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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

UK Has good coverage except in rural areas, and in some rural areas they've done their own FTTP (B4RN for example).

There's a big "full fibre" push from various different providers (Hyperoptic (FTTB), GigaClear, CityFibre, BT OpenReach).

Most densely populated areas have the choice of FTTC (the infrastructure is ALL BT OpenReach, however you have a choice of providers who piggy back on this), and in bigger cities/towns Virgin Cable up to 380Mbps down 37Mbps up.

Pricing is very competitive, because even with areas that are all BT FTTC lots of providers use their infrastructure and OfCom regulates how much OpenReach are allowed to charge.

I have a truly unlimited cable package for £50 a month, 384 down 37 up.

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Hahahahahaha.

Openreach is utter shit outside of very very lucky areas. I live in London (zone 6) and we get 30/8 (after fighting with BT support for two months to fix it from 22/1). If you're not covered by VM and win the postcode lottery as to not have it drop constantly, you're lucky to get "tolerable" speeds.

Sounds like a pretty local issue, and while it's true that there are spots like that (Mudchute in the Docklands is also awful) a lot of the areas with FTTC are pretty stable ... just look at TBB broadband stats for real speed tests.

Anecdotal ... I've lived in two completely separate areas of the UK and been connected to 3 different FTTC cabs ... none of them were problematic.

And even those lucky area are capped at 50mbit upload, which is better than nothing but that's not what I call a "gigabit" speed, and still make having all your data in the cloud a distant future.

Just count yourself lucky that you don't have an Exchange Only (EO) line, that doesn't have a cabinet and runs directly to the exchange.. I'm in Whitechapel (Zone 1) and get 8/1

There is an ongoing programme to upgrade EO lines to have their mini-cabinet so they can get vDSL. You are an inadvertent casualty of "unbundling". To promote competition the Exchange is allowed to have equipment from other providers in it (most exchanges have only one or two other FTTC providers, many have none) and that _could_ be ADSL and so the interference from VDSL _could_ break that, violating the unbundling rules, so, they just don't offer VDSL.

It would be technically easy to give you VDSL, it would just break a rule that was put in place to ensure competition for ADSL service, which you now don't care about because even that close to the Exchange it's only giving you 8/1

I have a friend who lives in a small market town in the North on an exchange only line, he gets 2/0.5. Most of his neighbours can get vDSL too, poor bastard.

He uses a 4G router with a Three unlimited SIM.

He has both connected because we do a lot of FPS PC gaming and the latency on 4G is too poor to game so he switches to his ADSL connection to play games and then uses 4G to download/stream.

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