UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
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.
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....).
About as accurate as you'll ever get.
Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.
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?
Took them ages to get POTS - You can see why Civil engineers make Architect jokes
Most ISPs don't seem geared up for FTTP, so it's good for BT, as most people will just go with them.
It does not take into account rusted, damaged wire, open cabinets where rain & moisture can enter, etc.
This tool gives me an estimate of 13 Mbps on my line - I actually only get 6, and when seeing the building's electrical & phone line cabinets, I can understand why, but as a consumer you shouldn't be required to manually try to estimate how "good" your phone line is - the ISP should be giving you an estimate you can trust.
I guess it's just a dice roll. /shrug
From personal experience, it does work. You want things to get to the point where some senior executive at BT says "can you sort this cabinet out" because that's easier than dealing with all the noise from residents, councillors and MPs. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
I see they're based here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-275016... in yet another disused nuclear bunker.
Unfortunately the area we live isn't serviced by them - but they were very good at checking availability!
Deploying fiber can be done in a fairly low-impact way and as long as planners don't put up roadblocks, deploying fiber to remote locations isn't a massive challenge, as a number of rural deployments demonstrate.
[1] https://www.gigaclear.com/about/case-studies-testimonials/ [2] https://www.gigaclear.com/fastershire-rollout-schedule/
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.
Perhaps I am very lucky and the North East has good internet but my experience has not been bad at all.
To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.
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.
It's annoying that we defer to them...
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.
I could get 2000mbps with Comcast and can only get 25mbps with AT&T...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]https://www.ultrafibreoptic.co.uk/ [2]https://www.talktalk.co.uk/shop/ufo/broadband
Government couldn't see past the old world of cable and watching football, BT pretty clearly could see far past just the TV. It was popping up on the news pretty regularly in the late 80s along with all the interesting things it might bring.
Me, I just wanted to consign my BT Home Highway (128K ISDN) to the bin.
What we ended up with was a travesty with BT restricted to copper only and exchange sharing for ADSL. As someone else pointed out most of what they invented got sold off to S Korea.
That has not been my experience. I live in an urban area where BT has a monopoly (no Virgin). They were not even slightly interested in deploying even FTTC -- the coverage was full of "notspots" where one house in a street had decent broadband and another up the road had none at all. BT have been quite lazy from where I stand, leaving players like CityFibre an opening.
Also, blaming Thatcher towards the end of this decade seems not to be very useful. More recently, Ofcom asked BT to consider FTTH repeatedly in aughties (2000-2010). BT declined to deploy saying "no business case" right up to Dec 2017 when their hand was forced by Ofcom. If BT were better run, they'd recognize the value in FTTH by the end of the aughties surely?
A lot of the slagging off comes from hobbyist "entrepreneurs" who think either that they can run an office on home adsl products and or/that all the consumer customers should subsidize their business
Oh and that nice Mr Murdoc whos upset that BT is competing with him for sport don't see the tabloids complaints about the Murdoch tax to watch football.
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...
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]
Of course people who still have landlines nowdays probably have cordless ones that require a powered base station, but I assume that at least in the UK, the line must be left powered during power cuts.
I've never actually seen any ISP there even advertise a battery backup unit, I guess if you need they'll just tell you to buy a standard UPS.
No idea how it works in the UK, haven't had consumer-grade fibre here yet, always just got business-grade stuff where you bring your own hardware & UPS if needed.
Given the rate at which people -- especially younger people -- are getting rid of landlines in the UK I suspect in the future this'll be a non-issue. To be honest I'm not sure why I have a landline still.
I’ve never actually had a landline on fiber ever. It was always just standard Ethernet on top of which I run whatever I want (SIP client or WiFi calling).
How was that “landline” working? Do they give you a little converter that turns Ethernet into a standard phone jack (and converts it to SIP internally), or is there some other non-IP based signaling for that voice traffic?
I've installed (business) fibre links on 6 continents, handoff has always been a pair of fibres (usually LC or SC), usually with a /30 ipv4/ethernet, and a routed network pointing at my end of the handoff (or in the case of private peering, a BGP configuration)
My FTTH from BT is a single fibre (no idea if it's compatible with generic bidirectional sfps). This runs into an Openreach converter box - powered by a battery backup - which has 2 phone outputs and 4 rj45s.
My core mikrotik plugs into one of the rj45s and establishes a pppoe session with BT's network.
I mean, you still have some kind of consumer equipment there, which the ISP will likely be supplying for almost all users anyway – so that's quite a specific thing.
Despite the headline figures, G.fast will not achieve anything close to that.
And I have to say that all seems like a little short-term thinking. The fragility of fibre in a permanent installation is hardly a convincing argument.
If you are in a new building, without furniture and mess, fibre of course make sense. If you live in a Small Apartment, old making installation difficult, Fibre isn't so great. My guess is that the problem may be specific to cities.
Not to be That Guy, but RJ45 is a plug standard; normal ethernet cable is "cat5" or "cat6", and normal 10/100/1000 Ethernet is limited to just 100 meters. Which is completely useless given the average cabinet distances in the UK.
Though I suspect that most ELM is delivered over fibre and the CPE just presents a RJ45 fo ryou to plug your TOR Router into.
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
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?
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-unif...
edgerouter x https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-...
ap-ac-lr 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.
Somehow that doesn't make the situation seem better.
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.
What physically goes into your house is what the vendors should be required to describe it as.
Great point. FTTC is sold as a "fibre" product when it's not, really. But customers are wising up. Those that don't live right next to the cabinet know there's a difference. Also, fiber is cheaper to deliver -- e.g. in a pure-fiber setup one can get 1Gbps up and down for around £30 a month, which is a massive win compared to pricing for FTTC which has to factor in the cost of maintaining the legacy copper network.
Funnily, BT's sales team assured me multiple times that G.Fast was a fibre product and that I should "upgrade" to it (I have FTTH).
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-... for an example of using wondershaper)
In the end, Plusnet increased their prices by £1 and in the small print of the email, they said I could cancel my contract within 30 days...I was 3 months in so I cancelled. Now I'm using my phone (tethered + 20GB of data for £20 a month from BT) and BT-FON free wifi for Youtube videos.
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....
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
With the change to FTTC all that interference is gone and dropouts are very rare. FTTH doesn't really tempt us for any reasons.
[1] https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7676-bt-price-offers-now...
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).
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.
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.