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[thesmileyone]

I'm confused. People I know in your position either suck it up that they are stuck on slow copper lines or pay for a leased line.

Not try and make BT pay so you can have 5 copper lines?

What are you doing that is so bandwidth heavy that you need 5 lines for?

[ejs]

@thesmileyone
These are very long ADSL2 lines with nothing faster available (apart from some sort of leased line). So about 2Mb downstream or slightly more per line.

[Chrysalis]

Weaver it may be worth reaching out to providers to try and get one of the following arranged locally to you.

Public wifi providers.
Satellite broadband providers, one who was interviewed by a parliament committee within the last couple of years said they were deploying in scotland.

Someone having to pay out for 5 ADSL lines to get decent broadband to me isnt right.

[Weaver]

Well satellite is hopeless for so many reasons that I don't even know where to begin. Dodgy companies, famously horrid latency, no IPv6 unless you tunnel, funny HTTP tricks, service blocking, traffic-type shaping, uploads dodgy, horrible usage limits, enormous charges. I would never even consider it. Too many locals tried it and given up on it. A business customer even paid me a lot of money some years ago to get them out of the mess that they were in with satellite and get put back onto dialup the 0.5Mbps DSL.

As for public wifi, there is a long range RF network of some sort available in the village. According to their limited specs, it's slower than my current situation at best, and it's shared bandwidth so what you actually get is a complete pig in a poke, could be anything down to dialup speeds for all I know if someone else is using it as it's an unlimited buffet. Rumour according to a neighbour who was using it is that it's hilariously unavailable with many weeks of downtime and no maintenance SLA underlying it, so when it breaks it just stays broken, for an indefinite time period. That neighbour didn't give up his DSL in favour of it.

The political reality is that we have no LLU, no cabs and no fibre optic pipe to the village. And no prospect of change, despite some scathing emails from me to the politicians. In the highlands only urban areas matter, and percentages of population are the figures they keep quoting, as if making things even faster for those who already have very fast network connections is something worth doing. And meanwhile we remain at the mercy of BT because no one else does local loops that are viable and give ISP-choice through wholesaling. Probably it will be G.Fast next for people in Inverness because 80 Mbps isn't fast enough already, while get have users on sub 1.0 Mbps ADSL2+. BT and the politicians seem to be judged on how well they serve the most fortunate low-hanging fruit. I don't know why BTx is allowed to charge the same for a 0.5 Mbps copper line as for a 21 Mbps line. If they had to charge according to results delivered, then things might be different. BT would suddenly care about giving a high performance service. Of course from experience most locals around here just want to pay the absolute minimum possible as many are really hard up and some are either very stingy or just don't put spending on their internet connection high on their list of priorities, and don't care much about speed, if they even know what their speeds are. So this is a mismatch with this idea of mine.

Things are so wrong with the political setup and the BT monopoly that I don't know where to begin. We need FTTP. If cities I would like to see Virgin be compelled by OfCom to wholesale like BT has to. And I would like to ban all public spending on altnets unless they agree to wholesale, so that we can't be fobbed off with new monopolies of one crap but supposed ‘fast enough’ local altnet RF provider as is happening all over the highlands, small heaps of money being wasted and zero ISP choice and no controls over quality that local businesses get saddled with.

[ejs]

I don't really see how having hundreds of different companies re-selling the exact same thing improves that thing.

Of course from experience most locals around here just want to pay the absolute minimum possible as many are really hard up and some are either very stingy or just don't put spending on their internet connection high on their list of priorities, and don't care much about speed, if they even know what their speeds are. So this is a mismatch with this idea of mine.

... We need FTTP.

Who is the "we" in the "we need FTTP"? You just said that most people there aren't interested or can't afford it!

[Weaver]

My mistake, if I could get serious FTTP then I would give some of it away to my own neighbours. I should have said FTTV ie fibre into the village. My fault, brain fail. 

[Chrysalis]

My idea I meant having it alongside your adsl.

So the adsl still gets used for web browsing email etc.

But your movie downloads would be done over satellite.

[Weaver]

Understood.

[Weaver]

(I sent Amazon a feature request asking them if their app could be upgraded to handle cron jobs, i.e. to handle queued timed movie download requests in the middle of the night. That way, I'm not disturbing Mrs Weaver who is trying to work, and I'm using AA’s night time 1 TB per download ‘unit’ cheap rate. Netflix is an utter pain in that you can't even download flat out at all, only live streaming.)

[gt94sss2]

The political reality is that we have no LLU, no cabs and no fibre optic pipe to the village. And no prospect of change, despite some scathing emails from me to the politicians.

Playing devils advocate but you/your village are paying less than the real cost of providing a service to yourselves - with your service being subsidised by other customers.


And in 2020, you will all be entitled to minimum 10MB under a USO - again subsidised by other customers who will be effectively paying more as a result.

[Chrysalis]

http://wccftech.com/netflix-reportedly-offline-mode-year/?utm_source=traqli&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=115

[d2d4j]

Hi weaver

I hope you don't mind, and I do not know your area where you live, but one of your posts made me think

Is it a possibility, if you are near a town or city with fttc, and the distance not too far (you mentioned 4 miles to cab -circa), that you could ask a person in that to town, to have a second line installed, provision fttc to the line, and run your own fibre to your village/house, then either setup your own ac wap network for village, or just use for your own

Obviously, your cost would be upfront but I guess is doable, without the expense of bt/cp

It's just a thought

Many thanks

John

[Black Sheep]

Not enough info to give a definitive answer to your original question, but here are my own thoughts on the subject ......

Forget the drop-wire, as mentioned earlier, replacing this or adding another is child's-play and will have no impact on the final decision making/costing. As an aside, current drop-wires are single-pair only as opposed to the older two-pair wire. We also have a four-pair drop-wire (CAD55) that can be used for aesthetic purposes.

The likelihood is there is going to be a shortfall of 'pairs' at your DP (Telegraph pole) to provide an additional 2 lines. If an order is confirmed, it will go initially to a 'desktop survey' to see if a 'pair divert' solution can be achieved (ie: take pairs from another DP and divert them to yours). If this is out of the question, then a more in-depth survey will be carried out and as again mentioned earlier, there is a price-ceiling to this.

I understand your predicament, as I've stated umpteen times before, but the reason nobody else is running cables to your village is because it is a financial money-pit. The ROI would likely be a lifetime !!.

[Ronski]

Could you and the villagers get together and do a B4RN style install?

[kitz]

I don't know why BTx is allowed to charge the same for a 0.5 Mbps copper line as for a 21 Mbps line. If they had to charge according to results delivered, then things might be different.

Just a thought on that ^ which is a common misconception.

In reality the line serving 0.5 Mbps costs more to provision than a line capable of 24Mbps adsl.    Far more copper, often higher gauge, more poles, more digging etc. The cost to provision a 24Mbps capable line is next door to the exchange is negligible in comparison.
Both will use the same MDF and both use the same DSLAM, the 24Mbps line is far less likely to require maintenance and suffer from line faults, so is also cheaper to maintain.

Whilst I really really do sympathise with your situation...  its because pricing is the same regardless of length, its the shorter lines which subsidise the cost of the longer lines.

In a way I guess we were lucky that it was the GPO that put in telephone lines in the first place, if not then like any company cost and ROI would be a major factor.   
Have you also noticed the amount of new homes being built without gas these days even though they may be relatively near a decent size town.. if the cost of installation exceeds budget then its electric only.   I know quite a lot of houses around here that only have electricity for that reason. :/