Ok so here's what's happening:
I live in an exchange which has FTTC enabled. My cabinet is definitely enabled and so is the exchange.
I live exactly 1.8 miles from the fibre cabinet and live 2.0 miles from the exchange - they are situated very very close to each other.
Right now I get approximately 5Mbps (download) on speedtests and here is what my router stats are:
PI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation G.992.1 Annex A
Latency type Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up) 8.0 dB / 23.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 36.2 dB / 20.0 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 11.0 dBm / 1.8 dBm
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
FEC Errors (Down/Up) 2053 / 52
CRC Errors (Down/Up) 1230 / 66
HEC Errors (Down/Up) 36645 / 57
Error Seconds (Local/Remote) 191 / 53
I have a number of questions which I may have put in another thread but I can't find where they are so I'll have another crack, sorry if I'm being annoying.
1) FTTC doesn't show up on the Wholesale Checker. Before the cabinet was enabled, it showed up that WBC FTTC will be available and I will be able to get speeds of 500Kbps download and 100Kbps upload.
Whenever the cabinet was enabled, this disappeared. For those that lived closer it's obviously showing that they can get FTTC services now. Why did it disappear?
2) I get 5Mbps now as I said above, I believe the threshold for fibre is 5Mbps+ but what speed improvements if any would I see? My exchange isn't ADSL2 enabled therefore the cabinet supported a maximum of 8Mbps which I am close enough to syncing to (in fact, at one time, I did sync at 8Mbps).
3) I think BT might be shaping me right now. For example, my pings have been in their thousands and hundreds over the past few weeks although no one else near me gets these problems (my other line gets a ping of 70 [which is normal for me] and so does my neighbours.
I changed from BT Consumer to BT Retail and the switch was made last night, it is still slow. If I could by any chance move to FTTC would the ping be lowered?
And the change from BT Consumer to BT Retail didn't fix the current ping problems.
4) What upload speeds, if any, could I receive if I went to FTTC (I currently get about 0.36Mbps/0.448Mbps). We use VoIP so upload speed is quite important to our business.
5) Can providers place a manual order providing that no details for FTTC shows up on the wholesale checker? Even if I told them I don't care if I get speed improvements of 1Mbps, I'd preferably prefer to get higher speeds (especially upload as mentioned above).
6) Just an off the plot question, is there a fault somewhere if one minute I get speeds of 0.3Mbps download and the next minute get 5Mbps? This happens me occasionally.
Thanks for your help, Jack.