Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
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Thread: Finally getting Full Fibre broadband!
Harrison 11:19 21st January 2022
I wasn't expecting this so quite excited.

I received an email from BT (British Telecom) about their January sale. It said because my contract was soon up for renewal I qualified to upgrade to their newer best package and still save £5 per month.

All it really added over my existing package was their Hybrid Connect hub. This is a separate 4G wifi router that plugs into the existing Halo Hub 2 router and takes over and provides your broadband if the main broadband goes down. It has only gone offline a couple of times in 5 years so I wasn't that interested, but if it would save me money over my existing contract it was worth the upgrade.

On logging into my BT Broadband account and selecting offers it was suddenly listing Full Fibre to the premises as an option. About a year ago Openreach dug up my road and laid fibre cables, and installed the hardware on each of the telephone poles, but that was it. I couldn't find any information on when it was going to go live and could be ordered. I had even checked in December and there was still no news. I'd been staring at the fibre hardware attached to the pole right outside my house all year. 

So anyway, being sceptical I didn't believe it was really available. I clicked upgrade and it offered me all the different options, including the fastest, and it really was £5 cheaper per month (but still expensive compared to many other providers). Order went through and it's booked to be installed on the 8th Feb.

So what will I be getting?

BT Halo 3+ 900 package.

That is their fastest full fibre to the premises package providing 900Mbps download and 150Mbps upload speeds. They also guarantee it will always maintain a speed of 700Mbps. So pretty close to 1Gbit Internet speeds. In real terms if it's running at the full 900Mbps it will download at 112.5MB/s. That's 1GB in 9.1 seconds!

Can't wait. No longer will I need to leave the PC or Playstation online all night downloading games. It in theory could download a 100GB game in just over 15 minutes.

It's also going to make server backups and installs so much nicer.

As an added bonus this BT package also gives you Xbox Gamepass Ultimate completely free!

And although I already have the previous package that came with everything else this Halo3+ package provides, you do get quite a lot.

Halo Smart Hub 2 router
Hybrid Connect 4G EE router
Complete Wifi
Full Fibre
Home Tech support
Keep Connected Promise
Price Promise

The price Promise is interesting because they say they will always offer the same or better deals then new customers. That's good because so often you see great deals only available to new customers.

The Keep Connected Promise means your broadband should never go offline, with the 4G router taking over if the main broadband goes down.

Home Tech Support I wouldn't really ever need. They will send an engineer to the house if something won't work. This also combines with the Complete Wifi promise, whereby the BT App locates any poor wifi spots in your house and BT will give you up to 3 BT Discs that form a Wifi mesh and boost the signal.

I already have one of the BT discs, but wifi is fine everywhere in the house. But I'm using it slightly differently. If you connect a disc to Ethernet it boosts and repeats the Wifi from the disc via ethernet. So I ran an armoured ethernet cable to our garden studio log cabin last year and the BT disc is connected down their repeating the Wifi signal. It works perfectly with full signal strength. It even repeats the same id and password so it's seamless. So I have wifi right dien the 50m of garden to the bottom. Lol.
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Kin Hell 12:09 21st January 2022
Nice speeds H.

We had SupferFast here in Cornwall about 9 years ago.

The new one they're releasing is UltraFast.

Aye so fast down here, we're still waiting for SuperFast to be Fast.....

BT couldn't wire a f'king Lan Party up....
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Harrison 13:39 21st January 2022
You still having issues? I remember you did years ago. What speeds are you getting?I

I was thinking that except for multiple users there is actually not too much point in them offering any future services much faster than 1Gbps as most Ethernet ports are still Gbit, so won't utilise anything faster. Not until 2.5Gb or 10Gb become the norm. 2.5Gb seems to be getting adopted by some with new motherboards supporting it. Probably because it can still use Cat5e and 6.

I was reading all these idiots on BT complaining that they couldn't get the 900Mbit speed and they were not recommending it. Every one of them was using wifi!
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Kin Hell 08:51 22nd January 2022
Currently connected at 53.923 Mbps & 8.819 Mbps. Been up for 45 days without any Disco's.

I have seen as high as 63Mbps but it's been even crappier ever since Storm Dennis fried our local cabinet how many years ago.

I guess I shouldn't complain whilst only paying for Infinity whilst getting Infinity 2 speeds, but as usual, BT move the goal posts again kludging & bastardising industry standards.

The thing about Cornwall in the UK is this. The only way to get on the Internet is via BT wires or Satellite. The latter isn't cost effective in any manner making BT the Monopolistic scavenging bastards they are.

Only new building developments in Cornwall are getting full fibre & those new builds getting it have to be near main fibre pipelines.

On top of that, the quality of house builds is pure shit. They are nothing more than carboard houses where you can hear your next door neighbour farting. - Quality eh!
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Harrison 09:38 22nd January 2022
It has been exactly the same here until now so you are not alone. I've got about 35-55Mbps on my existing connection since moving here in 2015. At my old address it maxxed out at the full 76Mbps.

They initially also only ran fibre to the new build estates here too. It was getting silly because new houses in the middle of nowhere had it, but older houses that needed it far more were stuck on copoer. And I agree with house building. It is completely crap and I would never buy one. It's also mad the prices they command. Often a 1/3 more expensive than far larger 1930s house in the area, and hardly any garden or parking space, plus as you say, so close together you can hear your neighbour doing everything.

Chuchester got a full fibre uograde about 4 years ago and that's only 4 miles from me. Buy living in a far more rural area I want expecting fibre any time soon, so was really surprised when they started digging our road up to install it this time last year. But then no idea when we could order it after work was finished. So big surprise when I discovered I could now order it. There was nothing through the door or from BT. I had to discover it by accident. At least that way not many know about it yet in my road so I could book it.

But if you think your situation is bad, consider this. My parents in the New Forest only had their local exchange and cabinet upgraded to FTTC last year! So only recently got 30Mbps. Before this they were on ADSL at 2Mbps and couldn't even stream Netflix or Youtube.
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Kin Hell 14:21 22nd January 2022
I'm really tickled for you H. Enjoy it.

A good friend of mine lives close to the New Forest @ Holbury, just after the Hythe Bypass heading East. - He's in the same boat fella & he isn't a happy chappie being an I.T. Guru. He's got 10Gbit around his house!
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Stephen Coates 09:30 23rd January 2022
Sounds good. We don't have fibre here yet, but it should be coming in the next couple of years.

Openreach recently had a big price cut on wholesale fibre which means, if you have the choice between fibre and VDSL, fibre may actually be cheaper (provided you have the same speed).

I've no doubt the 900Mbps will satisfy harrison. Won't be much use here yet as most of my network is 10/100 and 802.11G. Still, I would like to get fibre to replace the copper lines as a means of modernising, even if the speed is the same.

Funny story with my Dad recently. He has had ADSL for ages, but VDSL has been available for some time, Openreach fibre has recently been put in, and Cityfibre are digging up nearby streets. So, he telephoned Plusnet (who don't sell fibre, but do sell ""fibre"") to ask about upgrading. So they upgraded him to ""fibre"" aka VDSL.

Funnily enough, about a month later, Openreach put a stop sell on all copper products in that area, so had he waited a month, he wouldn't have been able to upgrade to VDSL; he would have had to have had fibre. I don't know how Plusnet would handle that given that they don't sell Fibre.
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Harrison 17:14 23rd January 2022
Did you know that VDSL was a term made up by BT? And no one else uses it because it doesn't exist. I didn't realise that until recently. It's just known a FTTC everywhere else.

And it's always been a stop-gap because they only need to run the fibre to each cabinet. But that then means the main fibre lines are in place from the exchange as when they install the fibre in each road, they only need to run it to the cabinets already in place.

It has amazed me how they have managed to keep inventing solutions to get faster and faster bandwidth along copper wires. Moving from dialup to adsl using thr same copper wires was quite unbelievable at the time. But then to jump from 8Mb to 76Mb still on copper wires was even more so. But I think line noise that was pretty much the limit.

Openreach and BT now have the current plan to replace pretty much all copper lines with fibre by 2025, and then to shut down all traditional phone lines, so your Dad might be forced to upgrade to full fibre within the next 3 or so years.

I'm not sure how they will achieve this goal though as upgrading to full fibre is a pretty new thing for Openreach customers and it only gets installed if you order it. I've read that they have technology that can be installed to allow existing phones to work on fibre lines, so they might just convert the telegraph pole junctions and keep the copper to the houses that haven't upgraded.

With my upgrade I lose the copper wires and the therefore the existing phoneline, and have already received a VoIP BT phone Wythenshawe HD audio calling. It's a bit vague if I keep my existing phone number or be assigned a new one. I'm hoping I keep the same as it's easy to remember.
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Kin Hell 16:27 24th January 2022
Yes, not sure what the V bit refers to in VDSL.....

Virginal.... er.... Vulgar.... maybe viscopedic....

....Little Johnny puts hand up @ back of class....

It should have been a big fat C for me miss. - The V is for Vaginal.
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Kin Hell 08:39 30th January 2022
I just realised something H....

You're getting Overhead Fibre by the sounds of it. - They were on about this years ago & it looked doubtful they were ever going to use it.
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