News - BT Infinity to launch 300Mbps "supercharged" broadband

[watercooled]

Any idea if FTTPoD will be resold to consumers any time soon? I know the installation costs can be eye-watering depending on distance from agg node etc, but it would still be interesting to know. I'm about 50m away from the VDSL DSLAM but I didn't catch where they installed the node.

[Jonj1611]

hmm, that map TA shows the southwest (near plymouth) has alot of dots yet I know no one in plymouth who has bt infinity apart from those that live about .5miles from the actual Plymouth City Centre, I am moving house and decided to check if I could ditch virgin and get BT infinity but its not available in my area or where I live currently from a solid 60mb/s virgin to estimated 1 - 5mb/s.... pathetic I dont understand how BT think its ok to just dump some cables into the city then leave and claim they have accommodated the rural areas! Well I am not even rural... only 2.5 miles off the city centre and its not exactly a small area.

It seems bt just lay their cables anywhere in a city and just wait for virgin to actually put their network further, odd considering the amount of money is chucked at BT to do the opposite.

I also live in Plymouth and my exchange is actually fibre enabled, but I still cannot get fibre because the box near my road won't be upgraded. I contacted BT and they said that its commercially unviable. Err what? So they did a survey or something to see who wanted fibre? No, they didn't, I live in quite a densely populated area so not sure why they would think that.

Personally I think they are just enabling the exchanges but not upgrading a lot of the green boxes so they can just say, hey we cover 95% of the exchanges in the country. Not that we have actually upgraded 80% of the boxes connected to said exchanges lol

[hooneyrob]

So, there's two products to consider. One is FTTP enabled exchanges - as you've read, BT have only enabled selected exchanges so it's pretty black and white in terms of availability. Exchanges either have FTTC or FTTP but not both... We can check via the blog. The second product is FTTP on Demand - this is now showing up in the check I'm performing with some predicted dates. With the FTTP enabled exchanges, there is a £0 install (subject to survey) and in the majority of cases, the install stays at £0 even after site survey, monthly cost for the business service is £150 a month. The FTTP on Demand product is different since BT will 'on demand' route your fibre via the route your copper is provisioned over today.

We only perform checks for business or home workers (FTTC or FTTP) etc. Of course, residential prospects are welcome to order the business product. The key difference is that the business product receives better treatment across the BT backbone, business support etc.

[shaithis]

hmm, that map TA shows the southwest (near plymouth) has alot of dots yet I know no one in plymouth who has bt infinity apart from those that live about .5miles from the actual Plymouth City Centre, I am moving house and decided to check if I could ditch virgin and get BT infinity but its not available in my area or where I live currently from a solid 60mb/s virgin to estimated 1 - 5mb/s.... pathetic I dont understand how BT think its ok to just dump some cables into the city then leave and claim they have accommodated the rural areas! Well I am not even rural... only 2.5 miles off the city centre and its not exactly a small area.

I live in Plymouth and have Inifity (St Judes, so fairly close to city center).....my brother has it at West Park and my mother has it at Whitleigh. It is most certainly not only around the city center.

I know of people at North hill who cannot get it because they are too close to the exchange and supposedly connect directly to it instead of going through one of the green junction boxes......not sure if that's what they have been fobbed off with or whether there is some truth in it though.

[watercooled]

Ofcom haven't approved VDSL for use inside exchanges, for interference reasons IIRC. Re-routing all direct connections through cabinets would be no small job, I'm not sure if they do it or not, but it does seem a bit daft that you can't use the service if you're directly connected.

[ConnorLowe]

May have to switch over from my appalling 2Mb talktalk!

[DaFaRsHeR]

Hmmm not much value there,Hyperoptic are offering 1GBP/s via FTTB for £50 a month over three times quicked that BT's Hybrid-fibre offering despicable!

[watercooled]

And how widely available is Hyperoptic?

Pulling fibre to an apartment building to connect a load of people is a heck of a lot cheaper per-connection than connecting houses individually, which is why countries like Japan and S.Korea get to boast about high speeds in places - a great deal of the population live in closely-spaced apartment buildings.

And some places offer what seems like fairly cheap FTTH (e.g. Verizon Fios) but end up with streets looking like this:
http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.co...f63c2ad36c.jpg

Ease of getting decent broadband is closely related to population density. Some densely populated parts of the USA get fairly good connections (although a lot of them suffer from above problem) while less densely populated parts are stuck with ADSL or dial-up, and have to pay eye-watering prices for it.

[TheAnimus]

And some places offer what seems like fairly cheap FTTH (e.g. Verizon Fios) but end up with streets looking like this:
http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.co...f63c2ad36c.jpg

Reminds me of my Vietnam Telecom shirt
http://www.ginkgo-vietnam.com/index....&product_id=61

Pretty much every telegraphy poll looks like that.

[kawauso]

I live in a major city and I'm still only able to get FTTC. Having just looked up the list of FTTP-enabled exchanges, I can't see any ryhme or reason to them either.

[DaFaRsHeR]

Fair enough but £50 for 300Mbp/s against 1Gbp/s shows no value to the customer! Also lets face it BT has fibre to the box in the main, a bit more investment in putting Fibre all through to the home / terminal is not that much effort for a major uplift in service. That is all I was saying, if you dont agree that is fine but puts you on their side not ours!

[watercooled]

I'm not on anyone's side; as a consumer, yeah faster and/or cheaper connectivity would of course be nice, but realistically there are reasons why these things cost money. BT may not play entirely fairly considering the current market, and I'm not arguing against that.

As I explained, the reason companies like HyperOptic can offer those speeds/prices is down to the market they operate in, they're no charity. Country-wide ISPs like BT/Virgin/etc essentially average the cost of all their customers regardless of location - for example, do you think it costs them the same to install and run a short line in the middle of a dense city as it does a single phone line miles long to serve one or two rural properties? Of course not, but they pay the same for line rental.

Installing FTTP isn't necessarily 'a bit more investment', it can cost substantially more depending on location, and it's potentially a big risk depending on uptake of the faster services e.g. if most customers only end up signing up to their lowest tier on FTTP. TBH if I had to guess, I'd say the slowing rollout of BT FTTP possibly has something to do with uptake stats in enabled areas - if it had been very successful, surely that would be an incentive to crack on with it?

And a big point a lot of people overlook is the overall connection speed beyond the access network. Great, you have a 1Gbit connection to the ISP, but even assuming they have sufficient peering/transit, how fast can the remote server actually transmit the data to you? Here's an example of someone testing download speeds of various services on Google Fibre: http://cafbit.com/entry/google_fiber_tourism

I'm by no means making an argument against the likes of FTTP, it is inevitably where things are heading, but it's not necessarily as desperately yet needed as some people seem to think.

[loyal986]

Daydreaming in serbia... Must wait a decade to have such a speed with such price

[eltel]

i can tell you why cornwall has done so well with the fibre rollout the main atlantic fibre point is in bude that's the only reason i can see for them doing what they have done after all its not like cornwall as a whole has a large business base or homes for that matter i'm not bitter (much)

[watercooled]

That's unlikely to have anything to do with it; access fibre networks are entirely separate to, and independent of, transit networks. There are loads of undersea fibre landing points around the country, not to mention the far more numerous overland connections linking parts of the country together.

Having a long-haul cable pass through an area doesn't change the cost of installing thousands of DSLAMs, OLTs, associated distribution cabling, and so on. At best you might be able to rent some dark fibre back to a major interconnect point if you're close to an active endpoint, but that option would likely have been available from a load of other transit providers anyway.

It's not something I've really looked into, but it's probably just that their local gov't decided to invest a fair chunk of their money into broadband.

[Zeven]

A mate of mine living in Vienna got about 5 Mbps over his landline which he deemed absolutely unacceptable, especially for the 28€ he was paying per month. Unfortunately for him, that is the best he could get with his landline connection. Then he discovered that he could simply get 4G internet for his home for less money and several times the speed from A1 or T-Mobile. The question now is, why can I in England not get this, but a friend of mine in Austria can, despite England currently researching 5G internet? I live in one of the major cities of Europe i.e. London and yet I get a mere 1.9 Mbps in my area. That is simply ridiculous.