BT launches 152Mbps and 314Mbps ultrafast fibre packages

[Andi-C]

<admin edit - languages/swear filter>I've been waiting for FTTP for years ! My mobile internet is fast than my home internet.

The real pee take is they've rolled this out in an area of depression & the working class area that can afford the higher rate tariff's are left paying for low end speeds because BT open-reach can't afford the work on the upgrade !

[Sumanji]

Hyperoptic or bust.

[oranjedrol]

They could also make it more affordable

[Tabbykatze]

Hyperoptic or bust.

Begging Hyperoptic to come to my road, they have a local breakout 3 streets over. Even offered to run the cable myself!

[konfliqt]

Meh, recently went live with Hyperoptic at 945Mbps/941Mbps for £37.99/month with a 2ms ping (phone included and no line rental). Screw BT for ignoring exchange-only lines for 8+ years now!

[Tabbykatze]

I hate you with all the jealousy i can muster!!!

[peterb]

Hyperoptic or bust.

But very limited coverage - great if you live in inner London or a major city centre - but that’s about it.

[Syphadeus]

I had virgin media 100M when I lived in Edinburgh and between 6pm - 10pm on weekdays I would be lucky if I could stream iplayer or anything like that. You are lucky to be in an area where they have obviously bothered to invest in making sure the local loop isn't overloaded.

Exactly this. VM are great when it's available to you and they don't oversubscribe. But if they do oversub your area you can just forget it because it will be YEARS before they move to do anything about it.

[gagaga]

Virgin coming to my street in the coming months. Currently running 2 ADSL lines (Sky and TalkTalk) to provide load-balance and failover. Will probbaly flip one of the lines to Virgin, but have kind-of got used to 100% uptime now.

[jcobban]

Across the pond here in Canada we have had 1Gb/s (OK technically 984Mb/s) service for over two years over twisted pair copper phone lines. Of course availability depends upon how far it is from your modem to the closest fibre junction. At my previous residence I was only 20m from that junction point and 1Gb/s was offered. At my current residence I am 150M from the fibre so I can only get 250Mb/s. Because of the regulatory framework here in Canada I can order that service from any provider because Bell Canada must lease the line to any provider who has a point-of-presence in a Bell office.

[Ttaskmaster]

Got a letter from Gigaclear or something like that, stating they'd be laying fibre lines round our way "soon" with the option to connect, for up to 300Mbps... I think they'll have bulldozed our place long before that actually happens!!

[ALFRDO]

Across the pond here in Canada we have had 1Gb/s (OK technically 984Mb/s) service for over two years over twisted pair copper phone lines. Of course availability depends upon how far it is from your modem to the closest fibre junction. At my previous residence I was only 20m from that junction point and 1Gb/s was offered. At my current residence I am 150M from the fibre so I can only get 250Mb/s.

They want to use the same technology in UK - G.fast.
So based on your experience only those closest to the junction boxes will benefit from the maximum speed advertised

[jcobban]

Might need to actually put that ethernet cabling around the house, would be embarassing to have faster connection to the interwebz than between rooms.

These high-speed services all come with 802.11ac gigabit wi-fi support built in. Bell Canada largely promotes this as a way to connect all of your television sets, wherever they are located in the house, or even set up in the back-yard on a warm day, to their TV over IP service. This has permitted Bell to crush most of its competitors who have not yet gone to IP based services. The current Smart TVs generally come with built-in wifi which permits connecting them to this sort of service, although of course most people are just connecting them to streaming services. The only devices in my home that are connected by cable are the ones that are on the same desk as the modem. The only reason to use Ethernet cabling for longer distances is security since your wi-fi signal is broadcast and, of course, can be listened to by your neighbours as long as they have the right authentication. As we are always warned about in coffee shops anyone connected to a wifi hotspot can listen in on all of the traffic on that hotspot and can hack into any of the devices.

[jcobban]

From the Wikipedia entry for G.fast: "In tests performed in July 2013 by Alcatel-Lucent and Telekom Austria using prototype equipment, aggregate (sum of uplink and downlink) data rates of 1.1 Gbit/s were achieved at a distance of 70 m and 800 Mbit/s at a distance of 100 m"

All of these technologies use similar encoding techniques so the bandwidth depends upon how long the copper runs until it reaches the fibre DSLAM. There are two issues: first interference from noise obviously increases linearly with the length of the copper wire, which is in effect an antenna. The second issue is that different frequencies of electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds down the copper wire, which is the same effect that generates a spectrum from a glass prism or the colours of a rainbow. In first generation DSL services the DSLAM was in the central office, maybe 10 or 20 km from the service point. At 10km with the frequencies that the technology is permitted to use so as not to cause radio-interference with other services you could only drive a few Mb/s. G.Fast also is permitted to use whatever portions of the FM radio broadcast band are not in use in the local community. The biggest difference with the new services is that there is a DSLAM on every block where there are enough customers. In my case I am living in an apartment/flat so my copper wire runs down to the telephone junction in the basement where it is connected to a copper wire that runs to a junction on the street which serves both my apartment building and the one next door so the total wired distance is about 150m. A couple of years ago Bell Canada put a fibre-optic DSLAM in that junction box. At the moment there are probably only a couple of dozen customers using this high speed service, with most of the residents still wired directly to the telephone central office and therefore getting traditional ADSL speeds. However as more people buy smart TVs with support for streaming services built in the demand for these higher speeds will take off. Furthermore the carrier may simply decide to connect traditional ADSL customers to the fibre-DSLAM so as to eliminate the need for the copper-wires to the central-office and reduce the cost of providing conventional telephony services by switching them to VOIP. Bell Canada has a further incentive to promote the new capabilities because it is the core of a conglomerate that also owns about a hundred television channels and a streaming service that is the largest competitor to Netflix in Canada. So at some point Bell is going to approach the management of apartment buildings, just as the cable TV companies did when CATV technology arrived, for permission to install the DSLAM right next to the telephone panel, at which point every apartment/flat in the building will have 954Mb/s support.

[peterb]

In the UK BT (and only BT) has a legal obligation to provide 24x7 emergency service independent of mains supply. (and I suspect that was a
Linked to the civil defence infrastructure) which means the exchange (central office in CanUs) is battery/generator backed up and the idea was that telephone instruments were powered over the copper lines from the exchange.

That was fine while the primary telephone was provided by BT (or it’s predecessor) but most landline phones require mains power anyway, so in the event of a power cut they stop working anyway, unless they have an individual battery back up.

This has hampered FTTP, where passive optical networking is provided to a house by BT, they still have to provide a copper pair!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

and here i sit in kent getting a stinking 4 meg. not much fun when my daughter starts watching you tube.

I instinctively laughed because of how Youtube is evolving, (or devolving, actually) but the truth is that their platform is still full of incredible content. It's just hidden behind the same mountains and seas of garbage that seem to build up on every website of note. I'm sure you can find the entire discography of the majority of your favourite musical artists on it, immediately, for free.

Also, Youtube isn't much fun on a 1.8mbps connection when *I'm* the only one using it.

You poor love! I lived with 350kbps upload (and 2mbps down) for several years, until our street was fibred last year. Even now I only get 9mbps up and 50 down.

Yeah I know what it feels like - was on an upto 10 mb connection and eventually it petered out to 2 Mbps maybe 3 Mbps and 0.5 Mbps up.Uploading the videos I did for that Hexus review took hours.

Now on 40/10 since the middle of last year.