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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

Is this US only? I got "This address is invalid". I live in the UK at the moment.

Would be good to know a bit more about this tool. I'd love to get FTTP!

You might find https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/ helpful. If you want to check an address and don’t know the phone number, use https://www.findmyaddress.co.uk/search to get the UPRN for the address and paste that into the BT tool.

I’d also love FTTP, but the state of affairs in the UK seems really disappointing at the moment. If you run a business and live in a rural area then the Government will contribute £3500 to the cost of an FTTP-on-Demand build. Unfortunately, Openreach’s engineering costs are so ludicrous that (in my experience) it’s still not a realistic prospect.

The UK lives in the dark ages regarding Internet. In Switzerland I already had 150mbit internet (in 2010+) while when I moved to London I couldn't even get more than 16mbit while living in Zone 1. Still these days I can't get that speed.

Weird, I get 100MB consistently not far from zone 1. You may live far from the exchange

Or, ironically, too close to the exchange.

https://www.choose.co.uk/guide/exchange-only-line-fibre-broa...

I live near Hyde Park ️

OP was getting that in 2010 elsewhere - it’s fairly amazing that London isn’t getting multiples of that now.

It doesn't help that the UK (and some other countries) have corrupted the definition of fiber by allowing pretty much everything to be called fiber.

DSL (running on the shitty, rusty phone lines) is allowed to be sold as fiber because fiber is involved at some point in the transmission (up to the DSLAM). By that standard, even 56k dial-up could be called fiber because there would be fiber somewhere in the datacenter on the other end.

HFC (Virgin Media cable) is also called fiber even though it's fiber to a certain point and then you're sharing a coax loop with dozens or even hundreds of people. It's even worse because the shared bandwidth can be saturated and the connection becomes unusable because of packet loss (could technically happen with DSL if the exchange's uplink saturates, but I've never seen it happen compared to cable networks).

There's also a naming convention of "superfast", "ultrafast", etc which creates more confusion. If you want to express speeds, how about you just quote the raw numbers?

Yeah, if you live in a new building or further out of Central you can get things like g.network or Hyperoptic but even aa new apartment block build by Westminster council doesn't offer fiber.

Maybe this all will change when there is more Working From Home to be happening the coming years.

Definitely agree. Only a small percentage of the general public here seem to understand the difference between FTTC (which is what we have) and FTTP/FTTH (which is what we need). Perhaps if they did then the Gov would have to work harder on FTTP delivery.

Thanks for the link. As I suspected, I can only get FTTC (80/20). FTTPoD is available but ... as you mentioned it's not exactly the best option.

Going by https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband - I see "Good news – we'll be upgrading your area to Full Fibre (Fibre to the Premises - FTTP) soon."

Anyone know how soon "soon" is?

Anecdotal but mine was about 6 months.

Can you elaborate on OR's engineering being ludicrous? I've found them to be quite helpful, and their costs to be roughly in line with the costs I would expect from other trades!

Well, the cost can be both reasonable compared to other market rates and yet ridiculous. I know someone who got a quote recently to connect their rural property to fibre, literally about 100 metres from the cabinet, like, not far at all. But because they had to dig through a road and lay the cable over a small stream they quoted about £60k for the job. That might be "in line with the market" but it's still a ridiculous amount, there's no way a normal homeowner can afford that.

Right but that's not openreach's fault, that's because they need to dig up a road and go under a stream.

Get a quote for a mains gas connection or an electrical connection and you'll find it in the same ballpark.

Well, so for electrical work I know that Northern Grid will do any reasonable upgrades for your network for free, just because that's part of what they exist to do. I asked for an upgrade to 100amp connection to my house, they did a survey and answered that they would need to dig out the whole cable from my house to the street and replace it with a new one. "Of course" - they said - "we would put everything back at is was once we're done". Cost? Absolutely free. Well, funded by the taxpayer I guess. I don't see why openreach shouldn't be the same - if your house isn't on the fibre network, they should connect you as that's literally their mission statement. I guess for really complicated cases the cost could be shared or something, but quoting people 50k for connecting a domestic property to fibre shouldn't be acceptable.

But it's not just 50k for a domestic property, it's 50k to dig up a road, and tunnel under a stream.

I wasn't aware that electrical connections were done for free - Citizensadvice [0] calls out that for gas if the connection is far enough away you'll have to pay for it. I've heard anecdotal costs of <£1000 for a straightforward connection that doesn't involve digging up a road.

[0] https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/energy/energy-sup...

I have a home office situated 15-20m from an Openreach manhole. The building is less than 20 years old so there is an existing, unused, duct from the manhole directly to my home office. I live in an FTTC area so there is already fibre nearby.

The quote for getting fibre to the office was £9.5k + VAT (i.e. US$15k). And remember: this is for infrastructure which is long-lived, and which Openreach will have to install anyway, sometime over the next decade or less.

That's much more expensive than my experience, I wonder if there was another complication? I was quoted closer to 2k for installing to my building about 100m back from a cabinet.

They ended up installing it separately, and it looked like it took them about a week.

Unfortunately, I am using the FCC form 477 data which is only valid in the US. Do you know of a similar dateset in the UK?

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