8 ms·

I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales). I'm forever calling out engineers because the li

I naively thought this was going to be somewhere like rural India, not the UK (albeit relatively rural Wales). I'm forever calling out engineers because the line crackles to the point it's difficult to take a call and my internet speed drops from ~65Mbps to ~10. Maybe I should start looking for old TVs. Somehow, being on a road where the houses were only built 5 years ago we have copper lines and on my side of the street the houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised it was the UK at all.

dan1234 6y ago
On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).
- ChildOfChaos 6y ago
  I have the same, but can't get Virgin. However I just contacted BT openreach after finding some neighboring properties can get fiber and they told me they are building a new cabinet next month, hooray!
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Openreach certainly are interested in converting homes from EO to a street cabinet and have done this many times, but that's little comfort to you because they haven't done yours yet. In some cases Openreach converts from EO to FTTP, so you go from only having very poor ADSL2 available to 300Mbps or better available over fibre.
  - sippingjippers 6y ago
    I think past around 20Mbit or so the returns are diminishing. My flat has 400Mbit or so from Virgin, and although the WiFi is excellent (uncontended airwaves around here), actually availing of it requires you perched within reasonable proximity of the router, and pulling from a site with a large enough outbound pipe. On average it is probably fair to expect 8Mbit/s egress from any particular Internet site, with worst case much lower than that. Probably the faster connection has some latency benefit, but on the whole I wouldn't factor "super fast Internet" into choosing my next place to live
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Where fast download speeds shine are software installations and updates on hard-wired devices. The less time I have to wait for updates before I can launch a game or app the better. In the US when I had fiber I would see Steam hit 80MB (megabytes) per second. But the really important thing is upload speed. It shouldn't take ten minutes to upload a two minute video master to YouTube. Also off-site backups of large files would be nice, but is too slow over cable modem upload speeds.
    - mcny 6y ago
      Things are a little different When you have multiple people trying to work from home. Even if a single connection is limited to 8Mbps a fatter pipe helps because you have more than one connection at any given time. Oh and fiber can do xMbps both ways I believe. Even Comcast gigabit is only 30Mbps up. Where in the US can I get: 1. Cheap land to build a house 2. Under half an hour drive to Costco/sams club 3. Paved road to property 4. Water and sewage 5. Electricity 6. Fiber gigabit Internet What else am I missing?
      - noodlesUK 6y ago
        A considerable part of the Portland metro area has FTTP, and it extends into the semi-rural areas past eg wilsonville
      - easton 6y ago
        Chattanooga, Tennessee is the best bet right now, I believe. (Of course, depending on your definition of cheap land. But the internet bit is covered, and they have Sams). Internet: https://epb.com/home-store/internet https://epb.com/home-store/internet
      - NortySpock 6y ago
        Kansas City suburbs. Though Google has halted their Google Fiber expansion plans, AT&T has a fiber service.
      - toast0 6y ago
        I notice your list doesn't include a decent commute to work. You can probably find somewhere in washington state that meets that, although for cheap land, you'll need to avoid population centers. And you'll need to pick a lot carefully. Electric coverage is pretty complete on paved roads, but water, sewage, and fiber networks aren't guaranteed. Well and septic isn't too bad, if the system is well built and the lot is appropriate (well needs an aquifer, septic needs a big enough flat patch and appropriate soils).
  - dan1234 6y ago
    A quick trip to the Openreach Fibre checker yields: “We don’t have plans to upgrade your area yet. But we’re working with Government and industry to change that.” Along with the usual “Register your interest” form (which I’ve filled out, but am pretty sure have been done in the past).
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Do you need fibre at all? I recently moved and didn't bother with it. Instead I'm using a 4G unlimited data SIM from Vodafone in a Huawei 4G/5G router. The speeds are normally around 80Mbps. I have no complaints whatsoever.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    There are two problems - coverage (trees, other houses ect get in the way) which means that for some places it's fine, for other places no good, and contention. In 5G the bearer (radio frequencies) is very well managed and I am 50/50 thinking that realistically contention will be ok for large scale consumption. But... ultimately, you have one set of radio between everyone whereas everyone has a fibre... (this is not quite true due to GPON but sorta!)
tialaramex 6y ago
Five years ago (assuming you weren't exaggerating) the house builder chose not to bother calling Openreach about the new homes they were building. They chose to wait until the last minute and then say "We're a house builder, just put up a few new houses, so connect them to a phone line for us OK?" If they instead engage at the outset, Openreach says OK, you need to put in ducting to run fibre to each house from the street and then along the street itself, our engineers will turn up and actually install fibre and enable simple phone service by default. But obviously when the engineers roll up to an estate with a dozen almost-finished houses "Dig up everything and start over" is not an option, so you get legacy copper phone lines. Too bad.
- watermanio 6y ago
  My last home was built about 5 years ago, and the house builder had fitted fibre ducting to the curb, but when OpenReach turned up they came with a ladder and slung up a copper cable. Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets, but anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
  - memsom 6y ago
    This is our situation too. What makes it worse is we have Cable in the area too, but that stops on the public street, and doesn't come on to the estate. We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.
    - ErrantX 6y ago
      Do you mean FibreNest (the Persimmon owned one?). I can't understand how they are allowed to get away with that! We live on a relatively recent Persimmon estate but luckily OFNL got the contract; even that's a bit dodgy, all of the ISPs have crap websites and are a little dodgy looking (although the service has been alright). And yeh, no BT line. It was an exclusive contract. OpenReach say they wont even install lines until the roads are adopted. Ironically, there is an independent Care Home built next door to us & OpenReach have been up and down the street and in our estate cabinet busy fitting their lines....
ricardo81 6y ago
Had an issue with line noise when I moved house. Took a while to figure out but apparently when it rained, I'd lose Internet connection. Took a bit of back and forth with British Telecom to convince them there's an issue after their continual "our tests indicate the line is OK"- if only they tested it when it was raining here! Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  Parents had the same issue with rain before they moved to fibre (which also barely works but eh, at least it barely works reliably.) Seems to be common enough that's it's trope-y.
  - newforms 6y ago
    This was REIN not RAIN, also common enough
- sgt101 6y ago
  The magic words are "the line is crackly when I try to hear someone" which will be recorded as "interference" and cause and engineer to be sent out. Then get them to open up any junction boxes that you can see. Normally the problem is that one of these has leaked causing poor coupling.
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    I wouldn't know about the finer details of physical telecommunications but in this case it would seem the physical (overhead) line that was about 30 metres from my property was allowing rainwater to interfere with the signal. That was what was replaced. Voice communication was never a problem (in the assumption I never spoke to people when it rained, I didn't often use the line for voice)
dingaling 6y ago
Buy yourself an RTL dongle and a wide-spectrum omnidirectional antenna and run a spectrum analyser when the problems recurs. That will get you the frequency, bandwidth and modulation of the interfering signal. I'm dismayed but not surprised that Openreach in the linked example launched straight into replacing sections of cable. They don't seem to spend much time actually analysing a problem.
- newforms 6y ago
  RE RTL dongle.. Or tune your AM radio to ~612kHz to listen to the REIN
dspillett 6y ago
> houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not That sounds odd and may be an error in OR's data. I would try to escalate it up to the point where it is investigated... It is far from unheard of for one side of a street to have different options, or even one part of one side of the street, because for some reason of geography or cab capacity when the houses were first connected they are connected to different cabinets and not all of them have been upgraded to enable g.fast. But such things shouldn't be localised to one home unless you are in a mansion with massive grounds (in which case stop messing with the consumer arm of BT-OR, you can afford to have your own private leased line installed via the business arm!). Be careful switching to g.fast if upstream throughput is important to you. I know people who had the top-end upstream offered by FTTC (~17Mbit/s) but got less after switching to g.fast (though better downstream, and for them like most that was the important factor so they were happy).

dan1234 6y ago

On my street, my house is one of 4 connected directly to the exchange instead of a cabinet, which means I can't get fibre (only FTTC is available here). BT/Openreach/Whoever aren't interested in changing this, but luckily I can get Virgin Media (overpriced IMO, but better than the 20Mb alternative).

ChildOfChaos 6y ago
I have the same, but can't get Virgin. However I just contacted BT openreach after finding some neighboring properties can get fiber and they told me they are building a new cabinet next month, hooray!
tialaramex 6y ago
Openreach certainly are interested in converting homes from EO to a street cabinet and have done this many times, but that's little comfort to you because they haven't done yours yet. In some cases Openreach converts from EO to FTTP, so you go from only having very poor ADSL2 available to 300Mbps or better available over fibre.
- sippingjippers 6y ago
  I think past around 20Mbit or so the returns are diminishing. My flat has 400Mbit or so from Virgin, and although the WiFi is excellent (uncontended airwaves around here), actually availing of it requires you perched within reasonable proximity of the router, and pulling from a site with a large enough outbound pipe. On average it is probably fair to expect 8Mbit/s egress from any particular Internet site, with worst case much lower than that. Probably the faster connection has some latency benefit, but on the whole I wouldn't factor "super fast Internet" into choosing my next place to live
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Where fast download speeds shine are software installations and updates on hard-wired devices. The less time I have to wait for updates before I can launch a game or app the better. In the US when I had fiber I would see Steam hit 80MB (megabytes) per second. But the really important thing is upload speed. It shouldn't take ten minutes to upload a two minute video master to YouTube. Also off-site backups of large files would be nice, but is too slow over cable modem upload speeds.
  - mcny 6y ago
    Things are a little different When you have multiple people trying to work from home. Even if a single connection is limited to 8Mbps a fatter pipe helps because you have more than one connection at any given time. Oh and fiber can do xMbps both ways I believe. Even Comcast gigabit is only 30Mbps up. Where in the US can I get: 1. Cheap land to build a house 2. Under half an hour drive to Costco/sams club 3. Paved road to property 4. Water and sewage 5. Electricity 6. Fiber gigabit Internet What else am I missing?
    - noodlesUK 6y ago
      A considerable part of the Portland metro area has FTTP, and it extends into the semi-rural areas past eg wilsonville
    - easton 6y ago
      Chattanooga, Tennessee is the best bet right now, I believe. (Of course, depending on your definition of cheap land. But the internet bit is covered, and they have Sams). Internet: https://epb.com/home-store/internet https://epb.com/home-store/internet
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      Kansas City suburbs. Though Google has halted their Google Fiber expansion plans, AT&T has a fiber service.
    - toast0 6y ago
      I notice your list doesn't include a decent commute to work. You can probably find somewhere in washington state that meets that, although for cheap land, you'll need to avoid population centers. And you'll need to pick a lot carefully. Electric coverage is pretty complete on paved roads, but water, sewage, and fiber networks aren't guaranteed. Well and septic isn't too bad, if the system is well built and the lot is appropriate (well needs an aquifer, septic needs a big enough flat patch and appropriate soils).
- dan1234 6y ago
  A quick trip to the Openreach Fibre checker yields: “We don’t have plans to upgrade your area yet. But we’re working with Government and industry to change that.” Along with the usual “Register your interest” form (which I’ve filled out, but am pretty sure have been done in the past).
secondcoming 6y ago
Do you need fibre at all? I recently moved and didn't bother with it. Instead I'm using a 4G unlimited data SIM from Vodafone in a Huawei 4G/5G router. The speeds are normally around 80Mbps. I have no complaints whatsoever.
- sgt101 6y ago
  There are two problems - coverage (trees, other houses ect get in the way) which means that for some places it's fine, for other places no good, and contention. In 5G the bearer (radio frequencies) is very well managed and I am 50/50 thinking that realistically contention will be ok for large scale consumption. But... ultimately, you have one set of radio between everyone whereas everyone has a fibre... (this is not quite true due to GPON but sorta!)

tialaramex 6y ago

Five years ago (assuming you weren't exaggerating) the house builder chose not to bother calling Openreach about the new homes they were building. They chose to wait until the last minute and then say "We're a house builder, just put up a few new houses, so connect them to a phone line for us OK?" If they instead engage at the outset, Openreach says OK, you need to put in ducting to run fibre to each house from the street and then along the street itself, our engineers will turn up and actually install fibre and enable simple phone service by default. But obviously when the engineers roll up to an estate with a dozen almost-finished houses "Dig up everything and start over" is not an option, so you get legacy copper phone lines. Too bad.

watermanio 6y ago
My last home was built about 5 years ago, and the house builder had fitted fibre ducting to the curb, but when OpenReach turned up they came with a ladder and slung up a copper cable. Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets, but anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
- memsom 6y ago
  This is our situation too. What makes it worse is we have Cable in the area too, but that stops on the public street, and doesn't come on to the estate. We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.
  - ErrantX 6y ago
    Do you mean FibreNest (the Persimmon owned one?). I can't understand how they are allowed to get away with that! We live on a relatively recent Persimmon estate but luckily OFNL got the contract; even that's a bit dodgy, all of the ISPs have crap websites and are a little dodgy looking (although the service has been alright). And yeh, no BT line. It was an exclusive contract. OpenReach say they wont even install lines until the roads are adopted. Ironically, there is an independent Care Home built next door to us & OpenReach have been up and down the street and in our estate cabinet busy fitting their lines....

ricardo81 6y ago

Had an issue with line noise when I moved house. Took a while to figure out but apparently when it rained, I'd lose Internet connection. Took a bit of back and forth with British Telecom to convince them there's an issue after their continual "our tests indicate the line is OK"- if only they tested it when it was raining here! Line got replaced, apparently it was 60 years old. Worked a charm since.

zimpenfish 6y ago
Parents had the same issue with rain before they moved to fibre (which also barely works but eh, at least it barely works reliably.) Seems to be common enough that's it's trope-y.
- newforms 6y ago
  This was REIN not RAIN, also common enough
sgt101 6y ago
The magic words are "the line is crackly when I try to hear someone" which will be recorded as "interference" and cause and engineer to be sent out. Then get them to open up any junction boxes that you can see. Normally the problem is that one of these has leaked causing poor coupling.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  I wouldn't know about the finer details of physical telecommunications but in this case it would seem the physical (overhead) line that was about 30 metres from my property was allowing rainwater to interfere with the signal. That was what was replaced. Voice communication was never a problem (in the assumption I never spoke to people when it rained, I didn't often use the line for voice)

dingaling 6y ago

Buy yourself an RTL dongle and a wide-spectrum omnidirectional antenna and run a spectrum analyser when the problems recurs. That will get you the frequency, bandwidth and modulation of the interfering signal. I'm dismayed but not surprised that Openreach in the linked example launched straight into replacing sections of cable. They don't seem to spend much time actually analysing a problem.

newforms 6y ago
RE RTL dongle.. Or tune your AM radio to ~612kHz to listen to the REIN

dspillett 6y ago

> houses on both sides of mine are able to sign up for g.fast but I'm not That sounds odd and may be an error in OR's data. I would try to escalate it up to the point where it is investigated... It is far from unheard of for one side of a street to have different options, or even one part of one side of the street, because for some reason of geography or cab capacity when the houses were first connected they are connected to different cabinets and not all of them have been upgraded to enable g.fast. But such things shouldn't be localised to one home unless you are in a mansion with massive grounds (in which case stop messing with the consumer arm of BT-OR, you can afford to have your own private leased line installed via the business arm!). Be careful switching to g.fast if upstream throughput is important to you. I know people who had the top-end upstream offered by FTTC (~17Mbit/s) but got less after switching to g.fast (though better downstream, and for them like most that was the important factor so they were happy).