything improved for those at the bottom end?

Suspect not, the FTTC deployment effectively created a new exchange to street cabinet digital infrastructure parallel to the existing (largely) copper POTS network.

So I see no real reason why the copper POTS/DSL infrastructure would get an upgrade from the FTTC deployment (aside: it certainly didn't in my area). However, there would be a small DSL QoS improvement in those areas with FTTC, because of (typically bandwidth hungry) users moving across to FTTC would change the actual contention ratio being experienced by the remaining DSL users.

I suspect also the figures are being skewed down by the potentially larger uptake of 40Mbps fibre compared to the typically more expensive 79+Mbps services.

Re: Hmmm... Ha Ha!

currently (and for years) running at an average 430 Mb/s in a major commercial centre in south central England and less than half a mile from a fibre cabinet (occasionally peaks at 1 Mb/s for a second or two at a stretch). Not the ISP's fault - it's the poor condition fo the 'last mile' copper, which 'someone' has for years failed to maintain properly. I get the impression that copper is being left to decay as a matter of policy.

Re: Urban areas

@Graham - there are thousands of residential customers in Sheffield city centre, none of which can get anything above 10Mbps ADSL connections unless they're lucky enough to have cable access.

Homes further away from the same exchange do have FttC, or plans to upgrade to at the least. The economics of running fibre to a handful of people simply don't apply in this case. After all, they've already had to run the fibre past these homes to get to the ones outside of the ring road.

Re: Urban areas

@ Graham 25

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds putting fibre into locations with no return.

I've tried the same argument (perhaps less succinctly expressed) before and it doesn't seem to work.

@ Jaywin

The economics of running fibre to a handful of people simply don't apply in this case. After all, they've already had to run the fibre past these homes to get to the ones outside of the ring road.

An interesting point, but Graham 25's point may still actually apply, but for slightly different reasons. If the subscribers who currently use ADSL and have an FTTC feed passing them by are in fact satisfied with the (ADSL) speeds they get (OK: < 10 Mb/s) then they have no real incentive to migrate to FTTC (or other faster offering) so BT could find themselves going to the expense of providing an additional cabinet with its contents, the AC supply to it and a fibre to it only to find that an insufficient number of subscribers take up the chance; after all additional charges would apply and if they are happy with what they have why would they bother to upgrade?

Speed has become something of an obsession, and I would dearly love to see some figures showing what people actually need to meet their usage and what they think they need. Chateau Commswonk was originally on an ADSL service that never exceeded 1.6 Mb/s so we jumped (OK I jumped) at the chance to upgrade to what was then 38 Mb/s, although a test a few minutes ago at 1948Z gave something altogether more modest (< 10 Mb/s) although the upload speed had not dropped by a similar factor. (Busy period, I expect, or hope.) However, with just Mrs Commswonk and me sharing this PC and no rug-rats guzzling bandwidth this reduced speed is still more than adequate.

I really would be interested in knowing what speeds people actually need as opposed to what they think they need. Perhaps speed - freaks are really a minority, and perhaps BT knows it.

I must remember to check my speed again in the morning when it's quiet...

Re: Urban areas

Well, nobody was making any money from certain UK areas until they put railways into them in the 19th century, and it made a massive difference. Yes there was an economic imperative to access, e.g. mines to extract materials, but that wasn't the whole picture at all, was it? Now if broadband based working from home becomes viable in the countryside (arf! arf! this being 2016 not 2006), then a larger proportion of people would move there, as well, the city is unpleasantly crowded and apparently you can't even get good broadband THERE. It would make a large difference to local economies, including taking commuting traffic off rural roads and increasing quality of life for hundreds of thousands or more, if done on the widest scale. Sometimes we have to LEAD the economy, not follow received quarterly-results-focused "economic reality". Reality is that some things are currently impossible but just need the right person at the right time to push things forward. Then there's the things that are easily achievable but just need a tiny bit of reorganisation. The UK government is the opposite of useful in this, watchdogs on all levels are toothless (by design) and everyone knows it. TalkTalk should be out of business immediately for such a breach of data protection as to plain refuse to use encryption on ALL customer details. Like encryption is that expensive! Yet they weren't even found in breach of the DPA last time I checked. What drugs are the responsible people on to think that it's 'reasonable' care of data to NOT encrypt it then let yourself get hacked, when it wasn't inevitable?! Just one example. Lies rule the UK, that's the underlying cultural problem. What on earth is government for if not to make the tough strategic guidance decisions that pure economic forces won't make on their own?

Re: Urban areas

To make you feel better, I only get 1.5 Mbps as I am rural. One YouTube video is all we can stream. However 3Mbps seems a bit slow. Do you have a dual-outlet master socket with your router plugged directly in to it (no microfilters)?

Re: Urban areas

Er, try suing them for not providing a fit-for-purpose landline? No broadband should cut-out just because the kids get home from school or whatever peak time (and surely the adult-derived peak is at a different time to that, like 6pm to 8pm?)

Oh silly me, can't upset BT, because they have a monopoly on landlines, since Vermin Media don't count as acceptable quality either. Use Samknows and thinkbroadband and speedtest.net, pingtest.net get evidence, and if it's your house's cable that's likely at fault (i.e. next door or a couple of doors down can get proper speeds), then force BT to check your cable properly. That can take some doing, but an 'accidental' damage to the cable that you happen to know nothing about can either make things worse if they don't fix it properly, or reveal underlying issues, if they do fix it properly and test properly. Of course this monopoly is only held to the 28kbps standard, still, right? I have family in rural Wales who get faster than that, 5km from the exchange.

Re: BT aren't rubbish if you are lucky

I think you mean "BT aren't rubbish if you make a bloody nuisance of yourself and you are bloody lucky".

FTFY.

BT & Openreach are a shambles, for the most part. There are some good people working in the field, but they are crippled by BT processes. I built a house next to a BT pole that the local engineer said had an empty port or two on and gave up trying to get BT to connect up to it after 3 months when Gigaclear strolled through and installed the day after I requested it. Never looked back, and have 100mbps up and down, and a land line with a decent set of features (auto-transcripted voicemail emailed to me, along with a WAV of the message, using the landline from my mobile, and all the other VoIP calling features IMS gets you) - all for less than what BT would have charged me.