Is fibre broadband worth it in a rural area?

ripplyuk

My broadband is only 1mb at best so I was thinking of upgrading to fibre. It is available in my area but I've just checked and the cabinet is almost a mile and a half away. Would this still be worth paying extra for?

Also, I'd prefer to move my master socket to another room. Does anyone know if they would do this for free if I'm taking a new fibre contract?

macman

What speed prediction do the FTTC line testers give you?
No, moving your master socket would incur an additional charge.

ripplyuk

It says:
FTTC Range A (clean) High 11.4. Low 7
FTTC Range B (impacted) High 9 Low 4.1

Sparx

That's awful for FTTC! However it's still 10x faster than your current connection and would be a huge upgrade regardless.

ripplyuk

It's probably because I'm about 6 miles from the exchange. I only use it for browsing the web/shopping etc. My connection has been dropping a lot recently and the engineer said its because it's so slow and when there is high usage it will drop out completely. I only have one ipad in the house but perhaps even that overloads my 1mb connection. Would fibre improve this?

kwikbreaks

It isn't your own high usage that will cause an issue. In fact it isn't even the volumes at all as there is always ADSL traffic even with no data being carried. The only way "high usage" can impact the stability of your ADSL is the number of ADSL modems turned on in the bundle of cables going to you - the technical term for this is crosstalk. I suspect the technical term for what the engineer was telling you is BS.

What it boils down to is 1Mbps for browsing on an iPad should be adequate although video streaming would be very poor. If you swap to fibre it will almost certainly be more stable and you'll probably find more things you can do with your connetion. Whether that is a worthwhile expense isdown to you.

They won't move the master free but with fibre you should have the option of them fitting an extension to postion the fibre modem in a more convenient position. I think this is called a data extension and you should get the option when ordering. It may be chargeable.

If you decide to take fibre don't forget to do so through a cashback site (TopCashBack or Quidco are the main ones) In fact take the option to choose which supplier you will use and don't just phone your current ISP for an upgrade.

ripplyuk

Could this 'crosstalk' be caused by other people in the area now getting broadband? I ask because my connection was fine before but now it's dropping out all the time and I've no idea why. I was thinking it could be because lots of other people are now using it and getting fibre would help 'compete' with them.

kwikbreaks

Well your problem could be crosstalk especially on a very long line but the usual cause of instability is local (electrical) noise pickup on the internal phone wiring - specifically the ring wire which can act as an antenna and dumps any electrical noise picked up onto one wire of the ADSL signal pair through the ring capacitor in the master socket. http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm discusses how you can ensure that doesn't happen.

With FTTC fibre bypasses a lot of the copper pair which ADSL uses and that is immune to crosstalk but you can still have some from the cabinet to your house. In the speed estimates above Clean assumes minimal crosstalk and Impacted is their best guess of what things would be like with a lot ofcircuits in operation.

If you move over to FTTC you'll get a new master socket and that together with the enforced connection of the modem to the master will eliminate poor house wiring.

One thing that occurs to me is that you mentioned your master socket is placed inconveniently. If you are running your router on a plug in extension then that is the worst possible thing you could do and may well be why you are seeing instability. Plugin extensions carry a ring wire which cannot easilybe isolated so can increase noise pickup.

macman

Worst case: if you only get 4MBps, that's still a 400% increase, and will allow you to stream iPlayer etc, which you cannot do on 1mbps.
Only you can decide if the improvement is worth the extra cost.

Dollardog

Thanks for asking this ripplyuk and thanks kwikbreaks, you have probably explained why I have such slow speed and problems downloading things on I-player etc. My current router - Orange Livebox -is attached to a plug in phone extension which actually has to travel a longish way, it is plugged into the master socket in the hall and has to go round a room to where the router has to be because of the mains plug and the pc. I am going to change to fibre optic and will not be able to have a wired connection to the pc due to not being able to get to the back of it, so will have to be wireless. The phone extension socket also had another device attached which could have probably caused noise on the line? I now no longer need to have that connected. What I could do is plug the new modem - Brightbox 2 - into the master phone socket and run a mains extension lead from the upstairs mains socket to the phone socket to plug the modem into . This would also make it nearer for the wifi signal to my laptop.