Full Fibre Broadband

Have you all upgraded to Full Fibre broadband?

The rollout across the UK is continuing with Openreach/government plan to shut the old copper phone lines down in the next 2 years. I was lucky that my area was a fairly early adopter, with Openreach installing the fibre cables, and the service going live the following year. I was one of the first to switch over in my road. Going from ADSL with about 55Mbps to Full Fibre with 900Mbit. A huge jump in bandwidth, and not realising with such speed that I would no longer even need to consider what to do with it. Downloading a full 60GB game suddenly only took minutes.

A couple of years later BT merged with EE and started to move their home customers over to them. I had the option to stay with BT when my 2 year contract was up, but for less money I could switch to EE and upgrade to 1.6Gbps and get a new router. I made the switch and needed an Openreach visit to upgrade the Fibre modem at the wall because the first one was only 1Gbit. I had an issue though that the EE router only had 1Gbit Ethernet ports and WiFi6 so I couldn't utilse the full 1.6Gbit on one device. A year later they launched a newer router with 2.5Gbit ports and WiFi7. I had to wait longer before being allowed to renew the contract to get the newer router. So now I can utilise a 2.5Gbit Ethernet network and get faster WiFi7.

And this week I noticed some things seemed quicker. I checked the router WAN speed and did asome speed tests and it seems my Bandwidth has been increased to 2.4Gbps. Very nice. Means about 300MB/s download speed, so a 60GB game would only take 3.4 minutes. Mad!

A couple of years ago another company called City Fibre also started to dig up the road and install their own cables, so I now have both to choose from. They offer alternative Fibre company contracts that you can't get on the Openreach lines. Some of these offer 900Mb up and down for just ?25 a month. Sounds like a bargain, and it's fine for most home users. But I discovered they use a shared local WAT network, rather than each house having its own fibre line setup as Openreach do. This can cause issues with online games and some VPN and other server connections. So I decided to stick with EE. It's nice to have the choice though.