Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => Broadband Technology => Topic started by: cancunia on December 04, 2020, 05:51:32 PM
-
I've just been given a £300k 'quote' by BT under the Universal Service Obligation for upgrading my long line 3Mbps ADSL to FTTP. I don't need or want FTTP, I simply want something better that 3M, even 5 would be better.
I'm wondering if there are any technologies out there that can be used to increase the bandwith without a Full Fibre connection?
There's an All In One cabinet about 2 miles from my house that serves a group of houses near to the cabinet, my long line ADSL goes through the cabinet according to BT, so I'm wondering if an ADSL DSLAM could be installed in that cabinet or some kind of ADSL Loop Extender could be used in the the cabinet ot at the exchange.
Are BT still putting miniature fibre cabinets on top of poles ?
Any thoughts welcome?
-
I've just been given a £300k 'quote' by BT...
:o - picks oneself up from the floor!
Is 4G an option where you live as £300k would pay for a few lifetimes worth of that?
:)
-
:o - picks oneself up from the floor!
Is 4G an option where you live as £300k would pay for a few lifetimes worth of that?
:)
Unfortunately the mobile signal is not usable indoors, I'm using VoWiFi which is in turn affected by the ADSL speed.
I'm guessing that BT Openreach gave such a daft quote rather than go out and do a real survey as they expect it'll cost more than I'm prepared to pay. Apparently they are protected from having to disclose what work is involved when they quote.
-
Have you considered getting a second ADSL line?
I think that for FTTPoD, you have to pay for them to go out and do a real survey.
-
Unfortunately the mobile signal is not usable indoors, I'm using VoWiFi which is in turn affected by the ADSL speed.
What about outdoors? Any mobile providers that have a coverage giving a decent speed? If so, could be viable to fork out a few hundred on an external antenna and a good modem/router.
Perhaps you could see if there are any alt nets covering your area? Or at least give us an indication to roughly where you are located?
-
Thanks for all the suggestions, I was somehow hoping that technology would have caught up with requirements for improved ADSL speeds on long lines.
As mentioned above, there is an All in One cab a couple of miles from my house, so I was hoping that some kind of repeater / booster / ADSL DSLAM could be installed into that cab. From what the Openreach engineer told me last year when he came to fix my line, the speed from the exchange to that cab is 8M & the cab is about half way between my house & the exchange, so a copper ADSL DSLAM in the cab onto my line would probably give me something approaching that speed.
-
An ADSL DSLAM in the cab wouldn't be allowed to perform any better than the VDSL2 DSLAM already in the cab due to the power cut back required to avoid the signals transmitted from the cab interfering with ADSL signals being sent from the exchange. It was trialled, but then they didn't want to do Long Reach VDSL2 because turning up the power transmitted from the cabs would have required stopping exchange based ADSL services on those cabs doing Long Reach VDSL2.
-
There is no such technology that BT/OR are deploying, that I'm aware of, they are now concentrating on FTTP.
You have various options, in no particular order.
Get a quote for FTTP on demand, you can get a free estimate, but will need to pay £250+vat for an accurate quotation. You may be able to get a voucher towards installation costs.
Bond more than one adsl line - Weaver on here has four slower lines than you have bonded.
Investigate external rooftop mobile reception
Investigate alt nets and wireless providers
Satellite broadband, although latency is high
If you post your location people may be able to give better answers.
-
Thanks for the clarifications above around the All in One cab & pole based DSLAM situation.
Bonding ADSL may be an option for QOS, but that does not give higher speeds AFAIK? I've also heard that multiple ADSL connections on a single cable into a property may interfere with each other, crosstalk etc?
I'll track down the other thread mentioned about ADSL Bonding and have a read through.
I read elsewhere that 4G may be a solution offered under the USO. I have a rubbish mobile signal but an outside antenna may resolve that as it's just over the hill from Cadwell Park where there are some very big mobile masts.
-
Hi cancunia,
I have four extremely long ADSL2 lines (7.3 km; 4.5 mi) which all sync at 3Mbps downstream / 500 Mbps upstream, apart from one which for some reason is under 400k upstream. I combine them using IP bonding to get a real 10.5 Mbps down / 1.18 Mbps up according to the Ookla speedtester https://www.speedtest.net (https://www.speedtest.net). The http://testmy.net (http://testmy.net) speedtester claims 1.4 Mbps upstream.
This means that single downloads and uploads are around four times faster, although the result for upstream combined speed is not as good as for downstream.
It’s not cheap but the results are outstanding.
Take no notice of the point about crosstalk; there will be crosstalk with your neighbours’ lines if not with your own, so the competitors might as well be your own lines.
You need a suitable ISP and a suitable router to combine the lines together for downstream and upstream respectively.
-
Hi cancunia,
I have four extremely long ADSL2 lines (7.3 km; 4.5 mi) which all sync at 3Mbps downstream / 500 Mbps upstream, apart from one which for some reason is under 400k upstream. I combine them using IP bonding to get a real 10.5 Mbps down / 1.18 Mbps up according to the Ookla speedtester https://www.speedtest.net (https://www.speedtest.net). The http://testmy.net (http://testmy.net) speedtester claims 1.4 Mbps upstream.
This means that single downloads and uploads are around four times faster, although the result for upstream combined speed is not as good as for downstream.
It’s not cheap but the results are outstanding.
Thanks for the info, looks very interesting. Can you give any info on how the IP bonding is achieved, is that something you did yourself, or do you pay for a service?
-
I use a router that speaks IP bonding. My ISP specifically supports line bonding as a service and if one line goes down they redirect the traffic to the other lines and my router does a similar thing in relation to upstream. Since my lines’ upstream speeds are not equal, my router has been told by me how to split the traffic between the various lines; that is, what fraction to send to each according to individual speed values that I have given it. Regarding downstream, my ISP gets per-line speed values dynamically from BT and these change within a few seconds of the lines’ sync speeds changing and the sync speeds are down-converted by being multiplied by a suitable number, something link 0.87 iirc; I use 0.884434 * 0.95 * sync_rate (for ADSL2) as my chosen IP throughout rate (ie including the cost of IP headers and all other overhead).
To answer some questions you had from before: BT did a trial some years ago in the Isle of Lewis (Eilean Leòdhais) at Tolastadh fo Thuath where they put in an FTTC-type cabinet with long copper lines coming from it to the not that nearby houses. That contained LR-VDSL2 modems with a unique configuration, and it worked well, I believe, because (I assume) the tx power was high and there was no competition from old ADSL / ADSL2+ users, and I believe it worked well despite the fairly long distances from the houses to the LR-VDSL2 FTTC cab. However BT didn’t extend this trial into a widespread rollout because of the problem of existing users need ing to all agree to upgrade to LR-VDSL2 service (unless they just changed it without people’s agreement, as happened with ADSL Max), and certainly would need to upgrade their modems to handle LR-VDSL2 in some cases. I seem to remember that it was discussed in an old thread here somewhere, but memory fails me. Another reason why it wasn’t followed up my be that by then BT knew they were going to replace absolutely everything with FTTP at some point in the not incredibly distant future.
By the way, you don’t need four lines; bonding two together would be better than bonding four (even more efficient still), as in my experience the efficiency regarding upstream goes down a lot when you go from three lines to four - three lines or fewer has very good results. Having said that regarding downstream, the combined downstream results even for four lines are very good still, I feel. I wrote a thread about my combined efficiency some time back, with many many numbers in it. ;)
I pay my ISP for IP-only (no voice) service on each line and then on top of that I pay a variable amount for download by total bytes downloaded but other charging schemes are available (I don’t understand all the options; it’s very confusing). Uploads are free (effectively), although with TCP an upload involves a certain small amount of return ACK (ie downstream) traffic. So the costs are a modest amount fixed per each line and a variable amount according to the amount you have downloaded each month. I do a lot of large downloads in the middle of the night (02:00-05:59 BST; ie 01:00-04:59 during BST summer time) because at that time downloading 1 TB [!] costs £3.90 (+VAT? who knows)
Since I have no voice service I have tried VoIP but it didn’t work too well because of the low upstream speed I think, or because of the dissimilar upstream speeds, so instead I have configured things using my ISP’s control panel (at clueless.aa.net.uk) so that VoIP coming into our phone number is redirected to my wife’s EE mobile phone. We have good 4G here, because despite the remote location (once you get out of the village, in which we are the northernmost house, onto the moor you can go 3.5 miles approx without seeing another house or wall or hedge or fence or even tree. And across the glen, in direct line of sight, we have the 4G basestation looking right at us.
One weird thing, discussed elsewhere, about my combined upstream is that it used to be (reported!) as a slightly higher 1.3 Mbps instead of the current 1.15-1.18 Mbps at times but not too long ago I was getting a reported combined result of 1.55 Mbps upstream. It could be or maybe should be due to changes in the speedtesters’ code.
-
Thanks for the clarifications above around the All in One cab & pole based DSLAM situation.
Bonding ADSL may be an option for QOS, but that does not give higher speeds AFAIK? I've also heard that multiple ADSL connections on a single cable into a property may interfere with each other, crosstalk etc?
I'll track down the other thread mentioned about ADSL Bonding and have a read through.
I read elsewhere that 4G may be a solution offered under the USO. I have a rubbish mobile signal but an outside antenna may resolve that as it's just over the hill from Cadwell Park where there are some very big mobile masts.
Weaver uses https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:Bonding
What's your 4G reception like from an upstairs window in the direction of your nearest suitable mast. As an experiment you could get PAYG sims from the other networks and try them presuming you have an unlocked phone.
ETA. To add to Weaver post, there's more info on LR VDSL here https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/04/openreach-start-removing-lr-vdsl-broadband-from-uk-trial-areas.html
-
Costs for traffic are not cheap and if you do a lot of downloads in the office daytime hours 09:00-18:00 then it’s really expensive and so in that case you would probably want a ‘quota’ charging scheme where you buy a large amount of download for a modest amount per month, but I’m not using that charging scheme and my memory has failed me you would have to ask for details.
The whole thing is not cheap, but compared to £300k is bargain of the century. My copper lines are very cheap per line. My router is around £660 iirc so not domestic kit pricing, but it’s a superb unit which I would have chosen anyway even if I was not doing IP bonding. Second hand units can be bought on ebay for cheap money but I think it’s a false economy because buying a new one gives you unlimited free support and configuration for your setup. I use two really old ZyXEL WAPs for wireless LAN service and they were incredibly expensive when I bought them many many moons ago (around £400 each) but much more modern WAPs are available now.
-
I am not at all keen on 4G. I have thought about going 4G a lot over the years. I would dissuade you from going that way for a number of reasons that I won’t repeat here once again - see my old threads, which someone may help us to track down. Dreadful latency, never knowing what your speed is going to be, because of contention with neighbours and unreliability- our 4G occasionally disappears for a couple of days, not often but too much for me as `i require an ultra-reliable service.
I have 4G data SIMs in my ipads that have real (ie global static routable) IPv4 addresses associated with them. I have an emergency portable 4G router too.
With two or especially three DSL lines bonded together the reliability should be almost 100% and since I also have 3G failover backup (seamless, as best as I can arrange it, switchover aka ‘failover’ to backup 3G) then my reliability is for all intents and purposes 100% ie no downtime. If I get my whole UPS system and petrol generator sorted for emergence power supply in the event of mains power failure then it should be really close to 100%; power cuts are very infrequent. Lightning strikes are the biggest threat to my reliability and to my wallet.
-
My 3G failover system is orovided by a USB ‘dongle’ 3G NIC which looks like a modem to the router and the router switches over diverting traffic to 3G when all copper lines fail at the same time. My ISP does a PPP LCP ‘ping’ (not an ICMP usual ping, but they can do the latter too) of each of my lines every few seconds and my router similarly PPP LCP pings some [? which ???] router at the ISP end every few seconds similarly to test whether or not each line is up, so if one link goes down then it redirects upstream traffic. If my router detects all lines really going down at the same time, it then switches over to 3G instead.
So both the ISP and my own router know from one second to the next whether a link is really up or down by testing all the way to the far end; ie a modem might report that a line is ‘up’ but there is an outage further away so the link effectively is still no good, but since we use end-to-end test continuously we really know whether the link is truly working or not (and we also know the latency too).
I have a program I wrote running in my iPad that talks to all my four modems (which contain custom firmware written by my friend here ‘johnson’ ;D ) and the program queries each modem for sync rates down and up. It converts the upstream rate received from sync rate to IP PDU rate (using the aforementioned multiplication) and generates an appropriate snippet of router XML config containing correct speed limits upstream for each modem (hence the 0.95 ‘modem loading factor’ which is used as well as the ‘protocol efficiency factor’ which for you and for me would be 0.884434 assuming your ADSL2 like me has a 32 byte protocol overhead for the combined total of all ADSL protocols below IP). This snippet of XML is inserted into an XML config file template and then the combined result is uploaded into my router. This means that the upstream speeds are set correctly for each line whenever I run the program, but this is not automatic, I have not yet got this to run on a monitoring server and change the speeds when needed. In any event that might not be such a good thing, since changing the ‘upstream egress rates’ on a link results in a tiny downtime, hardly noticeable, but it does happen if the old and new speeds differ. So I don’t routinely do it, not unless a link’s speed has gone down significantly.
-
My modems are all ZyXEL VMG 1312-B10As containing johnson’s excellent firmware; they are in straight modem-only mode. `here are thr current speeds:
Live sync rates:
#1: down 3122 kbps, up 528 kbps
#2: down 3066 kbps, up 576 kbps
#3: down 3096 kbps, up 396 kbps
#4: down 3139 kbps, up 570 kbps
—
Firebrick current upstream rate limiters' IP PDU tx rates (egress speeds), in-force right now ::
#1: 443632 bps
#2: 483962 bps
#3: 332724 bps
#4: 478920 bps
Total combined rate: 1.739238 Mbps (note: that latter is a theoretical combined total; what it should be, not what it is.)
Fractional speed contributions:
#1: 25.507%
#2: 27.826%
#3: 19.130%
#4: 27.536%
--
Obtained from live-querying the Firebrick.
-
I'm now at the point where it's become clear that BT's offerings for the USO are FTTP & 4G via EE.
In 2018 LR-VDSL which was for a while seen as the answer to cabinet based improvements to long copper lines was withdrawn after the PoC leaving the 2 options above.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/04/openreach-start-removing-lr-vdsl-broadband-from-uk-trial-areas.html
It's not really worth getting into why LR-VDSL did not fly, it's simply not available any more, at least not for now. Maybe an alternative will appear at some point.
I'm going to see what happens when my MP's office reply to my complaint and will report back if anything useful happens.
In the mean time, many thanks to those that have replied to my post.
-
A speed test today using my own ISP’s speed tester at https://speedtest2.aa.net.uk (https://speedtest2.aa.net.uk) give 10.6 Mbps downstream and a miserable 1.0 Mbps upstream; testmy.net at https://testmy.net/upload (https://testmy.net/upload) gives a rather better 1.3Mbps upstream and 1.4Mbps some days. I can’t guarantee that there isn’t some other source of traffic using my own link here as my wife may be using the internet right now.
My router is a Firebrick FB2900 with the ‘fully loaded’ software load, which is required to support IP bonding. It’s a stunning firewall/router aside from the thing about bonding; it’s extremely powerful, superbly built and it comes with limitless lifetime support and help with configuring it as you need it. You can either get it all configured for you ready to go or you can configure it yourself and you or your reseller (typically aa.net.uk). See:
https://www.aa.net.uk/firebrick/ (https://www.aa.net.uk/firebrick/)
https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:FireBrick (https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:FireBrick)
All the manuals are available on the web too, eg: https://download.firebrick.co.uk/manuals-plain.php?PRODUCT=2900 (https://download.firebrick.co.uk/manuals-plain.php?PRODUCT=2900) so you can read all about one.
I’ve only just remembered that Firbricks can now be rented very cheaply which is great if our don’t have nearly £700 burning a hole in your pocket. I regularly get lightning strikes being so high and exposed where I am (some half a mile north of IV499BN) with such long copper lines and some years back I asked about repair costs for my Firebrick FB2700 router and AA (from whom I had bought it) just gave me a new device foc! ;D I was definitely delighted.
Rental details:
https://www.aa.net.uk/firebrick/rental/ (https://www.aa.net.uk/firebrick/rental/)
I have being moaning in and on for years and years about how good this device is in terms of its build quilts, power and outstanding ease of use, so before I get rightly banned, I shall suggest trawling through older threads where I have written a lot about the FB2500 FB2700 and now FB2900 firewall-routers.