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[Weaver]

Two lines went bad last weekend: #2 and #3. (Line #2 is the new one put in last summer, the most recent one, and #3 is the second one installed, which was summer 2010, iirc.)

Engineer was called out on Thursday morning and phoned my wife to say that he had fixed some faults on two lines. Notes mention d-side but are otherwise very lacking in detail and are for some reason full of lies, and wildly and self-evidently incorrect as they are self-contradictory.

So here we go again. Yet another incident involving bad copper wires. How many faults is that in total over the last couple of months now?

Is there something that can be arranged with Openreach to put an end to this cornucopia of faults? Is there some procedure for reviewing large amounts of recidivist copper?

[banger]

4g Unlimited SIM.

[tickmike]

Half the time we do not even get 3g or even 2g let alone 4g , so not everywhere gets a good phone signal in 2019 

[Weaver]

We get good 4G here but sometimes that just disappears. It’s a good point tho.

Now I have four copper lines and 3G as well, set up for fast failover then it’s highly resilient and I don’t notice even two lines going bad simultaneously. It’s the hassle factor of having to manage all of it while I’m really ill. (Pain has been frightening this week.)

I just wondered if anyone had had experience of some sort of preemptive escalation type thing within Openreach - if such a thing exists. Wonder what there is available to AA.

[Weaver]

I’m trying to remember, I could try looking back through my old posts.

I think I have had one fault per line per year roughly, maybe less. But recently there seems to be this stream on faults. Whack-a-mole for AA.

[j0hn]

Is there something that can be arranged with Openreach to put an end to this cornucopia of faults? Is there some procedure for reviewing large amounts of recidivist copper?

No such service I'm afraid.

AAISP could likely quote you for a whole bunch of other more reliable services but given your location the costs would likely be huge.

It's a real shame FTTPoD isn't a possibility as although it can be expensive to install the rental savings over a few years vs 4 bonded ADSL lines would be considerable.

There appears to be zero FTTP of any kind on the Broadford exchange unfortunately.

[burakkucat]

I shudder to think of the granite rock-blasting that would be required to provide a ducted, optical fibre based, Ethernet Access Direct (EAD) link from the Broadford exchange to Torr Gorm. 

[Bowdon]

I wonder if there are any of these satellite isp's that can offer a service in your area?

I've never looked in to satellite offerings but some of them seem like a fairly reasonable price, especially vs 4 ADSL lines.

[burakkucat]

There is a word, of which one becomes aware, with a satellite based service . . . and that word is latency. 

[jelv]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access

A radio signal takes about 120 milliseconds to reach a geostationary satellite and then 120 milliseconds to reach the ground station, so nearly 1/4 of a second. Typically, during perfect conditions, the physics involved in satellite communications account for approximately 550 milliseconds of latency round trip time.

[j0hn]

I personally wouldn't use Satellite, for exactly the reason B*cat said, latency.
Price is high and usage limits are low also.

Satellite ISP's tend not to operate in specific areas. If you can see the sky....

Microwave links and TVWS would be more appropriate but I believe Weaver is extremely happy with his ISP.

[johnson]

Wasn't there a TVWS WISP that came around here a few months ago talking about symmetric 50mbps+?

I would bite their hand off if they offered it here.. in a BDUK area.

Skye seems like it would be a perfect place for such a service.

[Weaver]

There was a friend of Kitz who talked to us about TV whitespace services. Don’t know enough about this technology - I think it’s intelligent R.F. ? I’m very wary about (very variable) shared bandwidth systems where you might end up next door to another user who eats up all the bandwidth one day and there’s nothing you can do if there’s no guaranteed minimum performance - ring-fenced bandwidth per user.

One of my copper lines #1 is very good. I’m generally happy with the copper but recently it’s just been silly.

I talked to AA, who agreed with what has been said here, that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of review / escalation procedure within Openreach for bad copper. You just keep up the game of whack-a-mike and Openreach or BTW and AA keep on repeatedly wasting money on fault repairs.

Perhaps when OR has had enough of the repair costs, if they are not recouping them by charging someone, then they will do something about replacing the copper with new copper or fibre optics. I don’t know who is bearing the costs of all the repairs.

[ejs]

I'm not convinced that any typical broadband service really has any guaranteed minimum throughput performance or ring-fenced bandwidth per user. But this doesn't stop some people moaning the second they're not getting their full line speed in a speedtest.

[Weaver]

You’re of course certainly right about the total whole-path bandwidth in internet acces, as there might be insufficient backhaul or bottlenecks further upstream. I myself don’t experience such limitations and my ISP, AA has a publicised policy of ‘we will not be the bottleneck’, adding capacity so as to keep this true. I was imprecise and I should have said that my DSL link to the exchange, which is the obvious extremely serious bottleneck, is not shared,. And my own maximum traffic rates are so low in any case that the link within BT further upstream is not remotely likely to ever be an issue. Also I pay an extra £12 for traffic prioritisation within BT and AA anyway.

Psychology: I don’t like the idea much of the bottleneck link in an internet access path being shared, not ring fenced. But that’s just me. It’s the uncertainty, even if practically a service were fast most or all of the time but was such that there was a possibility that things could change and it could go very bad due to a rogue user. Service providers can always artificially ringfence bandwidth of course, in a number of very difference ways. It just means that they would have to charge a lot, or even way too much for the majority of users, who do not care about performance, just cost.

I’ve never ever experienced access link performance droop / wilt at peak times, not even in the bad old days.