BT Broadband Prices

[Fat Rat]

This is our new BT Fibre.

[kwackboy]

It's bonkers you can get that speed out in the sticks when city folk struggle to get 100mbps.

My area in a London postcode can't get above 70mbps but if I enable the 5g on my Samsung smart phone I can get 150mbps + ...

[Fat Rat]

The upload is as important as the download speed.Also, the latency.

We now have fibre all the way to the house, therefore the losses are minimal 

[Barbel Mick]

Brocket, Openreach will provide FTTP, in your case it can be fed overhead the same as your present line is. If the pole at the end of your lane, or one close by, has what is known as a Connectorised Block Terminal (CBT) & from what you say it should have, then fibre cable has been provided to that, so, a bit more fibre cable fed overhead the same way as your present installation will get you FTTP. There is a limit to the length of the span, between poles though & it may be less than with a copper drop wire, I don't know for certain though.

For those with copper cable & slower speeds than you should be getting this can be for all sorts of reasons & Mr. Nick seems to have had a few of them! Poor/corroded connections & damp are a few but using aluminium was the worst thing BT ever came up with (well, maybe not, but certainly one of them) as it's conductivity is almost half that of copper, it's weak & brakes easier but, I presume, at the time it was a cheaper alternative?
The other thing that is important to give the best speed possible is for the external (copper hopefully) to feed directly into your 'master socket' and your router to be plugged directly into that. If you have multiple sockets in the property they need to be fed from the connections in the cover plate of the master socket. If you can do without those sockets, let's say they've been in for years & you use cordless phones or as in Brockets case don't have a land line, remove the sockets or at least disconnect the wiring from the master.

Having said that, I'm guessing I've never looked, your contract will say "UP to X mbps speeds", not minimum of.     

[Brockett]

Ha Ha yes the term "up to" is almost, but not quite, an honest promise of service. Much like mother in law's "cup of tea" always weak and never a full cup.
Anyhow interesting info Mick. Now I'll have to find out what FTTP means.

[Barbel Mick]

FTTP......Fibre to the Premises. 

[Brockett]

 
FTTP as an acronym seems far more exotic

[NeilM]

According to the email I got from BT, most people on my service typically get 67Mb/s.... well not in my road they don't and I am not in the sticks, I am in a rapidly growing seaside town in the South West, just about 25 miles from Bristol.

Anyway, order placed with Virgin Media. That will be FTTP and I have chosen the service which provides a mere 132 Mb/s.

However, the ex-computer engineer in me is not cancelling the BT contract until the Virgin system is working.

[Fat Rat]

Don't forget, any devices in your home that are 10/100mbs (Switches/Hubs/WAPs) will need to be upgraded if you get a higher speed service.

[Mr Nick]

If you swap from BT to Virgin, make sure they don't rip out the BT wiring & socket as my other half worked with Sky on the broadband side, and this is not uncommon, making it more expensive for them to leave Virgin again.

[Barbel Mick]

It's a good idea Nick, but if you have cordless phones it's not so important. Any internal wiring or sockets are only required if you use 'plug in' phones. 

[Robotstar5]

I got FTTP with BT a couple of years ago, the biggest difference I noticed was upload speed. I take a lot of photo's and with each image being about 12 mb I used to put 100 images into the cloud upload folder last thing at night as they would take a few hours to upload, with fibre it has gone from hours to minutes 

[Mr Nick]

Virgin didn't just interfere with the internal wiring: they took out the BT master socket and cut back the wiring going to it, leaving the householder with no way to go back to BT without a re-connection to the junction box, wherever that was.

[NeilM]

Thanks for the heads up about Virgin. I will insist that everything BT is left alone for the reasons already given I.e. NEVER switch off the old kit until all the snags have been sorted with the new stuff.

Fat Rat: I don't have any of that gubbins, the BT hub is right next to the socket and plugs straight into it.

[mr_diver]

Virgin are swtiching to erything down the fiberoptic.

The phone now plugs into the router... great until the power goes out and you need to make a call in an emergency.

OK we have mobiles, and ditched the TV package and phone, just have the broadband with Vigrin and run a firestick in the TV.

It's not the cheapest, but BT can't match the speed and I do work from home a few days a week and BT's guaranteed daytime speed would cause issues with my access to the works server and taking a call through the laptop.

[purplebikeunicorn]

The "power out phone calls" thing was a reason my parents didn't want to switch. I did point out that they had mobile phones, and their cordless DECT phones wouldn't work if the power went out anyway... Some routers (or modems, looking at Openreach) have provision for a battery backup system which will maintain a connection if the power goes out, they'll give those to people for free if they've got a valid reason for it (I.e. monitored alarms, elderly pendant alarms, etc).

Regardless, when they switch off the standard PSTN in (2025 they say, probably later), all phone calls regardless of your internet connection will go via the internet.