10 ms·

UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

128 points by ohjeez 8y ago

swsieber 8y ago
Wow, we should totally pass a law like that in the U.S.
LeonM 8y ago
> or make a Skype call that doesn’t drop out every two minutes. When will people learn that bandwidth has nothing to do with this? You don't need 50mbit for a skype call! It's usually not the 'last mile' problem, but what I'd call the 'last meters' problem: most SOHO/consumer grade network equipment is just total garbage. Replace your ISP supplied equipment with something more reliable (I highly recommend Ubiquiti gear) and you'd be surprised how much more usable your internet connection becomes.
- notheguyouthink 8y ago
  Does it matter though? If the ISP is responsible for the "last mile", does it matter if they screw up the last meter of it? It's one thing if customer supplied boxes are causing problems in the last meter, but if the last mile is end to end controlled by the ISP, and they still screw it up, does it matter what meter is the problem? The only benefit I see here is that a confident/educated customer could implement the fix themselves as you suggest. However that's sort of dodging the issue, rather than acknowledging that the ISP isn't holding up their end of the agreement (in loose terms at least).
  - oicie0uD 8y ago
    You are paying for that ISP-supplied router, either explicitly as an item in your bill or implicitly factored into the overall cost. People will either go with the cheapest option if there are any options at all or the ISP will simply save costs to do the minimum necessary to provide internet access. And of course those routers are crap and only do the bare minimum. For example they often have comically bad firewalls/NATs that can overflow their state tables when you do any P2P, run your own DNS resolver or run a home server through dynamic DNS. And then there's buffer bloat. A custom router with OpenWRT and enough RAM will cope with those use-cases and will offer all the nice linux traffic shaping plugins like fq_codel and cake.
- bytematic 8y ago
  Latency is way more important. My last company gave me 100down but it took 3 seconds to load google. I couldn't play any games or even talk online with friends. I switched over to another company for similar price, no speed change, and everything works fantastically. If I had incredible ping/routing I would take 20 down, I'd love to see what the most I use is, probably less than 10.
  - dodobdob167 8y ago
    Probably errors / transmission or a vlan issue
  - isostatic 8y ago
    So what latency did you have? I find it hard to believe it was more than 30ms to a nearby pop. Did you have some half-duplex link somewhere?
- horsawlarway 8y ago
  People should try to understand the difference between bandwidth and latency. I've found an analogy to a car is a simple way to help people understand. Bandwidth: This is how big your car is. High bandwidth is like driving a huge truck. You can load a whole bunch of things up at once. Latency: This is how fast your car is, measured in the time it takes to get between two places (so lower time means a faster car) So you can think about most web usage like picking up groceries from the store. Driving a huge slow 18 wheeler is a waste: you're only picking up a few groceries, and it will take a long time to get to the store and back. Driving a tiny fast corvette is silly, because even though you get there real fast, you're going to have to make three trips to fit all the groceries in the car. What most people want is good all around car - Big enough to haul what you need, fast enough to not feel sluggish doing it. Some things work better with the fast car (playing games, video chat, streaming songs) Some things work better with a big truck (downloading games, streaming HD video, moving large files) But you have to pay attention to both.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  Yup. To invoke the inevitable car analogy, if your problem is it takes too long to get to 40mph from a standing start at the lights, upgrading from 200mph to 250mph top speed won't necessarily help. Even more so if the problem is sometimes it won't start on a cold morning or there aren't enough seats. The pro-fibre lobby is convinced that somehow 1Gbps will enable an as yet undetermined application and countries where people have 40Mbps will get left behind. But the application doesn't exist. I had 1Gbps for several years, now I have 40Mbps. It's not just that I don't miss it, I don't even notice. I could easily afford faster, but I could also easily afford a giant cardboard Han Solo, and I didn't buy that either. Reliability matters, but in practice copper reliability isn't bad enough to be a significant factor compared to consumer gear. Latency matters, but most of the work needed there is in consumer gear, not in the last mile or elsewhere in ISP networks.
- LiquidFlux 8y ago
  Could you recommend modem / router equivalents ( whichever applies to replacing ISP supplied equivalent, I'm assuming both? ) at a few different price brackets? Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?
  - LeonM 8y ago
    Well, in my case, I use a Edgerouter-X with an SFP module that connects directly to my fiber line. Remember, a fibre lines does not even require a modem. I don't have experience with DSL equipment. The equipment my ISP send me (it's still in the box) came with a 'fiber modem', which is a fiber-to-ethernet converter, and a no-name brand router with build-in wifi. The firmware on it is a custom branded build of 3 years old, and I don't expect they ever released a security update for it (KRACK attack, anyone?). For wireless connectivity I use a Unify AC pro, which has proved highly reliable. See [0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi-made-me-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unif...
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    ubiquiti is the least expensive stuff that actually works. edgerouter x https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B00YFJT29C/ https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-... ap-ac-lr https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B015PRCBBI/ https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B0... total up to $152 at the moment. the wire cutter's suggestion for best router/access point is a $180 netgear product. and based on my prior experience, the netgear hardware won't last more than 12 months.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  So for a small fraction of annual per customer income ISPs could transform their service, but they cheap out to save a few quid ... the difference in wholesale cost on the better router-modem must be c.2-3% of a low cost contract. Somehow that doesn't make the situation seem better.
Rjevski 8y ago
Not sure if that's going to change something. The main problem was never peak-time congestion (I've never experienced it personally), it's just the fact that 1) the infrastructure is shit and 2) everyone sells DSL as "fibre". The infrastructure is a mess. Unless you've got actual fibre to the home, you're stuck with DSL, aka rust. The problem is that it's impossible to tell just how rusty it is without subscribing to service and running a speed test (at which point you've either entered into a year-long contract or paid install fees). Even the ISP can't know. What Openreach (company mandated by the government to manage the actual phone lines) should do is leave a DSLAM connected to all lines, to allow people to connect a modem and see the sync speeds (and possibly run a speedtest from a server provided by Openreach) before they sign up to anything. The second issue is that everyone is falsely advertising DSL (and other garbage like coax cable, also called HFC) as "fibre" and consumers are confused as to which "fibre" is the better one. This also makes it much harder for companies that sell real fibre. As it stands, this change will just make telco scammers sell "fibre" "up to 11mbps" instead of "up to 30mbps" or whatever they were selling before. As far as the consumer is concerned it's still a lottery whether you'll actually get the advertised speeds, with no way to know beforehand.
- fluffysandwich 8y ago
  For Virgin Broadband, peak-time congestion is definitely a major issue. I have indeed had better experiences with DSL in that regard, but lower overall speeds.
- gaius 8y ago
  The rationale is that the path end-to-end, measured in miles, is mostly fibre. But of course that is neither here nor there; if you do dialup with a 14.4 modem then actually that will be mostly fibre too because that’s what the trunks are! What physically goes into your house is what the vendors should be required to describe it as.
- PaulKeeble 8y ago
  We have had terms for the difference between VDSL, coaxial and actual fibre into the home for a long time, but Ofcom has allowed BT and Virgin to sell their products as "Fibre". Ofcom and the Advertising standards agency are partly to blame, they are have allowed the advertising to suggest these products are something they are not for several decades at this point.
ISL 8y ago
What fraction of the US has fiber to the home? It must be far, far smaller than Lativa's 50%!
signal11 8y ago
> The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, they pushed tech like VDSL/FTTC (up to 80Mbps) and now G.Fast (up to 500Mbps), which are "fiber to the cabinet" but the last mile is copper. The problem is, speeds fall off depending on how far your home is from the cabinet. I've seen many non-technical consumers be disappointed and say "the ISP said I can only get 11Mbps but they advertise up to 80Mbps". BT have now been told by the telecoms regulator to prioritize deploying fiber to the home. Also, serious money is now pouring into alternative network providers. CityFibre, which is installing its own gigabit-grade fiber network in about 30 UK cities (so home users in all these cities can be offered FTTH), was recently acquired by a consortium with fairly deep pockets. BT, which historically was the entrenched monopoly, is no longer the sole arbiter of the UK's broadband future.
- simonbarker87 8y ago
  Every home I have lived in for the past 10 years or so has had Virgin fibre to the home. BT don't have the monopoly at all, they just have poor infrastructure and are the defacto that most people choose. Our unit didn't have a direct fibre connection when we took the lease, we rang Virgin and they used infill money to lay a fibre cable to all the units on the trading estate at no cost to us other than the initial £20 set up fee. Perhaps I am very lucky and the North East has good internet but my experience has not been bad at all.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Are you sure it's actually fibre? Or is it their bullshit coax cable (HFC) they mis-sell as "fibre"?
    - matthewmacleod 8y ago
      It's a bit weird that there hasn't been a decision about the mis-selling of "fibre" connections in the UK. Virgin's network is pretty great if you're not in an oversubscribed area, but it just seems weird to bill it as "fiber". To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.
oldcynic 8y ago
The UK could have had world leading broadband were it not for Mrs T. She decided BT's late 1980s decision to rollout fibre was anti-competitive and killed it in 1990 when we were pretty much leading the world [0]. So the grindingly slow reality of ADSL isn't especially surprising sadly. [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  Yes, and gave a private company the right to roll out its own infrastructure. Said private company put infrastructure in a few very high concentration areas during the 90s and did nothing since. It's almost as if natural monopolies actually exist.
- wjoe 8y ago
  And yet BT is pretty much the definition of anti-competitive now anyway, and it's that monopoly which is killing progress today.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    Is that really true? What's stopping alternative companies from rolling out fibre services, beyond the cost barriers?
    - PaulKeeble 8y ago
      The contract that BT signed with the government for all the funding granting it a duopoly with Virgin, where Virgin isn't going to increase the cable network at all. That combined with the wayleave issues at a local council level being waved just for them means that the preferred rollout partner in BT gets all the money, all the profits from it and has all the access. About the only nationwide competition that is even remotely happening is from Hyperoptic and they are being blocked all over the place and they are also really laser focussed only on high-density buildings.
gmac 8y ago
This doesn't appear to address the two main issues I encounter when choosing UK broadband, which are that (a) advertising of upload speeds seems entirely unregulated, so that some providers offer ridiculous deals (e.g. 38Mbps down, but 1Mbps up, with the latter figure hidden in small print on another page), and (b) unless I choose Virgin, I will have sporadic disconnections sometimes for hours at a time depending on the interaction of decades-old copper, weather conditions, and random chance.
- Blackstone4 8y ago
  Completely agree on the upload speeds...I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.
  - dspillett 8y ago
    > upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed This is not directly due to the technology involved, it is due to congestion on the upstream side slowing down IP control packets (ACKs and such) as they are queued with the rest. When you have a slow upstream pipe it is very easy to see this effect. It is even worse when there are multiple upstream connections trying to use as much as they can (as seen in torrent transfers and similar), and it affects interactive traffic like SSH connections significantly too. You can work around this by shaping your upstream traffic to reserve a little bandwidth for small interactive/control packets. If your router runs Linux there are a number of simple scripts to setup the basics (wondershaper is one I've used successfully in the past) or you can be more specific to your needs by setting up your own config with the appropriate tools. If you usually only use one PC then you can run the shaper there instead, of course, but running shaping on one individual machine on a crowded network will have no useful effect. (see http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-improve-internet-responsiveness.html http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-... for an example of using wondershaper)
    - Blackstone4 8y ago
Blackstone4 8y ago
In the UK, the central network is fibre but the "last mile" from the exchange to home is always copper. The "last mile" can turn into 2+ miles if you're unlucky. UK ISPs sell various different speeds including 'fibre' at the high end. However it's never true fibre and you'll have copper cable no matter the package you pick. I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt. I tethered my phone to my laptop and got 16MPS upload speeds....
- wafflebear 8y ago
  You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.
  - Blackstone4 8y ago
    I think you're right. I spoke to the guys at Plusnet and they said it was fibre to the cabinet and no matter what package I picked it was copper to my house. With that in mind, I thought they were effectively limiting your bandwidth at the cabinet based on your package. From the plusnet page: > Speeds are available as follows: > Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the package you choose > Average download speeds of 10MbΦ for ADSL2+ enabled areas
    - dodobdob167 8y ago
      Adsl is a different beast indeed. It's physically limited because the frequency that it uses and the encoding that was possible or practical in the 90's can't carry more than 24. Vdsl is indeed throttled at the edge router into two products, basically the lower frequency components provide the lower speed product and propagate better over longer lines.
- rndmio 8y ago
  As the other commenter said the move from ADSL to "fibre" meant that rather than being copper from your house to the exchange it's now copper from your house to the cabinet on a street nearby (hopefully) and fibre from there back to the exchange. The "last mile" of copper is now a lot, lot, shorter which is how they're able to run the faster speeds over it. Sure FTTC is not FTTP but it's dramatic improvement over ADSL/2
wjoe 8y ago
Interestingly, Virgin Media now advertises slightly faster speeds than it did before this came into effect. Where it's fastest package was previously 350Mbps, it now advertises the same package as giving "Average download speeds of 362Mbps". "Average" still leaves a wide range of speeds, and as far as I can tell they don't quote different speeds for different locations. I don't think quoting the average speed of all users in the country for each package is going to give much more of an accurate picture than maximum speeds. Especially since the abundance of FTTC here means your speeds are much more dependant on local infrastructure.
matthewmacleod 8y ago
It would definitely be really nice if the UK rolled out comprehensive fibre connections – it seems like a good long-term investment for as many homes as possible to have a direct FTTP service. At present domestic internet connections using DSL top out at 76MBps – and that's if you live on top of the cabinet. Aside from niche providers, the only other high-speed network is Virgin, which runs a HFC network at up to 350MBps (which, to be fair, is pretty cost-effective and widely available).
- PaulKeeble 8y ago
  There are still quite a lot of people in cities who don't have VDSL yet and are still stuck on maximum 20 Mbps ADSL2. Worse than that is that due to the length and age of the lines they can be getting unstable connections around 1.5Mbit/s. This is one of those areas where the suburbs and countryside have done significantly better from government funding of BT to roll out Fibre. Wayleaves and Councils and landlords and management agencies across the cities have repeatedly blocked rollout, the situation for many is still much worse than 76 Mbps VDSL, that is a good outcome for someone in a UK city.
kingosticks 8y ago
Hyperoptic is another niche fibre provider that are only present in parts of major UK cities (30ish apparently). They offer 1Gbps over their own daisy-chained network. Their pricing is good and the performance is great (so far) compared to Virgin. As always, it's just the availability that's lacking.
jsmith99 8y ago
UK Internet is actually not that bad. I pay under £25/month for unlimited 80/20 and most households can achieve almost that speed.

128 points by ohjeez 8y ago

Wow, we should totally pass a law like that in the U.S.

> or make a Skype call that doesn’t drop out every two minutes. When will people learn that bandwidth has nothing to do with this? You don't need 50mbit for a skype call! It's usually not the 'last mile' problem, but what I'd call the 'last meters' problem: most SOHO/consumer grade network equipment is just total garbage. Replace your ISP supplied equipment with something more reliable (I highly recommend Ubiquiti gear) and you'd be surprised how much more usable your internet connection becomes.

notheguyouthink 8y ago
Does it matter though? If the ISP is responsible for the "last mile", does it matter if they screw up the last meter of it? It's one thing if customer supplied boxes are causing problems in the last meter, but if the last mile is end to end controlled by the ISP, and they still screw it up, does it matter what meter is the problem? The only benefit I see here is that a confident/educated customer could implement the fix themselves as you suggest. However that's sort of dodging the issue, rather than acknowledging that the ISP isn't holding up their end of the agreement (in loose terms at least).
- oicie0uD 8y ago
  You are paying for that ISP-supplied router, either explicitly as an item in your bill or implicitly factored into the overall cost. People will either go with the cheapest option if there are any options at all or the ISP will simply save costs to do the minimum necessary to provide internet access. And of course those routers are crap and only do the bare minimum. For example they often have comically bad firewalls/NATs that can overflow their state tables when you do any P2P, run your own DNS resolver or run a home server through dynamic DNS. And then there's buffer bloat. A custom router with OpenWRT and enough RAM will cope with those use-cases and will offer all the nice linux traffic shaping plugins like fq_codel and cake.
bytematic 8y ago
Latency is way more important. My last company gave me 100down but it took 3 seconds to load google. I couldn't play any games or even talk online with friends. I switched over to another company for similar price, no speed change, and everything works fantastically. If I had incredible ping/routing I would take 20 down, I'd love to see what the most I use is, probably less than 10.
- dodobdob167 8y ago
  Probably errors / transmission or a vlan issue
- isostatic 8y ago
  So what latency did you have? I find it hard to believe it was more than 30ms to a nearby pop. Did you have some half-duplex link somewhere?
horsawlarway 8y ago
People should try to understand the difference between bandwidth and latency. I've found an analogy to a car is a simple way to help people understand. Bandwidth: This is how big your car is. High bandwidth is like driving a huge truck. You can load a whole bunch of things up at once. Latency: This is how fast your car is, measured in the time it takes to get between two places (so lower time means a faster car) So you can think about most web usage like picking up groceries from the store. Driving a huge slow 18 wheeler is a waste: you're only picking up a few groceries, and it will take a long time to get to the store and back. Driving a tiny fast corvette is silly, because even though you get there real fast, you're going to have to make three trips to fit all the groceries in the car. What most people want is good all around car - Big enough to haul what you need, fast enough to not feel sluggish doing it. Some things work better with the fast car (playing games, video chat, streaming songs) Some things work better with a big truck (downloading games, streaming HD video, moving large files) But you have to pay attention to both.
tialaramex 8y ago
Yup. To invoke the inevitable car analogy, if your problem is it takes too long to get to 40mph from a standing start at the lights, upgrading from 200mph to 250mph top speed won't necessarily help. Even more so if the problem is sometimes it won't start on a cold morning or there aren't enough seats. The pro-fibre lobby is convinced that somehow 1Gbps will enable an as yet undetermined application and countries where people have 40Mbps will get left behind. But the application doesn't exist. I had 1Gbps for several years, now I have 40Mbps. It's not just that I don't miss it, I don't even notice. I could easily afford faster, but I could also easily afford a giant cardboard Han Solo, and I didn't buy that either. Reliability matters, but in practice copper reliability isn't bad enough to be a significant factor compared to consumer gear. Latency matters, but most of the work needed there is in consumer gear, not in the last mile or elsewhere in ISP networks.
LiquidFlux 8y ago
Could you recommend modem / router equivalents ( whichever applies to replacing ISP supplied equivalent, I'm assuming both? ) at a few different price brackets? Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?
- LeonM 8y ago
  Well, in my case, I use a Edgerouter-X with an SFP module that connects directly to my fiber line. Remember, a fibre lines does not even require a modem. I don't have experience with DSL equipment. The equipment my ISP send me (it's still in the box) came with a 'fiber modem', which is a fiber-to-ethernet converter, and a no-name brand router with build-in wifi. The firmware on it is a custom branded build of 3 years old, and I don't expect they ever released a security update for it (KRACK attack, anyone?). For wireless connectivity I use a Unify AC pro, which has proved highly reliable. See [0] [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi-made-me-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unif...
- sigstoat 8y ago
  ubiquiti is the least expensive stuff that actually works. edgerouter x https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B00YFJT29C/ https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-... ap-ac-lr https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B015PRCBBI/ https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B0... total up to $152 at the moment. the wire cutter's suggestion for best router/access point is a $180 netgear product. and based on my prior experience, the netgear hardware won't last more than 12 months.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
So for a small fraction of annual per customer income ISPs could transform their service, but they cheap out to save a few quid ... the difference in wholesale cost on the better router-modem must be c.2-3% of a low cost contract. Somehow that doesn't make the situation seem better.

Rjevski 8y ago

Not sure if that's going to change something. The main problem was never peak-time congestion (I've never experienced it personally), it's just the fact that 1) the infrastructure is shit and 2) everyone sells DSL as "fibre". The infrastructure is a mess. Unless you've got actual fibre to the home, you're stuck with DSL, aka rust. The problem is that it's impossible to tell just how rusty it is without subscribing to service and running a speed test (at which point you've either entered into a year-long contract or paid install fees). Even the ISP can't know. What Openreach (company mandated by the government to manage the actual phone lines) should do is leave a DSLAM connected to all lines, to allow people to connect a modem and see the sync speeds (and possibly run a speedtest from a server provided by Openreach) before they sign up to anything. The second issue is that everyone is falsely advertising DSL (and other garbage like coax cable, also called HFC) as "fibre" and consumers are confused as to which "fibre" is the better one. This also makes it much harder for companies that sell real fibre. As it stands, this change will just make telco scammers sell "fibre" "up to 11mbps" instead of "up to 30mbps" or whatever they were selling before. As far as the consumer is concerned it's still a lottery whether you'll actually get the advertised speeds, with no way to know beforehand.

fluffysandwich 8y ago
For Virgin Broadband, peak-time congestion is definitely a major issue. I have indeed had better experiences with DSL in that regard, but lower overall speeds.
gaius 8y ago
The rationale is that the path end-to-end, measured in miles, is mostly fibre. But of course that is neither here nor there; if you do dialup with a 14.4 modem then actually that will be mostly fibre too because that’s what the trunks are! What physically goes into your house is what the vendors should be required to describe it as.
PaulKeeble 8y ago
We have had terms for the difference between VDSL, coaxial and actual fibre into the home for a long time, but Ofcom has allowed BT and Virgin to sell their products as "Fibre". Ofcom and the Advertising standards agency are partly to blame, they are have allowed the advertising to suggest these products are something they are not for several decades at this point.

ISL 8y ago

What fraction of the US has fiber to the home? It must be far, far smaller than Lativa's 50%!

signal11 8y ago

> The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, they pushed tech like VDSL/FTTC (up to 80Mbps) and now G.Fast (up to 500Mbps), which are "fiber to the cabinet" but the last mile is copper. The problem is, speeds fall off depending on how far your home is from the cabinet. I've seen many non-technical consumers be disappointed and say "the ISP said I can only get 11Mbps but they advertise up to 80Mbps". BT have now been told by the telecoms regulator to prioritize deploying fiber to the home. Also, serious money is now pouring into alternative network providers. CityFibre, which is installing its own gigabit-grade fiber network in about 30 UK cities (so home users in all these cities can be offered FTTH), was recently acquired by a consortium with fairly deep pockets. BT, which historically was the entrenched monopoly, is no longer the sole arbiter of the UK's broadband future.

simonbarker87 8y ago
Every home I have lived in for the past 10 years or so has had Virgin fibre to the home. BT don't have the monopoly at all, they just have poor infrastructure and are the defacto that most people choose. Our unit didn't have a direct fibre connection when we took the lease, we rang Virgin and they used infill money to lay a fibre cable to all the units on the trading estate at no cost to us other than the initial £20 set up fee. Perhaps I am very lucky and the North East has good internet but my experience has not been bad at all.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Are you sure it's actually fibre? Or is it their bullshit coax cable (HFC) they mis-sell as "fibre"?
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    It's a bit weird that there hasn't been a decision about the mis-selling of "fibre" connections in the UK. Virgin's network is pretty great if you're not in an oversubscribed area, but it just seems weird to bill it as "fiber". To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.

oldcynic 8y ago

The UK could have had world leading broadband were it not for Mrs T. She decided BT's late 1980s decision to rollout fibre was anti-competitive and killed it in 1990 when we were pretty much leading the world [0]. So the grindingly slow reality of ADSL isn't especially surprising sadly. [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

cup-of-tea 8y ago
Yes, and gave a private company the right to roll out its own infrastructure. Said private company put infrastructure in a few very high concentration areas during the 90s and did nothing since. It's almost as if natural monopolies actually exist.
wjoe 8y ago
And yet BT is pretty much the definition of anti-competitive now anyway, and it's that monopoly which is killing progress today.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  Is that really true? What's stopping alternative companies from rolling out fibre services, beyond the cost barriers?
  - PaulKeeble 8y ago
    The contract that BT signed with the government for all the funding granting it a duopoly with Virgin, where Virgin isn't going to increase the cable network at all. That combined with the wayleave issues at a local council level being waved just for them means that the preferred rollout partner in BT gets all the money, all the profits from it and has all the access. About the only nationwide competition that is even remotely happening is from Hyperoptic and they are being blocked all over the place and they are also really laser focussed only on high-density buildings.

gmac 8y ago

This doesn't appear to address the two main issues I encounter when choosing UK broadband, which are that (a) advertising of upload speeds seems entirely unregulated, so that some providers offer ridiculous deals (e.g. 38Mbps down, but 1Mbps up, with the latter figure hidden in small print on another page), and (b) unless I choose Virgin, I will have sporadic disconnections sometimes for hours at a time depending on the interaction of decades-old copper, weather conditions, and random chance.

Blackstone4 8y ago
Completely agree on the upload speeds...I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.
- dspillett 8y ago
  > upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed This is not directly due to the technology involved, it is due to congestion on the upstream side slowing down IP control packets (ACKs and such) as they are queued with the rest. When you have a slow upstream pipe it is very easy to see this effect. It is even worse when there are multiple upstream connections trying to use as much as they can (as seen in torrent transfers and similar), and it affects interactive traffic like SSH connections significantly too. You can work around this by shaping your upstream traffic to reserve a little bandwidth for small interactive/control packets. If your router runs Linux there are a number of simple scripts to setup the basics (wondershaper is one I've used successfully in the past) or you can be more specific to your needs by setting up your own config with the appropriate tools. If you usually only use one PC then you can run the shaper there instead, of course, but running shaping on one individual machine on a crowded network will have no useful effect. (see http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-improve-internet-responsiveness.html http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-... for an example of using wondershaper)
  - Blackstone4 8y ago

Blackstone4 8y ago

In the UK, the central network is fibre but the "last mile" from the exchange to home is always copper. The "last mile" can turn into 2+ miles if you're unlucky. UK ISPs sell various different speeds including 'fibre' at the high end. However it's never true fibre and you'll have copper cable no matter the package you pick. I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt. I tethered my phone to my laptop and got 16MPS upload speeds....

wafflebear 8y ago
You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.
- Blackstone4 8y ago
  I think you're right. I spoke to the guys at Plusnet and they said it was fibre to the cabinet and no matter what package I picked it was copper to my house. With that in mind, I thought they were effectively limiting your bandwidth at the cabinet based on your package. From the plusnet page: > Speeds are available as follows: > Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the package you choose > Average download speeds of 10MbΦ for ADSL2+ enabled areas
  - dodobdob167 8y ago
    Adsl is a different beast indeed. It's physically limited because the frequency that it uses and the encoding that was possible or practical in the 90's can't carry more than 24. Vdsl is indeed throttled at the edge router into two products, basically the lower frequency components provide the lower speed product and propagate better over longer lines.
rndmio 8y ago
As the other commenter said the move from ADSL to "fibre" meant that rather than being copper from your house to the exchange it's now copper from your house to the cabinet on a street nearby (hopefully) and fibre from there back to the exchange. The "last mile" of copper is now a lot, lot, shorter which is how they're able to run the faster speeds over it. Sure FTTC is not FTTP but it's dramatic improvement over ADSL/2

wjoe 8y ago

Interestingly, Virgin Media now advertises slightly faster speeds than it did before this came into effect. Where it's fastest package was previously 350Mbps, it now advertises the same package as giving "Average download speeds of 362Mbps". "Average" still leaves a wide range of speeds, and as far as I can tell they don't quote different speeds for different locations. I don't think quoting the average speed of all users in the country for each package is going to give much more of an accurate picture than maximum speeds. Especially since the abundance of FTTC here means your speeds are much more dependant on local infrastructure.

matthewmacleod 8y ago

It would definitely be really nice if the UK rolled out comprehensive fibre connections – it seems like a good long-term investment for as many homes as possible to have a direct FTTP service. At present domestic internet connections using DSL top out at 76MBps – and that's if you live on top of the cabinet. Aside from niche providers, the only other high-speed network is Virgin, which runs a HFC network at up to 350MBps (which, to be fair, is pretty cost-effective and widely available).

PaulKeeble 8y ago
There are still quite a lot of people in cities who don't have VDSL yet and are still stuck on maximum 20 Mbps ADSL2. Worse than that is that due to the length and age of the lines they can be getting unstable connections around 1.5Mbit/s. This is one of those areas where the suburbs and countryside have done significantly better from government funding of BT to roll out Fibre. Wayleaves and Councils and landlords and management agencies across the cities have repeatedly blocked rollout, the situation for many is still much worse than 76 Mbps VDSL, that is a good outcome for someone in a UK city.

kingosticks 8y ago

Hyperoptic is another niche fibre provider that are only present in parts of major UK cities (30ish apparently). They offer 1Gbps over their own daisy-chained network. Their pricing is good and the performance is great (so far) compared to Virgin. As always, it's just the availability that's lacking.

jsmith99 8y ago

UK Internet is actually not that bad. I pay under £25/month for unlimited 80/20 and most households can achieve almost that speed.