More than half of punters reckon they can't get superfast broadband

Re: BT & Fibre

BT wanted to lay fibre to homes over well over 20 years ago and the government stopped them by not allowing BT to offer cable TV services which was the only thing that wanted high BW links.

Re: Copper cabling, crap service

"Fibre has always been the way to go."

"Always" is a big word. Some of us can remember times when it not only wasn't the way to go but didn't even exist except when you melted the middle of a glass rod in a Bunsen flame and pulled the ends apart.

Of course telephones existed in those days and it would have been silly to have waited for fibre to be developed so they were connected by copper.

Some of us can also remember the times when cable was introduced and BT wasn't even allowed in so various other companies cherry picked the areas where they thought the best ROI was to be found.

It was only when the cherries had been picked that it was demanded that not only should BT cable up the rest of the country PDQ but that the erstwhile cherry-pickers should be able to piggy-back on BT's investments when they couldn't be arsed to make their own.

Re: Copper cabling, crap service

The big problem here is if new housing is being built the area should be having fibre installed direct to premises country-wide and it should have been happening for at least the last 15 years but what's actually happening is they're installing copper. This is probably the biggest fail here; that's causing the most absurdity.

Once they have that sorted then we could be looking at getting other areas upgraded from copper but they've not even got that sorted yet. And they're getting massive taxpayer funds.

Re: Copper cabling, crap service

The copper network was designed for phones and is perfectly suited to low speed data transmission. However, copper is perfectly adequate to provide high speed transmission over reasonable local distances so if you get fibre to a street cab and use copper for the final leg, it is adequate. Our home broadband (in the country) is 150 yards from a fibre cab and we are getting 75Mb. This is plenty of bandwidth.

The contention ratio at the exchange is more important than quoted speeds, having fibre in the UK is like driving down a six lane motorway at high speed only to end up at a clogged roundabout (the exchange) where everything queues and waits for a path.

Re: Disruption

"As many as 79 per cent said they would accept disruption to their home in order to get faster broadband – an obstacle often cited by the biggest providers as an obstacle to fibre."

And how many said "how much?" when told what it might cost? Or wasn't that bit mentioned?

Re: Disruption

""As many as 79 per cent said they would accept disruption to their home in order to get faster broadband – an obstacle often cited by the biggest providers as an obstacle to fibre."

That few?

I bet the figures are way higher if you have to suffer wet length of string speed levels."

And yet - where fast broadband is available, only about a quarter of people take it up. The vast majority pick cheaper rather than faster.

Re: exchange only lines...

Same in the country. I'm on a EO line which is about 3km in line length according to Openreach's TDR. There is a cabinet 200m away from me which has finally had a fibre cabinet installed next to it, but it's awaiting activation. I am assured that they will eventually transfer my DP to that cabinet, but it looks like it'll be many months before that happens.

Re: exchange only lines...

My London EO line runs right past an FTTC cabinet at the top of my street to the exchange 1km away. Yet Openreach always says 'we are exploring solutions'. No VM either. #pissedoff.

Re: Why 60Mb?

Also raw speed is meaningless without some idea of QoS/contention.

60Mb/s with (say) 25:1 contention will usually give a worse experience than 5Mbps uncontended at peak times.

For VoD it doesn't matter if a 4K movie downloads in 60 seconds or 60 minutes - you can't watch it any faster......

Re: Why 60Mb?

For my own purposes the 38Mb/s I get is more than enough. What's more it's a relatively steady service, which is probably more important.

Before fibre the best I could get was 2Mb/s - on a good day with a following wind. As it would take more than an hour to download an hour's worth of viewing, live streaming was not possible. 38Mb/s is more than enough to support live streaming, but as with everything else computer related your demands increase to the limit of what's available. Streaming is possible, but can it support the kids streaming onto their phones at the same time as streaming TV, downloading music, playing games online... ?

At the moment the answer is yes (in fact easily), but I can foresee the day when I want to do more and 38Mb/s becomes a bottleneck.

Re: Why 60Mb?

A family with two children will easly use that and more, which is why 1g is needed per household

Re: Why 60Mb?

"I'm curious as to why?"

It seems obvious from other responses most of them have no clue about what they were being asked. Probably had 5 check boxes and 60Mb looked like the most reasonable one above middle choice.

No, YOU stop moaning. At least you don't have to put up with Virginmedia's endless price rises and lack of customer service.

You stop moaning. I live on Pen Llŷn and I can't get more than 1Mb/s.

"This discussion has been going on for years and will continue to go until someone steps up and just gets it done."

People keep throwing in these words like "always" and "just".

If someone should "just" get it done why not you? All you have to do is buy a lot of fibre, a lot of gear, recruit and train a few thousand staff and arrange planning for all the street works you'll have to do. It'll cost you billions but, hay, you can borrow that. Of course you'll need to be able to sell the product at a price that at least covers the interest and repayment of the loans. If you hire the staff direct you'll have to pay redundancy when you lay them off after the project's finished. How long will it take? If by "just" you mean a couple of weeks it's going to be a hell of a big ask for everybody. Or is just going to stretch for a couple of years? Or a couple of decades?

Are you going to do that? How long will your "just" amount to?

Why do you think it's been talked about for years? Could it be because nobody wants to take the risks and make the investment for something that you think can "just" be done?

5G?

Laugh, I nearly ... I suspect it is really Tony Hancock that is the minister.

I live in London, and rarely get 5M!

I can see the fibre cabinet from my front door - it is about 5 parking spaces away.

I asked the Openreach guy when he was going to connect me, and he said

"%$£&^ Xpbwg %&$*!!!!!" - a good deal more informative than BT's customer

service.

I think I speak for many living in rural areas when I tell you to fuck off.

Have you any idea whatsoever of how much industry (including farming which now requires broadband!) happens in rural areas?

No, I suspect not.

You also seem to think that everyone in rural areas live there by choice. Also incorrect for a large number of people.

I think they need to stop looking at extending half-arsed solutions like FTTC out to rural areas and instead focus on bringing improved services to urban and suburban areas. People out in the sticks make an awful lot of noise about not having the same access to services as those in towns and cities, especially when it comes to things like TV/radio reception and broadband, but it's their choice to live out there and they have to take the rough with the smooth, just like those of us in urban areas have to put up with eg. traffic.

The fact that you apparently have Virgin suggests you are in a decent sized (sub)urban area as NTL/Telewest/Virgin never bothered going anywhere even semi-rural.

However, this has left you short on knowledge of rural life.

1. You don't need to be rural to get terrible internet. My parents are on the edge of an FTTC-enabled village, but their line comes from the next village 3 miles away for reasons history does not recall. Fibre would make that moot, but lots of people in London or urban areas seem to have the same issue with EO lines and associated weirdness. A rationalisation of the network would instantly help.

2. Why do urban areas need FTTP? You can do VDSL or indeed G.Fast quite efficiently over short distances. Yes, they're inferior to P2P fibre, but digging up roads is expensive and do you really need more than 300Mb/s right now? As B4RN proved, soft-digging can be done relatively cheaply and efficiently compared with the usual £/km quoted for laying fibre (okay, they were uber cheap by being community based, but even for a profit-making business, soft-dig is cheaper than hard-dig).

3. DEFRA. Farmers don't get a "choice" about being rural. Nor do other, necessarily-rural industries. Meanwhile DEFRA are going paperless and demanding that farmers complete admin online, having downloaded 100Mb, 1000-page PDFs on compliance. This is one hand not talking to the other. If you're requiring rural areas to do their admin online, then it is necessary to ensure rural areas have adequate internet access. Since copper does not work over long distances, this leaves fibre. OR address your complaint to DEFRA and tell them to go back to Royal Mail based admin.

"it's their choice to live out there and they have to take the rough with the smooth"

Ah diddums. Seriously, have you stopped to think what would happen if everyone from rural areas moved into the towns and cities? Would you be able to afford to live there any more because the house prices would shoot up? And the house you could afford might be several times your existing journey to work.

Seriously, the better solution would be to concentrate on enabling as much employment as possible to move out from the towns and cities by improving rural communications and converting some of the newly vacant office space to residential so that the remaining urban workers could live close to work so that there's be less distance to commute. It would be far more sustainable that the present situation which has been driven by over half a century's worth of planning policy dedicated to separating residential and employment areas.

I've had true 74mbit download with Infinity 2 for years here in Gloucestershire, until recently when BT screwed up and cut me off for 2 weeks because their internal departments don't communicate with each other properly, especially when it comes to billing...

During that time my next door neighbour kindly let me use their TalkTalk wifi, it was a 'dialup' experience of 1.3mbit. So today I'm wrestling with a cheap TP Link router flashed with DD-WRT to make it a guest wifi hotspot so visitors and next door can use. The biggest problem I'm having is that the "information stupid highway" contains too many guides on this subject using old firmware & settings that don't always translate into the present firmware.