Would fibre be worth it?

Towbar

LazyTyper wrote: »

I should point out that as more people on the same cabinet get Fibre broadband then the estimated speeds will prove to be true. This is just due to cross-talk.

Not So. As soon as there are more customers than individual output terminals in the box which supplies them, the VM engineers piggy-back by connecting as many individual feeds as possible to each terminal. When these box terminals will take no more they use trick 2. They split the customer end of the feeds so that they can connect as many properties as possible to each. One Box terminal.....Four customer feeds...Four splits = SIXTEEN customers connected to ONE output. No wonder the speeds achieved are a joke !!!

kwikbreaks

Towbar wrote: »

LazyTyper wrote: »

I should point out that as more people on the same cabinet get Fibre broadband then the estimated speeds will prove to be true. This is just due to cross-talk.

Not So. As soon as there are more customers than individual output terminals in the box which supplies them, the VM engineers...

LazyTyper was discussing FTTC not cable broadband and what he said is 100% true. What tricks VM engineers get up to is irrelevant as from the OP's comments on available speeds he is talking about FTTC and not VM cable.

With cable ALL the customers are fed by the same coax from the optical node anyway regardless of how the taps on the cabinet get split and over used. VM are well known for allowing far too many customers per channel group though.

Towbar

I am baffled now. If FTTC means Fibre To The Cabinet and my broadband, phone,and tv services are all sent from the cabinet to me and from me back to the cabinet via a fibre optic cable why are my observations/experiences irrelevant because the fibre optic cable is owned by VM

kwikbreaks

If you are on FTTC the fibre part of the circuit ends at your street cabinet and the rest of it is twisted pair cable to the VDSL modem in your house. The telephone circuit uses that same twisted pair. Each subscriber has their own dedicated twisted pair. That fibre and twisted pair is owned by Openreach (a BT Group company)

If you are on VM cable the fibre part of the circuit ends at an optical node cabinet up to half a mile from you. From there the signal is carried by coaxial cable to your DOCSIS cable modem. Any telephone circuit provided uses a twisted pair not the coax. Many susbscribers share the same coaxial cable but it has far higher potential bandwidth than a twisted pair but a lot of that goes to providing TV which shares the same cable. That fibre, twisted pair, and coax is owned by VM.

The only time you get your circuit entirely over fibre is if you have FTTP and that is only a small proportion of UK broadband customers.

FTTC and cable broadband are completely different technologies.

Threepints

kwikbreaks wrote: »

FTTC and cable broadband are completely different technologies.

As I am about to find out. I've had VM for years and been happy with them but am now moving to an area that VM do not serve so I am having to go over to (initially) BB. As it's a new build no ISP will give me a definite speed.

From googling various sites etc I suspect I will eventually get up 56Mb Infinity but for now I am being promised up to 8Mb .

System shock on the way

forgotmyname

Its funny that people think super fast broadband will allow webpages to download faster.

Unless you have dialup and moving to fibre there will be very little difference.

Even downloading the js for this site goes from 8 seconds on dialup to 1.5 seconds on a 5mb connection.
Going from 3 to 5 or 3 to 8 will make little difference and the way your browser chooses to display the page could be the bottleneck.

Towbar

kwikbreaks wrote: »

If you are on FTTC the fibre part of the circuit ends at your street cabinet and the rest of it is twisted pair cable to the VDSL modem in your house. The telephone circuit uses that same twisted pair. Each subscriber has their own dedicated twisted pair. That fibre and twisted pair is owned by Openreach (a BT Group company)

If you are on VM cable the fibre part of the circuit ends at an optical node cabinet up to half a mile from you. From there the signal is carried by coaxial cable to your DOCSIS cable modem. Any telephone circuit provided uses a twisted pair not the coax. Many susbscribers share the same coaxial cable but it has far higher potential bandwidth than a twisted pair but a lot of that goes to providing TV which shares the same cable. That fibre, twisted pair, and coax is owned by VM.

The only time you get your circuit entirely over fibre is if you have FTTP and that is only a small proportion of UK broadband customers.

FTTC and cable broadband are completely different technologies.

Thanks for your explanation.....All is now perfectly clear to me. Thanks again

kwikbreaks

Towbar wrote: »

Thanks for your explanation.....All is now perfectly clear to me. Thanks again

The waters were muddied when VM started advertising their product as fibre broadband and the ASA went along with that. It isn't fibre all the way - in fact the fibre terminates closer to some ADSL customers than VM customers.

Then BT launched Infinity which has more right than cable to be called a fibre service but of course that isn't 100% fibre either.

VM cable services are capable of higher headline speeds than FTTC but are much more susceptible to local congestion as the local pipe bandwidth is pretty low - especially the upstream. A couple or more torrent freaks seeding at full tilt 24x7 on your street and you may as well be on a long ADSL line because the upstream capacity shared between a couple of hundred or so cable users is only 36Mbps. That is why currently most cable customers still only see upstreams of 5% of downstream while most FTTC get anything up to 25%.