fibre optic broadband 3 meg speed

doningtonphil

Hello. I live in a rural area in South of Scotland. Nearby town recently got BT infinity. Despite being on same exchange BT and plus net advised they cannot offer fibre in my village. I checked plus net today though and it offered or standard broadband estimated speed 4 meg but also offered fibre optic....With an estimated speed of 3 meg.

Went on by website. It advised infinity not currently available but they could offer fibre, again estimated a 3 meg!!!!@.

Does this mean full fibre optic us imminent? Several BT openreach vans seem to have been in the village over the last few weeks. I asked one of the engineers digging up the road of it was for infinity and he said he thought that was a long way off as he had heard rumours BT were going to install fibre to house rather than fibre to cabinet due to the poor condition of the copper wires in the village.

What is going on?

forgotmyname

Yes they can offer fibre, But only if your local box has been upgraded which the system wont show hence the estimated 3mb speed.

Mine was the same then it jumped to show 68mb estimated. I actually get 73 and it seems im capped at that., The engineer said it was actually better than that on his test.

Do you have an MP that lives locally? If not i wouldnt hold my breath for getting an upgrade anytime soon.

doningtonphil

Thanks

So they have laid the fibre optic cable to the cabinet. Why would they do that but not upgrade the exchange?

brewerdave

What they sometimes do, is install new fibre cabs. locally but then feed them from an adjacent (larger)exchange rather than upgrade the small local exchange - can only think that its an artefact of this style of install that is giving such strange predictions of speed ??

lee111s

The probable issue is that your cabinet has fibre, however the distance that you are from your cabinet means that you're only able to ger a speed of 3meg.

Because of this, BT won't offer Infinity which I believe they're not allowed to offer unless you have a minimum speed of 15meg. They will however your broadband over fibre, but as the speed is less than you get from ADSL then there's no point in you switching.

It's all about distances, fibre can provide much higher speeds than ADSL but it's much more distance restricted. ADSL can provide 2meg up to about 6.5km away. VSDL2 (what Openreach's fibre to the cab uses) has a maximum reach of about 1.5-2km depending on the quality/guage of the copper line from the cab to your home.

lee111s

brewerdave wrote: »

What they sometimes do, is install new fibre cabs. locally but then feed them from an adjacent (larger)exchange rather than upgrade the small local exchange - can only think that its an artefact of this style of install that is giving such strange predictions of speed ??

That's not quite right, the fibre link from the cabinet to the exchange provides a massive amount of bandwidth to the cabinet. There's very little loss of speed over fibre, that's why with fibre to the home they can guarantee 1Gbps connectivity.

doningtonphil

the quality of the wire from cabinet to house might be the issue. As I mentioned, one fo the engineers suggested a rumour of upgrade to fibre to house due to the state of the copper wires in the village.


Would fibre to house (if it happened) give us superior performance to fibre to cabinet (we are at the far end of the village from the cabinet and it is the 2nd longest village in Scotland!!!)

lee111s

Yeah, with FTTH (fibre to the home) you get almost zero loss over large distances so you will get the maximum speed that the service offers.

Usually though, it's FTTC or FTTH, not many places have both! Although a few years ago I think there were trials of providing FTTH from fibre enabled cabinets.

brewerdave

lee111s wrote: »

That's not quite right, the fibre link from the cabinet to the exchange provides a massive amount of bandwidth to the cabinet. There's very little loss of speed over fibre, that's why with fibre to the home they can guarantee 1Gbps connectivity.

..yes, I understand that -I was just suggesting that the BT systems which predict potential speed could be getting confused by the apparent length of line if they are piggybacking onto an adjacent exchange ie giving an ADSL download speed rather than fibre