Kitz Forum
Chat => Introductions => Topic started by: ryan2390 on January 07, 2016, 06:26:16 PM
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Hello All
My name is Ryan and while rooting around for information about 3rd party VDSL routers for my grandfather I happened upon this site and remembered an acquaintance suggested I should join.
I live in the rural village of Ockley in Surrey and in the part of the village in which I reside has recently been 'enabled' for FTTP. If permitted I would like to post in the FTTC/FTTP sub forum with a diary of sorts of the installation. If anyone has any suggestions as to how I might begin I would appreciate it.
Until then I can tell you that when I first moved here we had ADSL and a few years ago we got upgraded if you will to ADSL2 and now enjoy speeds of around 5.5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up. On a good day with the wind in the right direction it can reach up to 6Mbps down. Not bad for a 5km line! I get a better sync speed than BT Home Hubs and for that matter the JDSU (I think it's called) equipment Openreach engineers use. Current equipment is an Asus DSL-N55U which I am also after getting some assistance with at some point.
Anyway hope to learn a few things and maybe even dispense some things I have learned :fingers:
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Welcome Ryan!
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Thank you very much Weaver.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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Welcome Ryan. :)
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Hi Ryan. :)
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Hello Ryan, welcome to the Kitz forum.
Living in Ockley, Surrey, you are right in the region covered by Walter's Wheelbarrow. There is a good chance that it has trundled past your abode whilst assisting others with sub-optimal broadband connections. :)
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Hello Ryan, welcome to the Kitz forum.
Living in Ockley, Surrey, you are right in the region covered by Walter's Wheelbarrow. There is a good chance that it has trundled past your abode whilst assisting others with sub-optimal broadband connections. :)
Walter's Wheelbarrow? Never head that before! But yes I was put in touch with Walter on Twitter via Chris Conder and he has been exceptionally helpful.
Thanks for the welcomes too. I take it you would be interested in what is happening with my FTTP installation?
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> I take it you would be interested in what is happening with my FTTP installation?
Very much so. Yes please! ::)
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Oh, and I hate you Ryan ??? ;D ;D ;D
<jk/>
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Hi Ryan and welcome to the forums.
Don't take Weavers joke to heart, he's just jealous. He's got three lines which are about 4.6 miles long and gets a combined 7Mbps or thereabouts.
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Indeed, Ryan ! I'm just as jealous as hell. ;D ;D ;D ::)
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Walter's Wheelbarrow? Never head that before! But yes I was put in touch with Walter on Twitter via Chris Conder and he has been exceptionally helpful.
So you are one of Walter's satisfied clients. Purrfect! :)
. . . I take it you would be interested in what is happening with my FTTP installation?
Yes, please. We all have an interest in the technology.
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Oh, and I hate you Ryan ??? ;D ;D ;D
<jk/>
:lol:
Quite understandable Weaver. Quite understandable indeed!
When it finally gets installed I'll be finally free of high resistance faults, water ingress and I won't have to spend three nights downloading a 30GB game. As and when it's turned on and settled I'll be pushing it to it's limit. See what it can and can't do. Until then any large files I download at my grandfather's address as he has 75Mbps VDSL2.
But yes I am looking forward to it. Think I will post what has happened so far this evening so keep your eyes peeled :)
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Gentlefolk,
Although I have visited and confirmed a rather poor ADSL service, I cannot claim to have satisfied Ryan and neither has BT Openreach so far !
Sadly this probably won't be much of an exploration of technology but rather navigating around the arcane processes involved once wayleaves have been agreed, new duct and fibre eventually installed. If I recall the FTTH was due to be installed on 10 November with the whole job completed by 20 November last year.
It's interesting to note that BT Wholesale seem too embarrassed to quote an expected upstream speed so perhaps gathering some ping and speed test data could be of marginal interest.
Kind regards
Walter
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Gentlefolk,
Although I have visited and confirmed a rather poor ADSL service, I cannot claim to have satisfied Ryan and neither has BT Openreach so far !
Sadly this probably won't be much of an exploration of technology but rather navigating around the arcane processes involved once wayleaves have been agreed, new duct and fibre eventually installed. If I recall the FTTH was due to be installed on 10 November with the whole job completed by 20 November last year.
It's interesting to note that BT Wholesale seem too embarrassed to quote an expected upstream speed so perhaps gathering some ping and speed test data could be of marginal interest.
Kind regards
Walter
Walter you have been exceedingly helpful for which I am eternally grateful.
As for the FTTH if/when it get's installed I will be pushing it as best I can and if you wish you can come and try it for yourself! Perhaps I could arrange with the parish council for it to be installed in the village hall for demonstrations and to put pressure on BT to extend it to the rest of the village ;) :lol:
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Go for it, get other potential users drooling at the thought too. Reliable internet connections, what a change that might be.
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Go for it, get other potential users drooling at the thought too. Reliable internet connections, what a change that might be.
Especially as the poor sods in the southern half of the village are stuck with FTTC
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There's plenty of debate surrounding FTTP v FTTC within this site. I will personally stick my neck out and say that the vast majority of EU's are quite happy with FTTC speeds, I know I am.
It simply comes down to two questions ……..
1) Do you really need 330Mbps+.
2) Are you prepared to pay for it.
Again, I reckon the demograph that will answer 'Yes' to those two questions will be around 5% of the population, with most of those being made up of business EU's. Obviously, nothing scientific here, just my opinions. :)
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I respectfully disagree. Surely FTTP has to be fantastically reliable? This is the attraction for me. It may be that FTTC lines are too short to present a lightning risk, but for me the lightning risk if it's there is another killer point in favour of glass not copper.
BlackSheep is completely right about his 330Mbps thing. But if I were buying my current house now, I'd be happy to pay an extra £20k or so for FTTP. I didn't think about it when I was flush.
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Do I need 330Mbps? No
Are we prepared to pay for it? Yes.
I live with my family and I'm confident we could use the 70Mbps or so if you're close to a VDSL cabinet. Granted not all the time but still. I know from experience I can saturate a 65Mbps cable connection and that's just me. When I found out how much work is going to to be involved to bring FTTP to us I almost wanted them to say stuff it and give us VDSL. Trouble is there are very few good pairs left if any at all and the line is prone t water ingress so FTTP would mean we no longer have to rely on poor quality cables.
So even if BT change their minds and only give us 100Mbps over fibre then that's better than anything over copper. In my view anyway.
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The other point about 330 Mbps is that it's divided amongst n users in the household. If you have a large number of occupants then not having to struggle over bandwidth is worth a lot.
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Hi ryan and welcome. :)
I dont have time to write an epic post, but at the end of the day it is down to cost. I would love FTTH, but do I view it as an essential no. Im not anti-BT and Im not pro-BT, just a realist when it comes to who is going to pay for this.
JerseyTelecom is a good example.. or rather bad example. Many years ago it was said we should follow the path of Jersey whereby state funded half of the roll-out. Since then, theres been hiccups and delays and its still not complete. Someone did the maths once on here and we are talking many billions. You cant compare the UK with Jersey because it has no vast Welsh mountains, Pennine and remote scottish highlands. Whats-his-face who was behind all the BT slagging off and directing the JT rollout seems to have gone rather quiet for the past few years on that subject. Jersey is minute when compared to the size of the UK.
BT cant fund this alone, no company who has to report to shareholders can. No-one else aside from BT was even interested in tendering for the remote areas. When it comes to gov funding, which is more important 30bn for fibre or 30bn to the NHS. Tough choice :(
wwwombat made a very good post last week or so about take up of higher speed products. In the uk we pay about £20 for upto 80/20. Compare with JT (http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/Personal/JT-Fibre/Fibre-Tariffs/Tariff-details/) who dont even have VAT so true cost would be higher.
I cant afford to pay much more than I do, and it was one of the reasons why I personally delayed upgrading from adsl to fttc.
The one UK exception is B4RN.. whose success is down to the technical expertise of Barry Forde et-al and the fact that knowledge and labour etc is all given for free.
I agree with walter that fttp is reliable and it is the future. The problem is who is going to pay for it?
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> which is more important 30bn for fibre or 30bn to the NHS
I think my opinion on that is the same as yours. ;D
I think the users have to be st least given the opportunity of paying for it. Giving high speed internet to a lot of users who aren't even that bothered about speed makes no sense. My sister got ADSL 0.5 Mbps fixed for the first time. I asked her how she found it compared with dial-up. She said she couldn't tell much difference.
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It's not only cost - its also time.
FTTC represents the least worse (if you must) compromise of getting in practical terms, best possible BB speeds to the most people in the least time, for the least cost.
You have to ask the apocryphal village of Little Snoring on the Wolds whether they would like FTTC reasonable quickly or would they like to be on the end of a 10 year wait for FTTP after all of Manchester and Birmingham was completed.
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@c6em I might suggest that the people of littlesnoring be done first, as their speeds may (possibly) be really bad and they may be at lightning risk. If not then they don't get to the top of the list. Do the relatively few people who are really desperate first, and give people a chance to pay, because that's a measure of how much they want it. If they aren't willing to pay anything, then they don't actually want it badly, they just think they do.
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*snip*
BT cant fund this alone, no company who has to report to shareholders can. No-one else aside from BT was even interested in tendering for the remote areas. When it comes to gov funding, which is more important 30bn for fibre or 30bn to the NHS. Tough choice :(
*snip*
I agree with walter that fttp is reliable and it is the future. The problem is who is going to pay for it?
I'm not after creating a political debate as it's not really appropriate for the location nor do I really want to in the first place. I will however say that we could potentially do both if we scrapped a certain railway project. But like I say I don't want to start a political debate.
Whilst I and others would love to see a national FTTH rollout it simply won't happen and should I unfortunately have to move I would be happy enough with 80Mbps. Even 50Mbps. Ideally I'd like a little more than that and given the choice between conventional FTTC or cable I'd go for cable probably. If BT are told they can't install FTTH here and they could guarantee me a reliable connection with no interference on the RF spectrum by installing a DSLAM for VDSL at my DP I'd say go for it. It's better than the 5.5Mbps I get now.
Anyway hi kitz and thank you for the welcome.My Gramps pays a little more than you do and as long as he gets what he pays for he's happy. Poor bugger can't figure out netflix but knows how to do a speed test. I made sure of that when he got his VDSL service. Gives him a good excuse to have fun winding me up as to ho fast his internet is ;)
The other point about 330 Mbps is that it's divided amongst n users in the household. If you have a large number of occupants then not having to struggle over bandwidth is worth a lot.
We recently experienced this sort of issue just after Christmas. My sister had been given a playstation 4 and I had just purchased a game which required a large amount of content downloading after I had installed it from disk. 5.5Mbps between two people wanting to download around 30GB of data was not an ideal situation. I think it is in these sorts of situations where the high bandwidth comes into it's own and it is only going to get worse when 4k streaming becomes the norm like HD streaming has done.
There is also, in my mind at least, the issue of power consumption. Downloading a game from steam for example to my PC currently requires me to leave my PC on overnight sometimes for multiple nights to download something so the other people in my house can use the internet. I don't know how much there is in it but I bet we would use less energy if I didn't leave my PC on overnight. Just a thought anyway.
Anyway as I type this sentence it is 0307 in the morning and I had better be off to bed. :)
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I respectfully disagree. Surely FTTP has to be fantastically reliable? This is the attraction for me. It may be that FTTC lines are too short to present a lightning risk, but for me the lightning risk if it's there is another killer point in favour of glass not copper.
BlackSheep is completely right about his 330Mbps thing. But if I were buying my current house now, I'd be happy to pay an extra £20k or so for FTTP. I didn't think about it when I was flush.
...................... which makes you part of what I would call, the 5% Weaver. TBH, you are the very first EU to have even taken lightning strikes into consideration, when debating the FTTC/FTTP debate. It's obviously a real threat to you ............. but for the VAST majority of the country, it won't even enter their radar.
I reiterate ...... this call for FTTP only suits the very few, IF you really want it and cost isn't an issue then you CAN get it. I would shudder to think of how much it would cost you where you live, Weaver, so would you expect a shareholding business to fork out a few hundred thousand pounds that they will simply never accrue ??
As kitz has pointed out ...... Wombat put together an incredibly thought-provoking post regarding this subject. It explains the debate using fact and his own thoughts in a far better manner than I could ever do. I'd tag it here but can't be arsed looing for it. ;D ;D ;D
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As always BlackSheep makes very valid points. I don't expect BT to provide these unreasonable services, it's up to government to do the right thing. And there are other priorities.
And BlackSheep is quite right about lightning. It can't be a risk to most FTTC users because their lines are so very short, and many users are just lucky because of the trend to use wireless routers, so their kit is electrically insulated and even the router typically has no earth. But to many rural users it is an absolute killer if they use wired networking, with several house fires known to me being started by BT wiring. The weather here is simply ridiculous at times, people in the south have no idea, but all the locals are used to it.
So in fact BlackSheep and I are more in agreement than my rant might suggest. I'd like some government help to get the cost of FTTP or FTTRN right down by improvements in the efficiency of installation by cash and by legislative powers that would help BT.
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Debate is great, Weaver. :)
My own opinion is that the Government won't be investing anymore than they do now (BDUK) anytime soon. Which is why the hiving off of Openreach from BT would be a backward step, with regard to investment into all things DSL.
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@BlackSheep - much respect as always
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FWIW, I live in a semi-rural area almost on top of the Pennine hills with an open aspect, in the NW of England & my FTTC connection has been hit by lightning twice since 2011.
However, most of the cabling from the cabinet is below ground, leaving around 40m or so exposed to the elements.
Each time, the damage was only to the ssfp.
I originally had a Mk1 faceplate which was replaced with another Mk 1.
The second time, the Mk1 faceplate was replaced with a Mk2.
On both occasions, there was no damage whatsoever to the HG612 modem, the router or anything else.
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The most recent of many occurrences was a few months ago, when I only lost one modem (out of three). The router survived. I'm getting specialist insurance, as before I've lost a switch and a £2500 server was bricked utterly. Before that I've lost ports on routers mainly.
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@Bald_Eagle1 out of sheer nosiness, where abouts are you? (PM if prefer) I have a particular love of the entire Pennine chain, coming from Derby I started exploring parts further north than my native Peak District in the 1980s as often as I could, then living in London, but my parents had a Farm just south of the edge of the National Park, in Staffordshire, very near Alton Towers (in fact visible with binoculars amazingly). Until I moved to Skye in 1998, I visited all latitudes of the Pennines as often as possible.
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@Bald_Eagle1 out of sheer nosiness, where abouts are you?
I live on the Oldham/Saddleworth border, around 1000ft above sea level with fantastic views. (I can see Jodrell Bank, Manchester Airport & the Welsh hills on clear days).
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@BkackSheep much respect as always
Back at ya, Weaver ;D ;D