News Lords ask for input on broadband plans

I would like to suggest that they stop aiming too high and try to spread the "wealth" a little. It's nice hearing that people in big towns and city will get 100Mbs soon but there are a lot of smaller towns and villages which are stuck on ~2 meg or less in some cases. This needs to be addressed or there'll be a huge digital gulf between them.
My parents are moving to a small village which, for some strange reason is linked to a exchange of another smaller village (as opposed to a town on the other side) with only about 700 residential homes so no upgrade on the exchange is planned. I see no reason why shouldn't pay for the service that we get, should only be reasonable, right?

 

I agree. No good pushing forward to 100mbit and beyond when a lot of places are left on 2. We need to move forward together. And again, I really want to see prices come down too, not just improvements in speed.

The guy from Canada reminds me that they have amazing infrastructure - even though it has to go over snowy mountains and hundreds of miles of wilderness etc.. Here we are on a tiny little island and we still can't get our **** together.

 

BT's FTTC VDSL is about 600m before 40/10 drop's off, copper qualilty will determine as its still used in the last part. however the move to profile 17a this year will see speeds go to 80/20 and extend the distance that 40/10 can be achieved, their is also profile 30a in the future.
Even houses that can only get sub 15meg on FTTC will see a massive improvement over what they could get before.

For new builds fibre should be put in however the issue is of cost and developers not wanting to work with networks to connect the fibre up etc.
BT has already announced that starting in 2013 you will be able to order FTTP where there is a BT FTTC cabinet, cost are unkown at this time as it was only recently announced however come 2014 coverage of FTTC will proably be between 80-90% of UK households.

Openreaches FTTC cabs only has have restrictions in conservation areas, where they need planning permission aside from that, their code powers allow them to install where they like.
Virgin is not interested in expanding their network massively as it would like BT and KC give them SMP and be forced to wholesale, something Virgin is not interested in. Otherwise it would have bidded for the bduk funds itself.

Sewage pipes are not always everywhere espeically as you move out from cities and towns, the biggest problem with using sewage pipes is you need the agreements between the water and telecoms companies- this is where problems occur and costs rise as who gets to carry out the work/who's responsible for damage.

Urban areas will always be ahead of rural areas because the market is larger and is cheaper for a return in invesment, the goverments BDUK funding looks to address the issue between the increase gulf between urban and rural.

The bduk funds allocated to each County Council should see these 'white area's' where no market force will bring superfast broadband (25mbps+) see them brought up to a faster service. BT's FTTC will dominate most of the tenders speeds of currently 40/10 to 80/20 later this year depending on distance from the cabinet your're phone line is connected to.

 

Rural always being behind cities is fair enough, but 50 times slower? Not good.

Actually my mate lives on a farm and he doesn't even get clean water. It's ok to wash in but you wouldn't wanna drink it.

 

nope the SSL thing does not work as its based of IP as well

DOcsis 1.1 i never had issue never (apart form 2 dead 1.1 modems over 7 years), when docsis 3.0 was put in and i upgraded to 50mb it was mostly broke for the first year or 2 at peak times as there bandwidth provider that i get my connection routed to was dropping packets (but anything inside the network was fine like there Download server is inside virgins network so no packet loss so they kept saying its not there issue), the Docsis 1.1 network (at the time i had lots of issues) was not using the same bandwidth provider as the 3.0 network

@ccxo
i have only seen small number of installs i guess yes 500m would still be good (i should work out where the cab is as i got one customer that's only getting 15mb on FTTC so it must be Quite far away, they only got 0.6mb on ADSL so i guess its better then that)

also the Cabs have to be installed where the DP box is (where the older green BT cabs are or the ones with BT ground covers on them) as the FTTC system loops into the phone line from the exchange (phone line would still work when loss of power), still i would not see there been an issue with an FTTC cab been installed

 

Sooooo let me get this. Their currency is just about shot because their almost about to default, and they are concerned with upgrading their Internet infrastructure?

 

that's a good question, i'll have to check.

 

Ive seen quite a few reports of line speed people are getting on FTTC, so 600m is about the average, is quite interesting to see what actual speeds are obtainable on some lines.
15mb is a useable service compared to 0.6mb on asdl so it vastly improves alot of people that are too far away from the exchange etc.

Cabs can be installed up to 100 meters away from the original PCP, just areas of planning conversation ie one area the green cabs had to be coloured black etc to make them more fit it.
Also in Warrington their is 8 exchanges in that area of which 4 exchanges have been enabled, Warrington istelf does not yet have a date but is the largest exchange so will take alot longer to enable.

 

but the daddy Warrington exchange that needs it they get a lot of customers for FTTC as there is a large number of customers that are quite far away, Warrington has not even been considered for FTTC yet so unlikely to see it for 3-6 years (only smaller exchanges are been upgraded Around Warrington that are not that big compared to it)

 

BT's rollout is hard to judge where they go first, a few things that have been seen is they do areas where VM is present first to take away customers from VM and secondly target well off areas etc.

Will proably have Warrington planned, i would assume it would appear in the next exchange announcement from BT, should be mid march.