It's a long way off for us, if ever, but if it was available today I wouldn't pay for more than 40meg or whatever was the cheapest. It's the reliability of fibre that would be a benefit us rather than the speed.
So 330 Mbps downstream is indeed a long way off for us too. A factor of × 133 off in fact, per line, and god knows what the upstream is like. It would be nice to have × 133 faster downstream but as Mr Smith said, total reliability is the goal.
Upstream speed is very, very important to me so I would be thinking about two 900 Mbps downstream / xx Mbps upstream links just in order to get the associated upstream. In fact what is the upstream? Doing backups to the Apple cloud is a nightmare at the moment; it can take 40 mins for one of my Apple devices to do a backup sometimes!
I don’t understand the implications of ordering two PON links. I can of course ask AA. I don’t know about the speed implications for contending ‘with myself’ and the avoidance of disappointment might be one of the many reasons why AA might want to talk me out of ordering two links. I don’t understand the reliability equation for PON, and am assuming that the improvement in reliability from ordering two FTTP links might be very poor. Carl is the man to ask of course.
Threats to FTTP that I can see are:
- death of ONT
- loss of mains at my end (I have a UPS and a generator though)
- digger attack
- attack by lorry or tractor
- lightning strike on whichever exchange (Caol Loch Aillse not Broadford who knows?).
- BT failure further upstream
- AA failure / maintenance as always
The other day the electricity substation in Port Rìgh got hit by a direct lightning strike so everyone was without power in the town; we were unaffected here south of the mountains. I realise that optical links are immune but presumably there is still a threat to one’s FTTP
service from (i) a direct hit on an exchange, although they are presumably heavily defended, and (ii) there is a threat from loss of mains at the exchange but again I assume there’s either a UPS and or generator backup for the exchange
If someone orders two FTTP links, I don’t understand whether or not there is a choice of an ONT with two ports on it or two separate ONTs.
I read somewhere that if one orders the BT 900Mbps / xx? PON service then the contention means you get a guaranteed 450 Mbps downstream. Please do tell me if this is wrong. So one advantage of buying two links is a guarantee of ‘full 900Mbps’ downstream.
I would have other practical problems to sort out, such as wireless bottlenecks, Firebrick bottleneck, gigabit ethernet bottleneck before I could get the full benefit of twin FTTP.
