Latency dropped recently

The latency on my home connection has recently dropped significantly from 60 to 25 ms. Tobermory is not due to have FTTC rolled out until 2016, but I did see the subsea cable being laid to the mainland last month.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6739-20-undersea-...

Would I be correct in assuming that my connection is now routed via the new subsea cable and not the old microwave link?

The drop in latency is welcome, especially for my kids online gaming, but there is still a marked slowdown during peak periods (6 to 1.5 Mbps), and a small rise in packet loss at all times (0.2 to 0.4%)

Regards, Noinchki

It may well be better routing down the fibre. The contention may mean that they've not increased capacity at some points yet and that should change as the FTTC products appear which usually allow you a bigger slice of peak time speeds.

Also you will find if things have improved latency wise, more people might be buying games consoles and downloading more.

I believe that BT has now commissioned the cable and is moving various services across to it from the microwave links. It is not an overnight task but can take several weeks to migrate block by block and to test each transfer across.

Once that is in and proven, it will then be a case of new fibre being blown or laid to cabinets and the various exchanges. Not a quick task.


I also heard that there were quite a few objections to BT's plan to lay the cables across - is that true? Do you know where it is actually landed?

Thanks for the info. I appreciate that there is a lot of work behind the scenes to bring FTTC onstream.

I'm not surprised there have been some objections to the works, but personally I see the benefits outweighing the negatives. I believe the cable was trenched and buried, which will have a small impact on sea life, but I would have thought a lot less than trawling that is done repeatedly.

You can see the cable laying ship here:

bt-completes-250km-undersea-broadband-rollout-in-scottish-isles

The cable was landed across the harbour to the left of where the photo was taken.

Not exactly a cheap project! What is the population of the Hebrides? 45,000? That means it has cost £600/person or around £2000 per household and the article suggests that is just the cost of getting the new fibre cables out to the exchanges. It will benefit voice connectivity as well as Broadband although I wonder how many people or premises will actually upgrade to FTTC?

The objections, I hear, may have actually come from the fishermen ... The Crown Commissioners raised no objections to the installation. It will almost certainly be trenched - normally done with a remotely operated plough that cuts the trench and the cable drops in before some back filling allowing the sea to finish the covering, then at low tide, excavators drive down the beach and race to get the last part of the trench in place.

The coming ashore at Craignure means a 25 mile link up to Tobermory which also needed installation.

It's even more costly per person if you consider that not all will benefit from FTTC. There are still many premises too far from the exchanges to get it. There are additional projects such as GigaMull to fill in the gaps:

http://www.gigamull.co.uk/home

However, others will still benefits from the links. The voice service will improve as will ADSL and even dial-up connectivity.

I hope others will see this project and realise that they are not cheap to implement and that BT or the Government cannot just throw hundreds of millions at it. BT will be "funding" their initial investment from the revenues of easy to install FTTC services and without doing those first there would be no funds for the more difficult ones.