Finally getting Full Fibre broadband!

[Harrison]

I wasn't expecting this so quite excited.

I received an email from BT (British Telecom) about their January sale. It said because my contract was soon up for renewal I qualified to upgrade to their newer best package and still save £5 per month.

All it really added over my existing package was their Hybrid Connect hub. This is a separate 4G wifi router that plugs into the existing Halo Hub 2 router and takes over and provides your broadband if the main broadband goes down. It has only gone offline a couple of times in 5 years so I wasn't that interested, but if it would save me money over my existing contract it was worth the upgrade.

On logging into my BT Broadband account and selecting offers it was suddenly listing Full Fibre to the premises as an option. About a year ago Openreach dug up my road and laid fibre cables, and installed the hardware on each of the telephone poles, but that was it. I couldn't find any information on when it was going to go live and could be ordered. I had even checked in December and there was still no news. I'd been staring at the fibre hardware attached to the pole right outside my house all year. 

So anyway, being sceptical I didn't believe it was really available. I clicked upgrade and it offered me all the different options, including the fastest, and it really was £5 cheaper per month (but still expensive compared to many other providers). Order went through and it's booked to be installed on the 8th Feb.

So what will I be getting?

BT Halo 3+ 900 package.

That is their fastest full fibre to the premises package providing 900Mbps download and 150Mbps upload speeds. They also guarantee it will always maintain a speed of 700Mbps. So pretty close to 1Gbit Internet speeds. In real terms if it's running at the full 900Mbps it will download at 112.5MB/s. That's 1GB in 9.1 seconds! :blink:

Can't wait. No longer will I need to leave the PC or Playstation online all night downloading games. It in theory could download a 100GB game in just over 15 minutes.

It's also going to make server backups and installs so much nicer.

As an added bonus this BT package also gives you Xbox Gamepass Ultimate completely free!

And although I already have the previous package that came with everything else this Halo3+ package provides, you do get quite a lot.

Halo Smart Hub 2 router
Hybrid Connect 4G EE router
Complete Wifi
Full Fibre
Home Tech support
Keep Connected Promise
Price Promise

The price Promise is interesting because they say they will always offer the same or better deals then new customers. That's good because so often you see great deals only available to new customers.

The Keep Connected Promise means your broadband should never go offline, with the 4G router taking over if the main broadband goes down.

Home Tech Support I wouldn't really ever need. They will send an engineer to the house if something won't work. This also combines with the Complete Wifi promise, whereby the BT App locates any poor wifi spots in your house and BT will give you up to 3 BT Discs that form a Wifi mesh and boost the signal.

I already have one of the BT discs, but wifi is fine everywhere in the house. But I'm using it slightly differently. If you connect a disc to Ethernet it boosts and repeats the Wifi from the disc via ethernet. So I ran an armoured ethernet cable to our garden studio log cabin last year and the BT disc is connected down their repeating the Wifi signal. It works perfectly with full signal strength. It even repeats the same id and password so it's seamless. So I have wifi right dien the 50m of garden to the bottom. Lol.

[Kin Hell]

Nice speeds H.

We had SupferFast here in Cornwall about 9 years ago.

The new one they're releasing is UltraFast.

Aye so fast down here, we're still waiting for SuperFast to be Fast..... :tumbleweed:

BT couldn't wire a f'king Lan Party up....

[Harrison]

You still having issues? I remember you did years ago. What speeds are you getting?I

I was thinking that except for multiple users there is actually not too much point in them offering any future services much faster than 1Gbps as most Ethernet ports are still Gbit, so won't utilise anything faster. Not until 2.5Gb or 10Gb become the norm. 2.5Gb seems to be getting adopted by some with new motherboards supporting it. Probably because it can still use Cat5e and 6.

I was reading all these idiots on BT complaining that they couldn't get the 900Mbit speed and they were not recommending it. Every one of them was using wifi! :lol:

[Kin Hell]

Currently connected at 53.923 Mbps & 8.819 Mbps. Been up for 45 days without any Disco's. :eyebrow:

I have seen as high as 63Mbps but it's been even crappier ever since Storm Dennis fried our local cabinet how many years ago.

I guess I shouldn't complain whilst only paying for Infinity whilst getting Infinity 2 speeds, but as usual, BT move the goal posts again kludging & bastardising industry standards.

The thing about Cornwall in the UK is this. The only way to get on the Internet is via BT wires or Satellite. The latter isn't cost effective in any manner making BT the Monopolistic scavenging bastards they are.

Only new building developments in Cornwall are getting full fibre & those new builds getting it have to be near main fibre pipelines. :dry:

On top of that, the quality of house builds is pure shit. They are nothing more than carboard houses where you can hear your next door neighbour farting. - Quality eh! :eyebrow:

[Harrison]

It has been exactly the same here until now so you are not alone. I've got about 35-55Mbps on my existing connection since moving here in 2015. At my old address it maxxed out at the full 76Mbps.

They initially also only ran fibre to the new build estates here too. It was getting silly because new houses in the middle of nowhere had it, but older houses that needed it far more were stuck on copoer. And I agree with house building. It is completely crap and I would never buy one. It's also mad the prices they command. Often a 1/3 more expensive than far larger 1930s house in the area, and hardly any garden or parking space, plus as you say, so close together you can hear your neighbour doing everything.

Chuchester got a full fibre uograde about 4 years ago and that's only 4 miles from me. Buy living in a far more rural area I want expecting fibre any time soon, so was really surprised when they started digging our road up to install it this time last year. But then no idea when we could order it after work was finished. So big surprise when I discovered I could now order it. There was nothing through the door or from BT. I had to discover it by accident. At least that way not many know about it yet in my road so I could book it.

But if you think your situation is bad, consider this. My parents in the New Forest only had their local exchange and cabinet upgraded to FTTC last year! So only recently got 30Mbps. Before this they were on ADSL at 2Mbps and couldn't even stream Netflix or Youtube.

[Kin Hell]

I'm really tickled for you H. Enjoy it. :thumbs:

A good friend of mine lives close to the New Forest @ Holbury, just after the Hythe Bypass heading East. - He's in the same boat fella & he isn't a happy chappie being an I.T. Guru. He's got 10Gbit around his house! :D

[Stephen Coates]

Sounds good. We don't have fibre here yet, but it should be coming in the next couple of years.

Openreach recently had a big price cut on wholesale fibre which means, if you have the choice between fibre and VDSL, fibre may actually be cheaper (provided you have the same speed).

I've no doubt the 900Mbps will satisfy harrison. Won't be much use here yet as most of my network is 10/100 and 802.11G. Still, I would like to get fibre to replace the copper lines as a means of modernising, even if the speed is the same.

Funny story with my Dad recently. He has had ADSL for ages, but VDSL has been available for some time, Openreach fibre has recently been put in, and Cityfibre are digging up nearby streets. So, he telephoned Plusnet (who don't sell fibre, but do sell ""fibre"") to ask about upgrading. So they upgraded him to ""fibre"" aka VDSL.

Funnily enough, about a month later, Openreach put a stop sell on all copper products in that area, so had he waited a month, he wouldn't have been able to upgrade to VDSL; he would have had to have had fibre. I don't know how Plusnet would handle that given that they don't sell Fibre.

[Harrison]

Did you know that VDSL was a term made up by BT? And no one else uses it because it doesn't exist. I didn't realise that until recently. It's just known a FTTC everywhere else.

And it's always been a stop-gap because they only need to run the fibre to each cabinet. But that then means the main fibre lines are in place from the exchange as when they install the fibre in each road, they only need to run it to the cabinets already in place.

It has amazed me how they have managed to keep inventing solutions to get faster and faster bandwidth along copper wires. Moving from dialup to adsl using thr same copper wires was quite unbelievable at the time. But then to jump from 8Mb to 76Mb still on copper wires was even more so. But I think line noise that was pretty much the limit.

Openreach and BT now have the current plan to replace pretty much all copper lines with fibre by 2025, and then to shut down all traditional phone lines, so your Dad might be forced to upgrade to full fibre within the next 3 or so years.

I'm not sure how they will achieve this goal though as upgrading to full fibre is a pretty new thing for Openreach customers and it only gets installed if you order it. I've read that they have technology that can be installed to allow existing phones to work on fibre lines, so they might just convert the telegraph pole junctions and keep the copper to the houses that haven't upgraded.

With my upgrade I lose the copper wires and the therefore the existing phoneline, and have already received a VoIP BT phone Wythenshawe HD audio calling. It's a bit vague if I keep my existing phone number or be assigned a new one. I'm hoping I keep the same as it's easy to remember.

[Kin Hell]

Yes, not sure what the V bit refers to in VDSL.....

Virginal.... er.... Vulgar.... maybe viscopedic.... :hmmm:

....Little Johnny puts hand up @ back of class....

It should have been a big fat C for me miss. - The V is for Vaginal. :shades:

[Kin Hell]

I just realised something H....

You're getting Overhead Fibre by the sounds of it. - They were on about this years ago & it looked doubtful they were ever going to use it.

[Harrison]

Well it's sort of overhead. As it's a 1930s house we have the phoneline underground until it reaches the telegraph poles outside the houses, then each pole has the wires overhead going to about 10 houses. So they have laid the fibre underground from the cabinet to the pole and it will just be overhead from the pole to the house.

It makes sense in terms of cost, because its far easier to run it overhead to the houses and then just in through the wall.

In Chichester they were completely underground, so far more effort and cost involved with the fibre laid underground needing an access hatch at the end if every property ready to them dig a trench to the door when someone ordered it.

Not sure how they will do full fibre for those living down country lanes where its all overhead on poles. Is it feasible to run fibre completely overhead on poles? Or will they be digging up those roads eventually too?

[Kin Hell]

I'd heard they were running Fibre from Pole to Pole, but then we all know these big corporate companies are always moving the goal posts. (even their own posts at will)

[Harrison]

Fibre install went fine. It was quite a lot of work for Openreach and the main engineer was a really nice guy. There was no issue with where I wanted it installed and he did a great job.

My old BT Masterswitch was positioned in an annoying location on the hallway windowsill with the cable running out through the corner of the window. The new install is down on the wall level with the plug sockets, so much better.

The install took him from 12:30 till about 17:00. A second engineer in a van with a crane had to go to the top of the telegraph pole to remove the old copper line to the house and install the new fibre line, and the main engineer then cleated it down the wall to the ground. He installed the main fibre box on the outside wall, then ran a cable in via our front porch and then in through the wall to the new fibre modem on the wall.

Only small issue was the router didn't initially connect to the new fibre, but it was just a setting in the router's advanced settings to tell it was now using the full fibre and not the fttc it was using before.

And whilst the work was being done and the line disconnected it was an opportunity to see if the new Hybrid feature I also got with the upgrade worked, and it did flawlessly. If the main line goes down the router automaticalled connects to a separate EE 5G router to take over the connection until the line comes back up. It did this seemlessly and the Internet just carried on working until it was restored. The BT Hub light changes to purple whilst in this mode. Now the speed whilst on 5G was about 60Mbps, which was still faster than my old fttc (should have just been using that before! ) but actually has potential to be much faster because it is 5G. But I installed the 5G router out of the way in the garage where its only getting 1 bar signal strength, so to still get 60Mbps was good.

Anyway, fibre is now up and running and it will take up to 10 days to fully adjust its speed and settle down. Initially straight after install I was getting about 410Mbps down and 50Mbps up, but this was testing from an S20 phone via wifi so will never get the true wired speed This went up to 550 down and 110 up by the evening. And yesterday I was getting about 680 down and 110 up. Hopefully it will get closer to the 900 in the next couple of days.

Even at the current speed I tested downloading some games on the PS5, and Guardians of the Galaxy was ready to play in 1.5 minutes, and fully installed in another 5 minutes! On my old fttc that would have taken over 2 hours! That's a huge difference and makes it a completely different experience. Also makes everything much more fluid. And it actually makes the need for extra storage on the PS5 but so important when you can just delete finished games and redown load them in under 20 minutes if needed again later.

Very pleased so far.

Also because the old copper phone line is gone it's now using a voice over IP phone instead to provide voice calls. BT provided one, and as soon as the fibre was up you just pair it with the router and it sets itself up and is ready to go. Even has the same phone number as my old landline, which I wasn't sure would happen.

And the BT Smart Hub 2 is quite impressive. Supporting ADSL, FTTC and FTTP. Has built in support for their exclusive BT disc wifi extending (that I use in a different way to broadcast wifi 50m away at the bottom of the garden in the studio), The hybrid 5G wifi mode and their VoIP integration to continue getting phonecalls. I think for the price it might seem a bit expensive, but you are getting access to a lot of kit that actually works well.

If there is one negative I would say it might not be the strongest wifi signal, compared to a third party router, but with the ability to add up to 3 free discs to repeat and boost the signal it's not a big issue.

[Kin Hell]

Glad it went well. :thumbs:

Pull up a DOS prompt type "ping www.google.co.uk -t" & look @ the ping time returns. - CTRL-C will break the ping cycle & then tell you your average ping.

Waddya get?

Then from the same DOS prompt, type "tracert www.google.co.uk", screenshot the DOS window & paste on here.

I'm just being really curious here H. ;)

[Harrison]

I'm not near a PC at the moment, but testing Thursday only via Wifi the ping was between 5 - 7ms. And Jitter was 1 - 3ms. On Ethernet it was 1 - 3ms ping rate.

[J T]

Cripes that's fast. I've been on full fibre for about a year but they have not opened up speeds anywhere near that fast. Although other than downloading games, I really don't cane my connection anymore. I haven't even bothered running any cables, wifi is good enough for right now.

[Harrison]

I was actually thinking about the speed and most of the time it's far faster then anyone will never need. But it removes so many issues we have just got used to, such as leaving a PC or console on for hours to download or update something. Or waiting for something to buffer before starting to watch it. That was still a thing of fttc for 4K films.

It all but removes all bandwith bottlenecks to allow the technology to work as intended. The PS5 f.ex. feels more fluid and snappy.

I've tested cloud gaming with Strada, Xbox cloud gaming and PSNow, and all finally work fluidly with no stuttering or buffering. Even games like Control ran just as if running on a local PC or Xbox. Quite impressed and if everyone were on such fast connections I can see the argument for cloud gaming far more realistic. But in still not 100% easy eh the idea that I wouldn't own any of the games.

[Harrison]

I downloaded a couple of PS5 games this morning and quickly used the PS5's network test to see what it was now reporting the fibre speed as being.

Pleased to see it showing as 874.5 Mbps, which is close enough to the 900, especially as the PS4 and 5 are renouned for not being too accurate on download speed reporting.

Disregard the upload speed. I think the PS5 had a funny moment as it took ages to report the upload speed. Everything else on the network is showing it as 110Mbps and is uploading at that speed.

1231

[Kin Hell]

<snip> On Ethernet it was 1 - 3ms ping rate.

Crikey H! - I just got a Boner! :banana:

C'mon BT... we NEED this in Cornwall. :w00tdance: