question Recommend (or not) fibre optic broadband providers ?

[AndyFowler]

I'm considering upgrading to fibre optic broadband and wondered if you think it's worth it and who you are able to recommend (or not)! Don't forget I'm a computer numpty so idiots guide will be usefull please chaps ! :undecided::-D

[Marmite!!]

BT Fibre is only Fibre from Exchange to Cabinet.. Speeds all depend on distance from your house to the cabinet which is hard wired..

[AndyFowler]

Ah thats usefull info Lee , what does the engineer have to do when they install it at your house then mate ?

[Marmite!!]

Ah thats usefull info Lee , what does the engineer have to do when they install it at your house then mate ?

They ust change the master box on the wall, most of the work is at the Cabinet.. that's if you are in an area with cable to cabinet.. I'm in a semi rural area an we are not getting fibre here for another year.. A few weeks ago they did upgrade our exchange to 21st century which meant they double our speed from 8mb to 16mb.. which is plenty & steams TV fine.

[AndyFowler]

Thanks Lee :-D

[Davey089]

I'm Rural .I was on std broadband went Sky Fibre because they said how good it was , the way to go etc etc , waste of money , in fact I would say it freezes more than it did before :mad: , very disappointing wouldn't recommend it to anyone .

[Marmite!!]

I'm Rural .I was on std broadband went Sky Fibre because they said how good it was , the way to go etc etc , waste of money , in fact I would say it freezes more than it did before :mad: , very disappointing wouldn't recommend it to anyone .

 

My mate who is a BT Engineer explained exactly that.. He said if the cabinet is some distance to a property you could end up with slower speeds than with standard broadband.. Also the distance between exchange & cabinet affects speed.. so a combination of a long distance from exchange to cabinet & cabinet to property could be disastrous speed wise..

 

Don't forget BT (& others) give you maximum estimated speeds, they do not guarantee these.

 

Don't forget a lot of other companies still use BT lines..

Edited March 3, 2014 by Marmite!!

[lowfat]

I am rural my phone comes in via overhead wire. The fiber cabinet is 250 meters away and my infinity is 9meg double what it was before. BT web site says it should be 33meg .

[andym]

BT (and others who resell their bandwidth) offer two types of fibre - FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) and FTTH/FTTP (Fibre to the House/Premises). FTTC is far more common, but if you're lucky and have the dosh, you may be able to get FTTH, whose bandwidth is effectively unlimited. FTTC relies on your existing copper cabling from the cabinet to the house and the bandwidth is therefore affected by distance from the cabinet just like ordinary ADSL. As a rule of thumb at about two miles from the cabinet there is no point in FTTC, ADSL will be faster.

 

BT finally got round to putting some fibre cabinets in Portsmouth about this time last year, so I switched from Demon's ADSL to BT's Infinity 1 using FTTC. I'm about two hundred yards from the fibre cabinet and my bandwidth jumped from 3.5Mbps to 38Mbps, a very noticeable difference. It took the Openreach man about fifteen minutes to do the swap, including walking to the cabinet and back!

 

Just bear in mind that if you're using something like Speedtest to check your bandwidth use a hard-wired connection, not WiFi. There's usually quite a difference in performance.

 

Andy

[mike65]

In real terms you have a choice of 2 BT and Virgin.

All the others Sky,Talk Talk Tesco all rely on a BT line.

Not all cabinets are fibre ready and the number of lines may be limited.

The BT Home hub has a "back door" that gives wifi access to anybody with a BT broadband account. That is how they get good coverage with openzone hotspots.

 

Mike

[Marmite!!]

The BT Home hub has a "back door" that gives wifi access to anybody with a BT broadband account. That is how they get good coverage with openzone hotspots.

 

Mike

 

Just spoke to my BT mate & apparently not.. The Fon side of things uses a separate channel to your home wifi people connecting to your fon spot can not access any of your private data.

Edited March 3, 2014 by Marmite!!

[mike65]

Just spoke to my BT mate & apparently not..

 

"Back door" is probably not quite the right terminology

But you can get it at my parents and they are a few miles from civilization and there are 3 BT wifi hotspots and 3 houses with BT broadband.

 

BT's website also says this

 

You can also get wi-fi in over 5 million hotspots throughout the UK. If you're a BT Broadband customer, you get free wi-fi with your broadband. By agreeing to securely share a portion of your wi-fi bandwidth through a separate channel on your BT Hub, you let others get online when your Hub's turned on. In return, you can use others' active Hubs to get wi-fi internet access when you're away from home.

 

 

It is actually probably more of an advantage if you are out and about and want to avoid data charges on a smartphone or other device.

 

Mike

[AndyFowler]

All good info chaps , thank you ! :-D

[Davey089]

My mate who is a BT Engineer explained exactly that.. He said if the cabinet is some distance to a property you could end up with slower speeds than with standard broadband.. Also the distance between exchange & cabinet affects speed.. so a combination of a long distance from exchange to cabinet & cabinet to property could be disastrous speed wise..

 

Don't forget BT (& others) give you maximum estimated speeds, they do not guarantee these.

 

Don't forget a lot of other companies still use BT lines..[/quote

I think I'm one of the unlucky ones where its gone the other way

[fv1609]

It is actually probably more of an advantage if you are out and about and want to avoid data charges on a smartphone or other device. Mike

 

It was very useful for me when we had a phone line down for nearly 3 weeks. I could walk up the lane & hover outside a couple of hot spots. Unfortunately it got a bit tiresome as it caused concern as I was thought to be listening in or planning a robbery.

 

Inconvenient but was better than nothing. No 3G here & even old-G is patchy.

[Lauren Child]

My mate who is a BT Engineer explained exactly that.. He said if the cabinet is some distance to a property you could end up with slower speeds than with standard broadband.. Also the distance between exchange & cabinet affects speed.. so a combination of a long distance from exchange to cabinet & cabinet to property could be disastrous speed wise..

 

Don't forget BT (& others) give you maximum estimated speeds, they do not guarantee these.

 

Don't forget a lot of other companies still use BT lines..

 

Keep in mind (as well) that this is the connection speed into the ISP. It's not necessarily the same as the connection speed from your ISP to the rest of the Internet. You can buy a very fast link for yourself, but if the ISP is using carrier pigeons, yoghurt pots and wet string to connect to the Internet, or is sharing the available bandwidth among more people, you won't get a very good service.

[Lauren Child]

I'm Rural .I was on std broadband went Sky Fibre because they said how good it was , the way to go etc etc , waste of money , in fact I would say it freezes more than it did before :mad: , very disappointing wouldn't recommend it to anyone .

 

If you're in a rural location you might consider a Ka band satellite service (like http://www.tooway.co.uk/). A friend has had one of those for the last year and it's worked quite well (a damn sight better than the ADSL service we had).

 

Before you jump at it you need to keep in mind that

 

a) There's a delay (high latency) on each connection (e.g. each click of a link) as the signal gets bounced off a satellite and down to a ground station that's probably in another country. It takes about a second or so for the signal to bounce up and down, and then return back. It doesn't sound that big but the delay is noticeable compared to local connections.

 

b) Rain can get in the way and dissipate the signal, so it may not work as well in the wet weather.

[ArtistsRifles]

Virgin works fairly well if you live in one of their areas of coverage. Only thing to beware of - as we found last year - was "over eager" sales people signing up customers in an area and overloading the local hub! Which can then escalate into delays in getting additional power feeds in from the local electricity company as well as UPS configurations. They got it sorted though and we now get approx 100 Gb

[david1212]

Work changed from AOL broadband to Plusnet fibre optic about 3 months ago.

The AOL download was typically 6 Meg which was fine, the issue was the upload of around 0.6 Meg.

 

The Plusnet gives us around 30 Meg download and much faster upload, I can't remember the test result but think at least close to 10 Meg if not over.

 

The Cabinet is over the road. The copper cable route will not be direct but unlikely to be more than 300m.

 

The installation was straightforward. Plusnet sent their router a few days in advance. On the changeover day a contractor working on behalf of BT Openreach swapped the master socket to one with two connections, one for the BT modem he brought and one for phones. The microfilter for phones is no longer needed. He then went and made the required installation/ changes in the cabinet. He came back, tested the line with a gizmo then connected the BT modem to the master socket and the Plusnet router to the BT modem. He then said wait about 30 minutes and you will be live but it may be a few days before you get full speed then departed. 30 minutes later we were indeed live.

 

Internet browsing is generally not noticeably faster, only when a page has lots of images or there is embedded video is the speed increase really noticeable. Some downloads are significantly faster but others not, I guess the speed is often limited by the source server rather than the maximum download speed.

 

It is definitely less reliable. There have been several occasions when it had dropped out and we have had to wait for 30-60 minutes before being able to browse and use email again.

 

As to would it be worthwhile I guess much depends on your current connection speed, what you mostly use the internet for, how many computers, tablets, internet connected phones etc are on line at once plus how long the copper connection between you and the cabinet is.