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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Buying 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....).

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It's not even rural areas that suck, I'm in zone 4 London, so pretty suburban, and I get about 7Mbps down/0.5Mbps up! The FTTC roll-out said it was planned for my cabinet, not just says it's not.

If your cabinet isn't provisioned for FTTC, make some noise with the council. If possible, get some residents together and write polite but firm letters to your local councillors, MPs, and BT executives. Follow up with further letters.

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'm in zone 4 too and I get 200Mbps. I could pay for more, and I'd probably get it, but 200Mbps is fine.

I guess it's just a dice roll. /shrug

I'm in zone 2, I have 76 Mbit vdsl, in reality it's 40-50 Mbit on good days. Virgin is not available in the building.

Boat dweller in Central London here. EE 4g gives me between 20 and 60mbps and 96gb data a month.

There are specialist ISPs like Gigaclear who have connected up villages in Oxfordshire, for example[1,2]. I believe the model is you get a bunch of families to commit to the service and they deliver fiber to your community, if it's within their service area.

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/

Bogons[0] are involved in a great project to do something about this - check out Balquhidder Community Broadband[1]. Bogons' Twitter[2] also has some fantastic updates about their work to lay fibre and provide connectivity to a few of these remote Scottish areas.

[0] http://www.bogons.net

[1] http://balquhidder.net

[2] https://twitter.com/BogonsNet

That's a fascinating read, thanks!

I see they're based here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-275016... in yet another disused nuclear bunker.

The guy who runs Bogons is Brandan Butterworth, who is credited with getting the BBC onto the internet in the 90s, and is currently "Chief Scientist" for BBC R&D.

There are some interesting providers in the area e.g. Fibrecast:

https://www.fibrecast.uk/

Unfortunately the area we live isn't serviced by them - but they were very good at checking availability!

https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/

About as accurate as you'll ever get.

The problem is that those tools don't take into account the quality of the wire going to your house, they just quote a best-case scenario based on the wire's length, assuming a perfect wire.

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.

This is true, but there are a number of data errors in BT's own inventory, so you will need to take this with a pinch of salt. For instance, according to this (and therefore in BT's internal systems as well) I am eligible for G.Fast -- I am not.

Doesn't work terribly well for new houses though!

Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.

House 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?

One way councils can force the issue is to deny planning permission unless builders can show they've engaged a telecoms company (doesn't have to be BT, could be Virgin or Gigaclear or Cityfibre). After all, we don't accept houses built without electricity and water. Why should we accept houses with subpar connectivity?

I recently got a new fibre connection (not from Virgin or BT) in my newish flat and I was taking to the chap who installed it about exactly this. He told me that it's actually the builders who pay BT and Virgin to come and connect up their buildings. This is so they can then market them as being almost "plug-and-play" with these services as some buyers look for this. The other smaller providers can then come along and install/connect their stuff but at their expense, and as you say, often afterwards. He said that this is made harder since installing afterwards means dealing with managing agents (in the case of of a block of flats) and this can be painful, which I can 100% believe. Perhaps the situation varies depending on where you are in the country, this was London (where there are no £350k houses!).

One of my friends parents a couple of decades ago brought an architect designed house and the designers/contractors neglected to put in any ducting!

Took them ages to get POTS - You can see why Civil engineers make Architect jokes

My new house (well 2 years old now) came with fibre into the hall cupboard (and cat5 to every room), I'd assume that FTTP is default with newbuild

Most ISPs don't seem geared up for FTTP, so it's good for BT, as most people will just go with them.

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