Reply to: How long to upgrade to fibre?

[quackhandle]

Unfortunately no, you cannot choose (sp?) your cabinet. There's a newer one closer to me than the one Im wired up to which is frustrating.

My cabinet is about 600 metres away. As a cautionary tale, I was getting average DL speed of 54Mb. In the last 5 months I've somehow 'lost' 6Mb DL speed. BT will do diddly squat because they say Im over 30Mb which is in line with my line's profile!

This site will tell you your cabinet number used by your line and potential speeds.

There used to be a website that helped you locate your cabinet but BT made the guy take it down! So now you have to use Google StreetView and walk around your local streets to find 'your' cabinet. It should have the number painted on it.

As I said though, with FTTC the distance from exchange to cabinet is immaterial. Its the distance from cabinet to your home which is the determining factor of your DL speed. The shorter this distance, the faster your DL.

Bear in mind if you buy a house within spitting distance of the exchange, you probably wont get fibre because your copper line will likely be wired direct into the exchange. Im not aware of BT having plans to fix this anomoly!

My parents in Scotland lived over the road from the exchange, (before Fibre) and the speed was appalling, well done virgin!

qh

[BolshieBastard]

Exchange to house is approx 1mile. Cabinet to house = 500m, not bothered to get fibre yet wait until next house. Think there may be a closer cabinet, can you choose which one?

Is there a map showing location of these cabs?

qh

Unfortunately no, you cannot choose (sp?) your cabinet. There's a newer one closer to me than the one Im wired up to which is frustrating.

My cabinet is about 600 metres away. As a cautionary tale, I was getting average DL speed of 54Mb. In the last 5 months I've somehow 'lost' 6Mb DL speed. BT will do diddly squat because they say Im over 30Mb which is in line with my line's profile!

This site will tell you your cabinet number used by your line and potential speeds.

There used to be a website that helped you locate your cabinet but BT made the guy take it down! So now you have to use Google StreetView and walk around your local streets to find 'your' cabinet. It should have the number painted on it.

As I said though, with FTTC the distance from exchange to cabinet is immaterial. Its the distance from cabinet to your home which is the determining factor of your DL speed. The shorter this distance, the faster your DL.

Bear in mind if you buy a house within spitting distance of the exchange, you probably wont get fibre because your copper line will likely be wired direct into the exchange. Im not aware of BT having plans to fix this anomoly!

[quackhandle]

What? Its fibre from the exchange to your nearest cabinet. Then its copper or aluminium from cabinet to your home. In most cases the distance from exchange to cabinet will be greater than cabinet to home. If your FTTC cabinet is more than 1km away, you'll hardly see any benefit of fibre because the 1km of copper \ aluminium degrades the advantage of fibre.

FTTH\P is costly because they have to lay fibre to your home (except if you are new build where FTTP\H is tending to be the norm).

Exchange to house is approx 1mile. Cabinet to house = 500m, not bothered to get fibre yet wait until next house. Think there may be a closer cabinet, can you choose which one?

Is there a map showing location of these cabs?

qh

[BolshieBastard]

Slightly off topic but what gets me about the marketing campaign to sell upgrades to 'fibre' when its not really fibre (more like fibre to your post code/block), ..is what do they market when we really do get real optic fibres to the door?

What? Its fibre from the exchange to your nearest Edit allocated cabinet. Then its copper or aluminium from cabinet to your home. In most cases the distance from exchange to cabinet will be greater than cabinet to home. If your FTTC cabinet is more than 1km away, you'll hardly see any benefit of fibre because the 1km of copper \ aluminium degrades the advantage of fibre.

FTTH\P is costly because they have to lay fibre to your home (except if you are new build where FTTP\H is tending to be the norm).

[BolshieBastard]

Its unlikely you'll get a BT Openreach engineer to do the FTTC install. It'll be Kelly Communications person and I've heard some horror stories how some have fitted the modem and infinity router.

Thankfully mine was ok but he didnt have a clue (more likely couldnt be arsed) to set up the router.

Be aware if you have an aluminium line from cabinet to home you might experience a slower speed than the BT speed estimator says.

I'd love to go FTTHome \ Property but the cost BT want to instal from your nearest cabinet is something like 1500 quid.

[original PM]

Slightly off topic but what gets me about the marketing campaign to sell upgrades to 'fibre' when its not really fibre (more like fibre to your post code/block), ..is what do they market when we really do get real optic fibres to the door?

We have fibre from the house to the pole

I assume then that from the pole to the cabinet it is fibre and then from the cabinet to the exchange it is also fibre?

dunno though really.

[BoredBloke]

As others have said, the delay is because they cannot control how BT operate. We had the same thing...we needed somebody to be available in the house from 8am to 6pm....they cannot be more accurate than that. If you misss this, SKY used to have an £80 charge that they would hit you with. I don't know if that is still the case as we switched years ago. In our case the BT guy didn't bother to show up on the day that they said they would, neither did he bother to in form us - communications are not part of their remit. We were the last house on the list that day and the engineer didn't have time to fit us in so cancelled the job. Although he didn't bother to inform us he did manage to reschedule us for another date 6 weeks later! I kicked up a big stink, with my ISP, although it wasn't their fault and with Opereach, who refuse to deal with members of the public. In the end I got them to do the work the following Saturday. He was there for literally 10 mins.

[VectraMan]

Slightly off topic but what gets me about the marketing campaign to sell upgrades to 'fibre' when its not really fibre (more like fibre to your post code/block), ..is what do they market when we really do get real optic fibres to the door?

Yes it's bollocks. What they really mean is "slightly more fibre than before", because with ADSL it's still mostly fibre (i.e. to the ISP).

[Platypus]

14 days from order to activation.

I got the impression that because I ordered online, this was more down to distance selling regs / cooling off period than any technical issue

[vetran]

Slightly off topic but what gets me about the marketing campaign to sell upgrades to 'fibre' when its not really fibre (more like fibre to your post code/block), ..is what do they market when we really do get real optic fibres to the door?

"unlimited light speed" of course.

[CheeseSlice]

Slightly off topic but what gets me about the marketing campaign to sell upgrades to 'fibre' when its not really fibre (more like fibre to your post code/block), ..is what do they market when we really do get real optic fibres to the door?

[Scruff]

When I moved house last year, the lead time was "up to 14 days" with Sky. I received the router from them within 2 days, and it turned out to be that the delay was in getting a BT Openreach Engineer to enable the connection in the cabinet and then come to my house to replace the Master Socket with a new one. All in all less than 10 days.

What I have done is replace the junk Wireless Router that Sky supply with an Asus-RT AC68U,since I needed Gigabit Ethernet and Dual-Band Wireless.

[cojak]

Mine's been around for about a year, but the service has degraded so much that I've been forced into the move (I can't even download podcasts any more...)

[vetran]

How long has Fibre been in your area took more like 6 weeks for me, but they had only laid the fibre the week before. My ISP was trialing it as well.

[VectraMan]

I had it installed 2 weeks ago. Took 4 weeks from the order. Presumably that's nothing to do with the ISP, but down to the availability of BT engineers.