For those who get 8 to 14 Mbps I can quite see why, but I think they will be moved to cabinet VDSL ( FTTC ) in the next 5 years without a choice.

If it isn't done as a standard then chances on that prices of ADSL will increase to the point where it is far more cost effective to move to other, newer, technologies.

It will be part of the exchange closure programme, FTTC/VDSL from cabinet is supplied by fibre from the regional centre; when analogue voice (WLR) closes in January, I suspect the plans will start to move people off exchange based ADSL.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

Most people in our street are still on adsl.

Bit like yourself a while back. No need for fast speed and are happy with the price they are paying.

I was happy on FTTC, I don't think I could cope with ADSL, certainly not the speed I was getting at just over 3Mb/s, certainly not now.
I can understand that some people may be fine with ADSL, the fastest speed of ADSL if you are lucky is around 10Mb/s. But most people would not get that unless they were virtually next door to the exchange.

Not possible to get ADSL here now, even FTTC is difficult.

i changed from FTTC to full fibre because of price, my main problem with the broadband market now apart from the price rises in contract is the 24 month contracts that most providers have, bad enough with 18

Well, not quite true. The fastest ADSL speed is 24Mb/s. When I was under EO Line until October 2019 I was getting all these years on ADSL between 14-16Mbps on average with the max at one point connected at 18Mbps.

I am in Central London, Aldgate East area but my Exchange is connected to Bishopsgate, which according to SamKnows (now no longer exists) was showing location as Jerome Street that is 0.3 Miles ~ 482 meters to my property.

My problem was never on attaining those speeds but the constant drop-outs! I would always get 16Mbps in both router stats and speed tests but under a 3dB to 6dB noise margin profile!! The problem is that each time my connection would drop the dB going to 0 would make my speed drop a few megs before jumping back.

It was a vicious cycle yo-yoing between 3dB and 6dB meaning the maximum historical connection uptime for me under a 3 and 6dB profile was no more than 3 days in the 16 years of using ADSL!
So, there was a solution, that BE Unlimited ISP told me at that time where they can manually cap the noise margin profile to 9dB and that finally solved the connection problem but at the expense of reduced speeds at 11-12Mbps. The max uptime for me was 60 days with Sky Broadband but on average it was 20 days uptime after raising the cap to 9dB.

ADSL was never reliable for me regardless of whether I used Tiscali, Sky, BE Unlimited or Plusnet. These were the only 4 ISPs I ever had experience of using under ADSL from around 2004 to 2020.

Before that of-course I used Dial-Up with Barclays and Tiscali from 1999 to 2004. FTTC resolved much of these problems as noise margin issues have more or a less been ironed out achieving 80Mbps download and 20Mbps Upload with both TalkTalk and BT since joining in Feb 2020. The problem is that in the last 2 years that speed due to cross-talk had dropped to 74Mbps download and 17Mbps upload.

I finally joined Community Fibre 1Gbps last month for a 12 month contract with first 6 months free promotional offer and after that £32 a month with £130 Uswitch voucher! Not sure if I will get the voucher, may have to wait 90 days and see. But it will still be cheap at roughly £16 a month even without the voucher.

Now I am getting about 950Mbps in speed test but on average 936Mbps. Both upload and download symmetrical with 0ms ping to their server.

I don't see myself ever returning back to FTTC even though I am under CGNAT! But I still think CGNAT with Full Fibre is better than no CGNAT but FTTC. I could pay £4 a month and get CGNAT removed but haven't thought of this yet. I also have the option of joining Vodafone FTTP after 12 months, which uses Community Fibre network and they offer free Static IP.

Because of my historical problems with ADSL that's one of the reasons I also had extra ADSL routers lying around! I had requested my ISP to send me new router, which never solved my problems. Now I have an old Sky Q Hub Wireless Router ER110UK that is pretty much brand new but no one is interested to buy it last 2 years since putting it up on eBay.

I did not know ADSL could go up that high, I did hear sometimes over 10Mb/s, but never 24. I used to get 3, maybe 3.5 if i was lucky, who ever I was with. Using the old Bulldog network gave me better results, I think it was mercury I was using.
I mucked around with SNR margin to get better speeds. Reliability was okay, unless I mucked about with the SNR margin too much.

I changed providers a fair bit on ADSL, BT was the first one and then different ones, AOL, ADSL24, mercury, Entranet, Eclipse, Metronet, but not in that order apart from BT. Maybe a few more as well. I changed to a Wireless network called Allpay, I jumped to around 2013, they promised 30Mb/s I never got that, around 10 at the most, but still better than ADSL and then after 18 months it got to the stage where the speeds reduced to not far from what I had with ADSL.
They leased their line from Zen and I don't think they had the equipment to cope, Allpay, not Zen. In the end it got almost down speeds worse than ADSL, and in 2015, I jumped to plusnet FTTC as that was up and running by then. I was only going to stay at Plusnet for 18 months, turned out to be 9 years.
Allpay gave up supplying broadband not long after I jumped. It was a shame really as it was a great idea. A mast on churches to send broadband to people in the sticks and in the city the mast was on the Cathedral. The equipment is still on my roof.
Allpay is still going, but doing what they started out doing, handling payments. At least they tried, so it failed.

I think that was one of the reason why I was not wanting to move to FTTP, I moved off a network once and it failed and it took a bit of work to find a provider, being plusnet to take me back so quickly. The other thing was that 36Mb/s on FTTC was fine for me. It was only because Plusnet wanted put the price up, wanted to stick me on a 24 month contract and kept pushing for FTTP that I decided to take a chance again and goo for Zzoomm.
It was a good choice I think.


What happens in there future, who knows.

I do have a load of routers and modems here.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I did not know ADSL could go up that high

ADSL was upto 8 Mbps
ADSL2+ was upto 24 Mbps

Openreach didn't offer 2+ for a long time, so other ISPs did "LLU" and put their own kit in the exchange. I was with Bulldog and managed 16 Mbps on ADSL2+ in the early days. The line length, line quality, interference from businesses or AM radio, and crosstalk, all hit together to reduce the actual sync rate and then overheads for the data rate you achieve.

VDSL is very similar but because most people are within 500metres of the box, the rates can go higher; at 450 metres my line managed 40 Mbps at best, and after the pandemic as everyone in my area signed up, I dropped to 30. I switched to cable as no FTTP in my area as I needed upload for home working.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 08-Apr-26 08:51:53)

I went back onto ADSL2+ when I first moved back to Farnborough (new build not appearing on various systems.
I was a lot closer than you were …. And could sync at 24mbps in Church Road West.

It was sort of OK , until my stepdaughter came home from uni and FaceTimed her b/f all the time. This saturated the upload, and no one else could then even open a webpage.

Oh yeah,. I forgot about ADSL2+, I remember going from 512Kb/s to 1Mb/s and then was able to get 3Mb/s, not sure how they did that.
LLU, local loop unbundling or something like that, means they just put their own equipment in the exchange.

Yes, I know FTTC was more or less just moving the ADSl equipment from the Exchange to the cabinet, but still had the distance problem of ADSL.

Just a shame it have taken this long to get to FTTP, I would have loved to think what my mate would of made of it. Sad that he passed before all of this.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention the ADSL2+. Indeed ADSL cannot typically go above 10Mbps. In simple terms I probably meant ADSL2+ forgetting about the difference between that and the older version. Most people who had ADSL did get upgraded to ADSL2+ in 2005.

I also remember around 2004 when I first upgraded from Dial-up to ADSL and it was with Tiscali! We had 512Kbps and then it was 1Mbps. And then around 2006 we got upgraded and started receiving 14-16Mbps. Actually it was a free upgrade, which I remember my dad was notified by Tiscali themselves. The price packages did not increase by much.

However, I was really young and inexperienced at that time and never knew the difference between ADSL VS ADSL2+!

I was 15 years old in 2004 busy with school. Those days I never remembered or had any interest in finding out why ISPs were able to offer this jump from 1Mbps to 16Mbps. In simple layman terms I only knew we were being upgraded to broadband from dial-up!

But I never knew at that time that this broadband technology was called ADSL or ADSL2+! Like most ordinary users, we care mostly about the broadband speed but never show a technical interest to differentiate between copper services, hybrid fibre and full fibre.

I think it is only now that most of us care to know the difference between ADSL, FTTC and FTTP! Unfortunately, till this day many people still don't know the differences between FTTC and FTTP especially those who only care about basic web browsing. But the people who have had flaky/unreliable internet connections like in the case of myself, that was the only time when I tried to push my housing estate to sign a wayleave agreement for FTTP. Of-course FTTC came at a much later date and if I did have that in the first place 10-15 years ago I probably wouldn't have been demanding FTTP.

To be genuinely honest, in normal web browsing I do not seem to spot a massive performance difference between the 70-80Mbps I was receiving under FTTC vs the 900+Mbps that I am now receiving with Community Fibre. However, there is no buffering issues or pauses in 4K youtube videos! I'm able to watch 4K HDR streaming in BBC iPlayer on some specific shows on my TV and Youtube HDR without buffer issues!

I'm also noticing an improvement in FLAC radio stations no longer stopping randomly since upgrading to Community Fibre. But in normal web browsing there isn't really much difference, maybe a very tiny noticeable difference!

However, the upgrade from ADSL2+ to FTTC is massive! That difference is extremely noticeable like going from 60Hz refresh rate to 165Hz. The same goes with Dial-up 56Kbps vs 1Mbps is very noticeable. Dial-up was snail pace when loading web pages but remember no discerning difference when playing online chess/checkers on MSN Gaming Zone on dial-up. For me disconnection issues were my biggest complaints and the DLM triggers, which were more or a less resolved with FTTC and now with FTTP it is even better.