Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => FTTC and FTTP Issues => Topic started by: IBeAdam on September 01, 2020, 09:07:28 AM
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I’d really appreciate input on whether this seems a good idea, or not.
Currently I have FTTC which up until October last year was stable, if slow. 26 down, 2 up.
I then started getting regular daily (but random) drops and after getting no help from my (then) ISP I moved to A&A. I’ve had many engineers out and spent a huge amount of time (and money) proving it’s not my wiring, equipment etc. Issue has been tracked to degraded cable from pole to ground, however OpenReach will not repair it within any timeframe.
Then almost 3 weeks ago we totally lost internet. Sync ok but no ppp handshake. Error is “ Out Of Sync Fail:GTC_FTTC_SERVICE_1400 DSL port, splitter or Tie Pair issue found most likely near to DSLAM. Continue submitting trouble report.” Despite A&A chasing we still have no internet!
I purchased a Huawei 535 and used the included Three SIM to get us up and running quickly. 4G is more variable and I’ve not yet made any effort to site the router in an optimal location, but at the least we get 26 down, 15 up.
I used the VPN service from A&A to get a fixed IP address and bypass CGNAT.
I have tried my EE SIM and get around 50 down, 45 up.
Initially my thoughts were to use the 4G connection as a backup or load balanced connection. However, I’m now thinking why bother? Why not just go for EE, use A&A VPN and that’ll still save me £10/month in to the bargain.
Summary-
A&A FTTC 26/2 but random drops and currently no internet.
Three + A&A VPN 26/15 minimum, would save £15 month
EE + A&A VPN 50/45 minimum, would save £10 month
Does this sound sensible?
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Sounds good to me.
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My personal experience, granted on Three, is on a good day it can be 50-100Mbit, on a bad day it can be 2Mbit, average is 20Mbit but as it fluctuates second to second, it can still be a pretty crap experience for anything other than web browsing. I also don't find it always works that well with a VPN.
For the same reason, its very rough load-balancing with my VDSL with the 4G, as if the 4G is performing poorly it holds back performance of the VDSL. I do have my games consoles set to load balance across all my WANs, but only because I don't really game online. Mostly its the two VDSL lines doing the heavy lifting though, 4G barely adds anything 99% of the time, it only reaches good speeds in the early morning when everyone is asleep.
It really depends on your local mast, it can be brilliant but it can be all over the place. I'd definitely never consider going 4G exclusively personally, but some people use it without problems.
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Thanks for the replies.
I’ve been monitoring 4G (Three) for the last two weeks, running a Speedtest hourly. It’s never gone below the speed of my FTTC connection. Hopefully EE will be equally as good.
My FTTC connection has been so unreliable, and as I say has been totally down almost 3 weeks now!
I would load balance, but the speeds will be so different (especially upload) I’m not sure it’d work well. I’m also trying to save money - A&A is currently £46/month and for that I get 26/2 and VOIP line.
I could move to Zen, and save £16/month and use that towards a 4G plan. Or stay with A&A for 4G only and use their VPN. Zen+4G would be £55/month (without VPN on 4G). 4G+A&A VPN+VOIP would be £36/month.
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All I can say is I hugely regret signing up for a 24 month contract on Three, but then partly that is because of the pandemic I'm not taking it with me once a month to meet with friends in a pub where the WiFi hardly ever works and partly as my VDSL works fine. So you definitely have a fair point as at LEAST it works.
It really depends how much traffic you use as PAYG can be a good option for a backup, its how I will probably keep 4G in the future.
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I tried a speedtest on my 4G at home the other day - upstairs where my office is I was astonished to get over 120Mbps
Am tempted to try and find some way of piping that into my wired network and load balance across that too - for bulk downloads that would put me at 250Mbps between that and my 2 x FTTC circuits. I have unlimited data with EE, but I believe this is subject to "12 regular devices" on tethering. Not sure how they see that though. I usually tether my two laptops when I'm away though.
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Just a thought: Have you thought about ordering a second DSL line and then ceasing the first one?
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Just a thought: Have you thought about ordering a second DSL line and then ceasing the first one?
This, also how much data do you use a month?
Smarty, three's mvno has much better pricing than Three, 30 day contract and if you still use A&A vpn you will avoid their peering and CGNAT.
What coverage have you got locally, https://cellmapper.net would be able to show what lte bands are available to you
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It’s now 3 weeks that my DSL line has been down.
I’ve been trialing Smarty/AAISP VPN and it’s better than my DSL line (when working) anyway.
I’ve ordered an EE £25/month unlimited plan as signal is better than 3 in this area. As a nice surprise it came with a swappable benefit (which wasn’t advertised) so I’ve picked Apple Music and cancelled my Spotify subscription. Prefer the latter but £10/month saving is welcome.
I usually keep data to < 300gb/month as that’s the AAISP limit, however mobile companies include upload in their calculations, so unlimited is better. It isn’t actually unlimited of course, but 1tb. I don’t know how they get away with advertising it as such.
Need to call AAISP today as £46/month for a broken broadband line is just too much!
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It isn’t actually unlimited of course, but 1tb. I don’t know how they get away with advertising it as such.
I'm not 100% sure but I think they throttle your traffic if you go over, rather than charging a fee or cutting you off. So they get away on a technicality.
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go with ee over three, complete no brainer
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Router up and running on EE. To say I’m pleased is an understatement.
Gone from 26/2 when working (which it hasn’t been for 3 weeks) with daily random drops to this.
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That looks really quite good. :)
It would be interesting to know how the service behaves over 24 hours, then, say, a week . . .
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What worries me is the unreliability of the service and the fear of congestion which is completely out of your control. All it takes is one greedy neighbour. But let’s just be positive and if it works well then fantastic. Just don’t tell anyone else about 4G lest they also switch to it. ;)
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I had hoped they would roll out 5G here so all the heavy users upgraded, freeing up 4G for me to hog. At least until FTTP.
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I’m using the AAISP VPN to negate weird stuff (technical term) on EEs network and also to give me a proper external IP address.
Also running Speedtest-tracker to monitor things every hour (on the half hour). Screen shot attached. Note the first speed increase is when I went from Three to EE and the second is when I moved the router upstairs. Ping also much lower on EE.
I’m hopeful that as the local 4G tower appears to be mainly aimed at users of the motorway the peak congestion may not be too bad. We’ll see. Those high figures from EE are peak Saturday evening and Sunday. Btw fixed line still broken anyway!
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Three seems to be having a good-ish day.
(https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/6473916342.png) (https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/6473916342)
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A month now my internet has been down! Not sure what BT/OpenReach/AAISP are doing, but no resolution appears to be in sight. Last I heard the “lift and shift” in the cabinet failed because they couldn’t find a working connection.
In the meantime my 4G connection is still performing well. At least 50/25 and often faster.
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A month now my internet has been down! Not sure what BT/OpenReach/AAISP are doing, but no resolution appears to be in sight. Last I heard the “lift and shift” in the cabinet failed because they couldn’t find a working connection.
In the meantime my 4G connection is still performing well. At least 50/25 and often faster.
:no: :no: :no:
I'm more puzzled that AA didn't offer you a 4G dongle as a temporary fix.
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:no: :no: :no:
I'm more puzzled that AA didn't offer you a 4G dongle as a temporary fix.
I didn’t even realise they do that sort of thing.
I’m disappointed to be honest. They’re very pleasant and clearly hugely technically competent but haven’t always answered my emailed questions and bottom line is 4 weeks without internet, at a time I’m going through redundancy, trying to do job interviews etc so an internet connection is rather a necessity.
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I’m disappointed to be honest. They’re very pleasant and clearly hugely technically competent but haven’t always answered my emailed questions and bottom line is 4 weeks without internet, at a time I’m going through redundancy, trying to do job interviews etc so an internet connection is rather a necessity.
I would recommend that you tell them exactly the above and ask that the service restoration be expedited. Make it be known that the service supply contract will be terminated and all payments made for the non-existent service will be recovered.
We also have a forum member who is an A&A employee. I would strongly recommend that you send a PM to andrew-AAISP (https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?action=profile;u=9597) to draw his attention to this thread and, thus, your plight.
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I can imagine you are disappointed, rightly so. AA aren’t perfect, but then I suspect no one is.
That suggestion of Burakkucat’s will work. When I’m trying to get something done with them, if no one understands what I’m going on about then as a last result I just drop a line to RevK, the director.
You may already be familiar with this, but note that you can chat to staff and other users live on IRC. That’s an excellent way of getting handholding fast. See
https://www.aa.net.uk/etc/live-chat/
https://support.aa.net.uk/IRC
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When AA went down last weekend, I carried on with the game I was playing on 4g for an hour and it worked fine, the game uses voip as well and there was no voip issues.
I think there will be a point where wireless broadband becomes the only broadband solution for many households as the advancement is very impressive.
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I hear what Chrys is saying, but I think wireless will hit a wall, for another techno analogy: just as single CPU cores are doing now. Also there will always be the problem that wireless is a shared medium, with all the resultant unpredictability of it. If you have a greedy neighbour appearing suddenly and never going away, then you are stuffed, but you’re still paying the same amount for a fraction of the service you used to enjoy. That’s why I would never be interested apart from in conjunction with something fixed; I want something that I can rely on, and I’m interested in the worst possible case. Business users I would think should be using fibre, which has enormous potential for future-proof growth, especially if ducted I suppose. I don’t know if very wideband fibre has problems associated with it, but I’m assuming it’s fair to say that the growth potential is practically unlimited at the moment for the foreseeable future at least.
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We've already hit a wall, its why 5G is largely focused on micro-cells but its hard to say if the pandemic is going to throw a spanner in the works here if people continue to work from home.
Its never going to be practical to have high-speed 5G to every home, unless its fed from a fixed-line service, in which case its really no different to WiFi.
A best-case scenario for a perfect 5G connection will already be surpassed by FTTP and that is WAY more efficient due to latency being predictable due to the characteristic of fibre, vs wireless where you need a ton of leeway due to the constantly fluctuating interference/deflections.
Early reports are that TDMA is doing sweet sod all to improve WiFi performance and the further the signal has to travel, the more you are fighting physics. Short of quantum tunneling, I can't see radio ever replacing fixed lines if you want a reliable, consistently performing service.
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I want something that I can rely on, and I’m interested in the worst possible case.
The problem is this isn’t FTTC, at least not for a large number of people.
In my case FTTP or alternatives are a long, long way off. Our FTTC connection worked ok for a number of years, but almost a year ago now (!) I started getting problems with daily drops. It took 6+ months of jumping through hoops to prove it wasn’t my equipment, which included a considerable expense and time replacing routers, switches, phones, filters, etc etc. Finally I was told to just live with the issue, as it wasn’t that bad! I moved to AAISP and went through further diagnostics (fair enough) for another 3+ months and finally I was with an isp who was prepared to get BT out, however they don’t have any more sway with them than any other and so while the issue was tracked to faulty cabling up the pole, BT won’t prioritise actually fixing it. Then of course, a month ago I lost all connection, due to a different issue apparently in the DSLAM.
In the meantime I’ve been using a 4G router, been getting twice the down speed and 25 times the up, decent pings and no downtime!
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My comment is based on the spots which look to be not getting FTTP, the government is only driven to fulfill rural areas, so urban and suburban areas without FTTP, the future for those people might be wireless for speeds faster than FTTC.
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An update.
My totally broken 26/2 FTTC line was finally fixed Sunday after 5 weeks down. It’s still going to be unreliable though as an ongoing intermittent fault has been traced to a degraded cable from ground to pole, but BT aren’t prioritising fixing it. It took almost 12 months to get that far.
I’ve been monitoring 4G initially intended as a backup. On average I get 50/20, peaking at 90/30 overnight. Lowest is around 26/15. Pings in the low 20’s. No down time at all in the last month.
The 4G has been reliable at a critical time for me - going through redundancy and trying to attend virtual interviews. Plus an autistic son trying to access online learning resources, while attempting to deal with all this change. It was a terrible time for my wired connection to be down, but BT/OpenReach didn’t care.
I have therefore ceased my FTTC line and am going 4G only. I am using the AAISP L2TP VPN to give me a fixed IP and bypass CGNAT.
Monthly savings will be in the region of £20/month and I get some additional data I can gift too.
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Thank you for the update.
You have clearly found a viable Internet access mode for your family's situation. Hopefully it will continue to serve you well.
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The 4G has been reliable at a critical time for me - going through redundancy and trying to attend virtual interviews. Plus an autistic son trying to access online learning resources, while attempting to deal with all this change. It was a terrible time for my wired connection to be down, but BT/OpenReach didn’t care.
Aren't Openreach obliged to prioritise vulnerable people and would your son not qualify as such? Although I can appreciate why you've given up on trying to get the line properly fixed at this point.
I do hope your 4G remains as reliable as it is now, around here on a bad day the latency becomes 2000ms under load so a very different scenario but they are supposedly upgrading the tower this week.
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Hi all,
I’ve been gathering stats every hour for over a month now so thought I’d report back.
Obviously speed tests can be affected by local network activity. Conclusion is I’m extremely happy. Speeds are variable but pretty much always above my old FTTC line, usually significantly so. Uptime has been 100%. The VPN has dropped a couple of times, but the connection remains working. I’m also saving £20/month.