Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => FTTC and FTTP Issues => Topic started by: snadge on June 21, 2012, 02:58:20 AM
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I couldnt believe what I read and wanted to see if it could be true....
this person on Sky Forums MOANED that he had ALU on his line that caused his FTTC to run at 17Mbps... after dis-aggreeing with members he came back 1 month later to say that BT/SKY replaced over 1Km of Alu cable with Copper just because he wasnt happy with 17Mbps and he now gets 31Mbps..he tells the rest of the threads posters to "blow it out their pants" for telling him there was nothing he could do...
i think he is talking rubbish... is he?
http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Fibre-Unlimited/Aluminium-cables/m-p/423771/message-uid/423771#U423771
I said:
i find it staggeringly hard to believe that BTo or Sky would absorb the cost of replacing 1Km of Aluminium cable with Copper just because you were getting 17Mbps speeds and weren't happy - they MAY only do so if you had said speeds previously and can show/prove/convince them a fault has caused it too lower...
there is no way BTo would do that when your getting 17Mbps...
"we do NOT guarantee speeds over the network" - is a BT Openreach (LL14) Broadband Engineer's favourite qoute! and theres no way a BTo Manager/Supervisor would OK that kind of work for 1 customer (unless sky said they would foot the entire bill, which i dont think they did)
Anyone else care to comment on this....lol... I may point some BTo engineers to this comment and see what they have too say...
I mean if Iam wrong then great!! but I just find it hard to believe...
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Sounds like a clearly worded email to sky is needed by a sky subscriber requesting:
1. Clarification as to whether or not this occured or whether only parts were done.
2. If so, the circumstances that led to the decision and the criterion that deemed replacement was required.
3. Who paid for it.
Making clear that the email is a formal request - and not a rant.
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thanks c6em for your reply
it could well be the newer copper was already there and he hadnt been put onto it... but now he has (Pair Swap)..
his words were "they ripped out the old alu and replaced it with over 1Km of copper wire" lol... hey I may be wrong but its kinda hard to believe they would do that cos he was getting 17Mbps on FTTC 40Mbps product
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I certainly can't see that happening, especially the way it has been worded. :no:
I notice a slight whiff of male bovine excrement in the air! :-X
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me too... poo it smells!!! (watch him totally prove me wrong here lol)
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me too... poo it smells!!! (watch him totally prove me wrong here lol)
In the incredibly unlikely event that he does prove you wrong, please forward his contact details to me.
He could act as my agent in getting my "up to" 1km line completely replaced with shiny new copper cabling.
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There is a chance it was a d-side swap.
That would be my guess. BT ripping out alu and replacing 1km in just a few weeks seems highly unlikely on the back of one complaint.
It took them years (iirc about 4) to plan and replace about a 1km stretch of alu near here so that a large size housing estate could just get adsl1, nvm a speed increase. Depends on exact location but ripping out alu can often involve road works.. and even local council planning permission.. which increases delay.* But most alu replacements Ive heard of seem to take a long time - how many estates around the UK had to wait years for something to happen.. and how many are still waiting?
Perhaps BlackSheep could comment.
*Which I believe was the case around here because both B'pl BC and B'pl Transport had their say in it too.
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There is a chance it was a d-side swap.
That would be my guess. BT ripping out alu and replacing 1km in just a few weeks seems highly unlikely on the back of one complaint.
It took them years (iirc about 4) to plan and replace about a 1km stretch of alu near here so that a large size housing estate could just get adsl1, nvm a speed increase. Depends on exact location but ripping out alu can often involve road works.. and even local council planning permission.. which increases delay.* But most alu replacements Ive heard of seem to take a long time - how many estates around the UK had to wait years for something to happen.. and how many are still waiting?
Perhaps BlackSheep could comment.
*Which I believe was the case around here because both B'pl BC and B'pl Transport had their say in it too.
Just for Kitz, as I was keeping out of this one due to the ambiguity of the claim, and I have too much to do to be bothered to read the link that snadge has supplied.
In a nutshell, I'd be absolutely gob-smacked if OR (can't comment as to whether SKY have contributed or not ??), would replace 1Km of any type of cable, regardless of numbers of complainants.
Our planning department are so restricted in what they can and cant allow, it's unbelievable !! We have to beg, borrow and steal in order to get a simple 33mtr length of 5-pr cable supplied as a 'Garden-leader' (IE- from nearest underground box to EU's premises), when the original cable has gone faulty.
We do have a FVR programme (Fault Volume Reduction) running, that has a few hundred grand as a budget. But, there is extreme ammounts of analysis carried out before any money is alloted. It usually entails a historically high fault volume 100-pr cable node leaving a cabinet, feeding 'x' ammount of DP's. The FVR lads will 'walk the node' (lift every single UG box lid) and get to the crux of which section of cable is faulty (ie: from box to box) and then put in new cable.
There is no way IMHO that one whole kilometre of cable has been replaced, more-so on a single 'low speed complaint'. But even if the entire ammount of EU's, who's circuit was in the said cable complained, they'd only replace the faulty section ...... ie: box to box.
HTH.
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Thanks BS.
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thanks BS.... much appreciated!!
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He could act as my agent in getting my "up to" 1km line completely replaced with shiny new copper cabling.
Copper? No, you need 1 mm diameter silver, in one contiguous length, from your NTE5/A to the FFTC DSLAM. ;D
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Copper? No, you need 1 mm diameter silver, in one contiguous length, from your NTE5/A to the FFTC DSLAM. ;D
Cheers b*cat.
I'll have a word with Alex at Plusnet :lol:
If I ever move house, I wonder which order these would be in:-
Location, location, FTTC cabinet location.
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Perhaps BB in all aspects should be included in "enquiries before contract". Lawyers would love the litigation prospects. >:D ::)
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You may joke but BB status is already starting to emerge as a selling/renting issue - particularly where a property cannot get access to broadband at all.
As regards the silver - is not silver used albeit a few microns thick as a coating conductor around a cheaper core on ultra high frequency applications? The 'skin effect' at these ultra frequencies means that the current only flows in the outer few microns of any conductor anyway and not throughout the entire core area.
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I believe that to be true also c6em. In laymans terms, DSL (Broadband) frequencies only use the outer layer of the conductor.
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There's an interesting Wikipedia article on skin effect here. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect) Half-way down the page is a table of skin depth against frequency, which shows that the skin depth for a middling ADSL frequency is in the region of one tenth of a millimetre, but a lot less at the higher frequencies. So this would be another contributor to the higher attenuation at the higher ADSL frequencies.
Further down that page there's another interesting table of the characterisics of telephone cable against frequency.
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Which even more interestingly shows the skin depth of Aluminium to be deeper than that of Copper - though of course it has a higher resistivity than copper.
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You may joke but...
Am I being reprimanded? :) It was a serious jest, but vendors will have to be extremelly circumspect in their information to buyers, given how litigious our society has become.
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is there a contract between BTo and the council too replace aluminum with copper on runs between PCP and Customers home? apparantley someone spoke to a BTo engineer who said just that!
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>> is there a contract between BTo and the council too replace aluminum with copper on runs between PCP and Customers home?
Couldnt say about a contract as such.. other than I know that the local council was involved in the one near here, but I get the impression that they were more concerned with planning rather than funding.
Im not aware of any council involvement in another estate that had TPON (took about 5 yrs before they got dsl). I suppose it may depend on what/who was at the other end ie a primary school which may make them have more interest and therefore invest in the community. afaik its mostly funded by BT.
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FTTC installs are to be at very minimum 15mbps..........so i call bullshit with what the guy is saying regarding BTo replacing 1km alu with copper.
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FTTC installs are to be at very minimum 15mbps..........so i call bullshit with what the guy is saying regarding BTo replacing 1km alu with copper.
Not quite. :P The quoted 15 Mbps DS is the minimum for the BT Retail Infinity product. Other ISPs/CPs can purchase GEA from your employer, Openreach and supply their FTTC product with whatever speed is attainable. :)
But, yes. Bovine effluvia prevails.
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Im not on FTTC, on ADSL. 9km from the exchange. But Openreach replaced 3km of cable to our property where there were no other feeds and upgraded it from .5 to .9 gauge to up the BB speed from about .3mb to 2.5mb. Although beforehand there was a telephone fault on the line. But still I was suprised they replaced it at all. Although saying this, it took 12 ISPs, a letter to Ian Livingston, and 2 openreach area managers before they did it, and a lot of pestering. It took 6 months to fault find all 9km of the line, until they were happy they couldn't do any further. Think the total job cost was £92k. and the bugger is we still have problems with our broadband dropping out :-[. probs think it's bull but there are people on this forum who can back me up.
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The clue is "there was a telephone fault on the phone line"
BT has a guarantee of service on voice faults - so if there is no extra feed available and the last feed goes dud then BT HAVE to replace it and HAVE to pick up the tab.....and as you say it ain't cheap.
There is no such guarantee of service for broadband issues.
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In your post you just showed how difficult it was and how it took months and even the involvement of Ian livingstone and several area managers You also mention a telephone fault and only being able to get .3 mbps and the number of hoops you had to jump through before you got yours sorted.
That is entirely different than BT replacing 1km of aluminium in a just a few weeks because a user was "only" getting was it 17/18 Mbps (can't recall exact figure).
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FTTC installs are to be at very minimum 15mbps..........so i call bullshit with what the guy is saying regarding BTo replacing 1km alu with copper.
Caveat ....... 15Mbps is the minimum to be achieved before we have to ring our SMC, to either say the EU is happy with the sub-15Meg product, or not. I have only had a couple of these instances on long'ish routes, but going from 0.5/1Mbps to maybe 10Mbps, the EU says they're more than happy. :)
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Im not on FTTC, on ADSL. 9km from the exchange. But Openreach replaced 3km of cable to our property where there were no other feeds and upgraded it from .5 to .9 gauge to up the BB speed from about .3mb to 2.5mb. Although beforehand there was a telephone fault on the line. But still I was suprised they replaced it at all. Although saying this, it took 12 ISPs, a letter to Ian Livingston, and 2 openreach area managers before they did it, and a lot of pestering. It took 6 months to fault find all 9km of the line, until they were happy they couldn't do any further. Think the total job cost was £92k. and the bugger is we still have problems with our broadband dropping out :-[. probs think it's bull but there are people on this forum who can back me up.
I'm not calling you a liar, gouldew, but no ammount of 'chairmans letters' or visits from Openreach Managers is going to get 3Km of cable replaced. If that were the case, we'd all be writing letters, or getting into little gangs to apply pressure up the BT echelon.
There was probably far, far more to it than you are aware of ?? As you are very rural, the cable will most likely be at full capacity, as in no spare wires to add new circuits. Or, somebody coming off a DACS circuit (Splitter box) as they have applied for DSL ??
Even if there was a PSTN fault, they will NOT, I repeat NOT just replace 3Km of cable for that. They will find the faulty section, cut it out, and replace with new.
As I say, I'm commenting in general terms here, not on your specific situation. But I reiterate, that you will not be in full possession of all the facts behind why they did what they did with 'your' feed. :)
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For what its worth i have been trying to get changed over to the E side for at least 7 years. Copper does exist quite a few spare according to last OpenReach engineer normally kept for emergency services and those that supposedly have to have a good conection.
Mean while up until FTTC couldnt get 3/4meg close on 6km from exchange, at best dropouts measured by the hundred a day on ADSL's.
I would put a bet somehow the OP has just had a simple swap to the E-side.
I am quite confident this alum cable now circa 32 years old is the route of my problems, nigh on impossible as you cant speak direct to the right people. I even tried bargaining with BT some years back, swap me over to E side and i will migrate. As you know BT bend over backwards just to get a sale, not so even for that.
Luckily i am only 270 to 300 yards from cab and only get 42meg which they deem a good connection.
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For what its worth i have been trying to get changed over to the E side for at least 7 years. Copper does exist quite a few spare according to last OpenReach engineer normally kept for emergency services and those that supposedly have to have a good conection.
Mean while up until FTTC couldnt get 3/4meg close on 6km from exchange, at best dropouts measured by the hundred a day on ADSL's.
I would put a bet somehow the OP has just had a simple swap to the E-side.
I am quite confident this alum cable now circa 32 years old is the route of my problems, nigh on impossible as you cant speak direct to the right people. I even tried bargaining with BT some years back, swap me over to E side and i will migrate. As you know BT bend over backwards just to get a sale, not so even for that.
Luckily i am only 270 to 300 yards from cab and only get 42meg which they deem a good connection.
Nah, yer getting ripped off there, Johnny. I'd be demanding at least 330Mbps. 'We' deem that to be a good connection.
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FTTC installs are to be at very minimum 15mbps..........so i call bullshit with what the guy is saying regarding BTo replacing 1km alu with copper.
Not quite. :P The quoted 15 Mbps DS is the minimum for the BT Retail Infinity product. Other ISPs/CPs can purchase GEA from your employer, Openreach and supply their FTTC product with whatever speed is attainable. :)
But, yes. Bovine effluvia prevails.
My bad, i was assuming the OP meant full FTTC fibre and not just GEA "faster broadband"