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> 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, ra
by 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 agoEvery 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 agoAre you sure it's actually fibre? Or is it their bullshit coax cable (HFC) they mis-sell as "fibre"?
- matthewmacleod 8y agoIt'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.
- Rjevski 8y agoYeah, so it's not fibre, and should not be sold as such. Not saying HFC is bad (it's actually an awesome way of reusing a deprecated cable TV network), but it's not fibre. HFC for example is a shared medium across the entire neighbourhood, and in fact if you get root access on your modem and run tcpdump on the HFC interface you may see everyone else's packets as well - there's optional encryption built into DOCSIS but I've never seen it enabled.
- pricechild 8y agoThe ASA has made the decision to allow it. It's annoying that we defer to them...
- simonbarker87 8y agoIt’s definitley fibre and we get a stable 100Mbit connection all the time.
- diet_soda_kills 8y agoSorry, but it's definitely not fibre. I know they told you it is, but it isn't. They're using the old cable TV network. It's a coaxial protocol called DOCSIS. Like BT, Virgin Media is fibre to the cabinet and then copper for the last mile. It's just that the coaxial copper and the DOCSIS protocol used by Virgin do a better job at speed than the twisted pair copper and the VDSL protocol used by BT. It's going to be very interesting to see how they advertise real fibre to the public when it arrives, if even on Hacker News there's confusion about it.
- trumped 8y ago
- fauigerzigerk 8y agoWe don't have Virgin on this premises here in London and the mobile phone signal is so bad it's barely usable at all. But I have to say that BT has been a very reliable ISP and the speeds are OK (in spite of being copper) with the exception of Sunday evenings.
- simonbarker87 8y agoIt might be worth contacting Virgin and see if you can get a free installation under the infill funding, it’s specifically for urban areas that have been missed out.
- merinowool 8y agoVirgin is very poor experience and they de facto have monopoly on fiber in some areas and that enables them to piss on customers who cannot get any alternative. Recently I had a fault and I was 3 weeks without the internet. I am sure that could have been resolved quicker, but their staff was completely incompetent. Cherry on the cake - I am also nowhere near the advertised speed.
- simonbarker87 8y agoFunny how we all have different experiences, I have been with them for 10 years (and longer before that in a shared student house) and can’t praise them enough. Much better than the experience we had with BT in the early days of starting the business.
- arethuza 8y agoBuying a house in a rural area is a nightmare as you don't really know in advance what speed you will get and the speeds quoted on sites like Rightmove are for entire postcodes - not the property in question. We bought a house last year in a rural area in Scotland - not far from Edinburgh and were appalled at the broadband options. We get 20Mbps down and 1 up which is enough for most things (barely) but that was one of the fastest speeds we saw (apart from one house in the wilds of Perthshire that had 400Mpbs....).
- rwnspace 8y agohttps://www.dslchecker.bt.com/ https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/ About as accurate as you'll ever get.
- arethuza 8y agoDoesn't work terribly well for new houses though! Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.
- tialaramex 8y agoHouse builders are told (unless they're literally building just one or two homes) to call BT at the start. For any large site, or where it's no trouble anyway, BT will run fibre to the new builds for IIRC free, the builder needs to make sure there are the right ducts etcetera in the ground, then a van shows up and blows fibre. But guess how many people in house building remember to do that? So instead they have the houses mostly finished and the sparky asks OK where do these phone points connect to? So that's when BT is called. And then BT will shrug and say you can pay our normal fee, you get copper cables, we can't promise how good the Internet service will be. The part that's sad is people will stand there, talking to a sales person about their £350k house, checking things on their phone, and not think to ask - wait, this does have high speed internet - right? You aren't trying to sell me a brand new house that lacks Internet access are you?
- 8y ago
- cm2187 8y agoAgree, and the BT monopoly is exactly what slowed down DSL deployment and speed in he UK 15 years ago.
- pjc50 8y agoI'm fairly sure there have been repeated initiatives, over decades, to improve speeds where the government has thrown money at Openreach and they've achieved next to nothing. e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40481561 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40481561
- dodobdob167 8y agoThis was last summer. What time line do you expect?
- tialaramex 8y agoI guess it could be a weird coincidence? Money goes to BT. BT upgrades loads of cabinets to enable VDSL, people get faster speeds. Could all be unrelated. Doesn't seem like it though. Also there's a deal where if BT says "This upgrade makes no commercial sense" (so they won't do it without government money) but then they make money off the upgrade, there's a "claw back" which gets back the extra money. Several of those clawbacks have now triggered in fact, and the money was used to fund yet more broadband.
- dodobdob167 8y agoMore accurately, it's down to the regulator being clear that it would not permit a return on the investment to roll it out. The competition is a joke. Virgin Liberty Global managed 100k passed prem for project lightning this year, talk talk and co are talk asked nothing else. How many times will companies like cityfibre have to go bust before investors realize early how hawkish Ofcom has got. Also what will people pay for? When they realize that g.fast will deliver 120 to 330 the glamor of fiber will fade. How many commenters have 50+ and suffer? I've got 330 fttp having moved from 12mbs vdsl, honestly I only notice once a week.
- oldcynic 8y agoIf only that were true. The Thatcher Government stopped BT's already running rollout of FTTH in 1990. That gave us cable competition from Blueyonder who did bugger all and a BT regulated against playing in that space any more. Hell Hastings and around Martlesham Heath (OK that doesn't really count) had FTTH in the mid 80s. If BT had been allowed their way it'd be all FTTH by now. Regulation pushed a lot of the subsequent ADSL/VDSL product as it was all they were allowed to do. It's only now, with broken infrastructure, and the regulator pushing for removal of those restrictions that BT got permitted to do fibre again, but this time around it's FTTC.
- Lio 8y agoThis. BT didn't ignore FTTH because they thought it was a bad technology. BT invented _alot_ of technology that makes fibre deployments world wide cheap enough to be feasible, including fibre jetting. They didn't role it out because first of all they were barred from selling TV over fibre in the late 80s early 90s in favour of foreign cable companies. Those cable companies eventually merged to form Virgin Media. Later BT opted for cheaper VDSL technology because it wasn't clear they would be allow to profit (due to wholesale price regulation) from FTTH investment. The expensive bit of deploying FTTH is in "holes and poles". i.e. digging up roads. None of the other UK players want to invest in FTTH outside of major cities and only BT is legally compelled to provide any form of broadband nationally at all. Firms like CityFibre just want to cream off the most profitable areas of the country and kill off cross-subsidising the rest.
- signal11 8y agoGigaclear is deploying fiber to rural communities, for example: https://www.gigaclear.com/fibre-optic-gigaclear-network-for-rutland-village/ https://www.gigaclear.com/fibre-optic-gigaclear-network-for-... CityFibre is deploying fiber to a bunch of cities like Milton Keynes and Peterborough. I do agree that there are a number of ISPs, like Sky and Talktalk, who are content to ride on OpenReach's coattails and build no last-mile infrastructure of their own. Virgin Media do have their own last-mile infrastructure but it's very, very limited geographically afaik.
- stuaxo 8y agoIn the 80s we were going to get investment in fibre, to every home - building factories to get economies of scale. This was stopped, and everything sold to South Korea, and we know how good their internet has been for years. 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...
- ksec 8y agoHaving had three few provider and different tech, unless I have a need of 1Gbps+ broadband speed in the future, I would much rather have copper RJ11 or RJ45. Copper Ethernet RJ45 is the best. No more modem, just plug and play. Installing a Ethernet cable is, assuming enough space in the pipe, can be easily pulled through using whatever force you like, I don't think you can actually do any damage to the cable while installing it. The telephone wire, It is a little hard to imagine a home without these wires. ( May be there are parts of the world which don't have them a default? I don't know ). There is no need to do installing. It is Modem then plug and play. G.Fast A3 actually allows 212Mhz and Dynamic allocation of Upstream and Downstream bandwidth. And gets 300Mbps + for 300M from Cabinet, and 500Mbps or those within 200M. I used to long for Fibre, but then when the installation comes, it either works perfectly in pipes that get pulled through, or you have to lay them out in the open and are warned they are extremely brittle. Which gets me a few phone call from friends getting nervous saying they would much rather stick with Cable or telephone wire with VDSL. Or in one case where she only has a 6M ADSL she just flat out cut the services and didn't want fibre's hassle. She is mostly on Mobile Phone anyway and her unlimited 4G plans is fast enough for what she needs. The only time she needs WiFi is when she is doing IOS update and that could be done in Office. And when the times Massive MIMO, 5G NG comes with high increase in capacity and speed. I can only imagine there will be more doing just that. A lot of times we nerds, geeks, tech savvy enthusiast just wanted faster speed, cheaper, better tech whatever. Fibre allow us going to 10Gbps! ( Yes there are 10Gbps Internet services to Home ), without actually asking if or do the many user cares. Last mile is a hard problem, and I wish more thoughts will be put in design and installation parts. Luckily we have people working on TerabitDSL, with spaces in between copper wires and using Waveguide-mode that is similar to use of millimeter-wave transmissions in 5G. [1] [1] https://www.assia-inc.com/terabit-dsl/ https://www.assia-inc.com/terabit-dsl/
- walshemj 8y agoThe Usual case of MP's with zero technical knowledge FTC make much more sense economically - if the Govemnet wants it has to give something back other wise why as a share holder should I pay for it. TBH 11 Mbs is fine for a consumer do they realy need more I only get 3.8 or so and I only ever have the odd hang on iplayer every 9 months
- signal11 8y ago11 Mbps down starts out as "fine" for the average home user, but remember needs change. What if that home user gets a Ultra HD TV and starts streaming Netflix in 4K (needs a steady 25 Mbps)? What if they have kids, who can be more voracious users? Also FTTC is asymmetric, which means 11Mbps down corresponds to something quite horrible up. Which means video conferencing doesn't work well. Which means home-working, Skype, video chat, etc are all hobbled. In fact, I know people with fiber broadband whose children use 4G for video chat at home. The example I usually give is that with ubiquitous gigabit internet in a city, you could send your kids to school even on a "snow day" because the teacher would be able to assemble the class and do something useful together even if the school was physically inaccessible. The way medicine and medical care for the elderly/less mobile is provisioned would change with gigabit internet. Telemedicine and remote diagnostic tools would be a lot more popular than they are now. These are just some thoughts as an average consumer who's not connected to the telecoms business at all (but has spent a lot of time trying to get decent internet service out of ISPs).
- walshemj 8y agoI have done muti national podcasts USA UK and AUS not problem on my notspot 3.5 MBS. Telemedicene and Video conferencing have been the latest thing in telecoms for decades. Just because you singular want something doesn't mean its sensible in the context of planning your countries national infrastructure or sense for a national telco which has to balance multiple needs. And what happens when some pensioner askes the PM during an election why there pension is not going up and "they" are subsiding these kids dowoading porn on facetubes - ask Gordon brown about being ambushed like this.