Full Fibre Broadband

[Harrison]

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.

[Kin Hell]

Yup....

1.6Gbit & now back on 900. - Gaming is utter crap. I have a 9ms ping to Google for FTTP . I use to get 12/13ms on 3.3km of Copper Wire.

Like I've always said H: - Here in Cornwall...... British Telecom - They couldn't wire a f'kin Lan Party up! ....cretins!

[J T]

We had FTTP connected when we moved into this house, about five and a half years ago. It was a right palaver, but that?s a long and dull story for another day.

We were on a 100/25 plan for a long time until I finally bothered to upgrade to a 1000/100 plan. I put in some new mesh wifi too, which is much better than the previous single-router solution.

Part of me is still tempered to run wires but I really can?t be bothered and the wifi is fast enough for pretty much anything I do these days

Which is (mostly) legal streaming these days.

[Harrison]

@Kin. That is a bit rubbish that you are sill having issues even after finally getting full fibre. I've never had ping rate or tatency issues here. I stream via Xbox Gamepass cloud streaming quite often as I have Gamepass Ultimate free with my EE fibre so might as well use it, I use that on my Steam Deck and you wouldn't know it isn't running natively. I will start another discussion about game streaming later.

@JT. I have tended to use ethernet runs instead of Wifi where possible. It's just more stable and consistent speeds. PS4/5 and Sky Steam definitely work much better through a wired connection. Over Wifi Playstation download speeds when installing a new game are crap, and I think it's an issue with the PS firmware.

Last year when I had all the floorboards up in my gamesroom to redo all the electrics and add a lot of extra plug sockets I took the oportunity to run Ethernet under the floor and add some wall sockets. I now have 3 dedicated wall sockets with cables running to a switch in the garage, and then goes to the main router in the wall, I've also run cables to the living room and spare bedroom (just in case), And a few years ago ran an armoured ethernet cable 60m down the garden to our garden office room, but that also has a Wifi extender that repeats the house Wifi, Means I can get Wifi coverage across the whole garden which is a bit mad, but also Sky in the garden room, Eithernet is still far better if possible.

[Stephen Coates]

We had Openreach, Digital Infrastructure, and Virgin Media all install fibre in this area about three years ago.

I decided to get a 5G cellular modem instead. Speeds are variable but can be as high as 350Mbps down/40Mbps up. Latency is a bit high as you'd expect but its not problematic (I don't play online games).

Not as good as fibre obviously but it only costs me a few pounds per month. I barely manage to use 150GB/month, and much of that is watching YouTube in HD. The modem does occasionally drop to 4G which limits the speed but I usually don't notice.

Its amazing what you can get for the price nowadays.

[Harrison]

If you only need relatively low bandwidth and it doesn't cost much then that's great. Someone I work with lost their wifi in the shared house they were renting so bought a Vodafone 5G modem/router and he's happy with it. Ideal if you have just moved house or go camping a lot.

[Stephen Coates]

I'm probably not as heavy a user as you are. My internet connection is always doing something, but it may just be IRC or internet radio.

Back in the dial up days I was never that bothered about the speed of dialup - When I got DSL I benefited more from the always on nature of it.

[Harrison]

Yeah. Thy obvious one is connecting to remote servers for admin. Having very fast fibre is a game changer for downloading server backups or uploading to them. But also everything is switching to streaming and 4K is pretty standard now.

Sky is about to shut down their satellite service in the next couple of years because the Astra satellites they use are coming to their end of life. And they have been moving over to streaming TV instead. I had been on Sky Q for years and was happy with it but finally made the switch to Sky Stream last year to get 4K in multiple rooms. And for that you need a stable fibre connection. When I first got it I had issues with it losing the network connection every time it was turned on. Port forwarding helped by I ended up changing the router and that fixed it. Anyway I was worried about not being able to record on Sky Stream, but actually 99% of the time everything is available via streaming to watch later and it works very well. There is the odd occassion where something won't load from a third party service as Sky Stream pulls the content from every streaming service such as iPlayer, ITVX, Netflix, etc. But I have been impressed with what they have achieved. It's the best streaming box/service at combining the content from every service into a single interface. The UI isn't as good a Sky Q but you get used to it.

And for gamers Full Fibre of a game changer. Modern games are huge. Average size of about 60GB these days for the bigger games, but some can easily be over 100GB these days. Even on ADSL you would be waiting hours for a game to download, so had to set it starting at night and leave it whilst going to bed. It also made you backup the download so you didn't have to download it again. Now on my current broadband I can download a 60GB game in a few minutes, so there is no need to worry about keeping a backup. If you want it again later just download again. You don't really think about it being so much faster change how you approach how you use the Internet.

The only issue with everything moving to relying on fast connections and streaming is when it goes down. You literally lose access to everything. So that is one issue. I only really listen to music via streaming that days, films and TV via streaming services, a more of games need Internet access, even my house needs an Internet connection for all thy smart devices for heating and water, all my light bulbs, Amazon Echos, doorbell, security cameras.. the list goes on.

The thing is you can get very fast full fibre pretty cheap these days. Alternative providers that don't use Openreach can offer 900Mbit up and down for ?29.99 per month which is a really good deal.