Options for sub 15Mb connections

Our cabinet has just been FTTC enabled. Trouble is it 1 to 2 km away from our village.
Some of us are able to get >15Mb speed estimates on the BTW checker. But two thirds of the houses only show slower speed estimates of 9 to 14.
These sub 15Mb speeds are a lot better than the 1Mb or so that most get at the moment.
So what are our options on our Market 1 exchange - SMBWY. In other words which ISP will be prepared to provide some sort of Broadband over fibre at sub Infinity qualification speeds ?

There are quite a few incuding BT. I am in a similar postion and use ADSL24.

The speeds quoted are estimates and you will find that the speed will be quicker than that quoted.

A few of the members on this site compiled a very comprehensive spreadsheet with the isp's offering FTTC,

FTTC Spreadsheet

As NuttyMucker says, BT have a sub-15Mbps FTTC product. They just don't call it Infinity and don't shout about it. So Infinity looks artificially fast . I'm not sure what it is called now, as they have re-jigged their products, but it used to be called Option 3 with Fibre.

NuttyMucker also mentioned ADSL24. See also this page. I'm fairly sure some of the others will do it as well, such as vivaciti.

As others mentioned we can do this no problem at all. Just place an order on our website as normal. Please note that the 10Mb upload option is not available if the downstream estimation is <15Mbps, but we are able to modify it to 10Mb once it goes live, if the downstream is actually higher than 15Mb.

In reply to a post by Adsl24:

As others mentioned we can do this no problem at all. Just place an order on our website as normal. Please note that the 10Mb upload option is not available if the downstream estimation is <15Mbps, but we are able to modify it to 10Mb once it goes live, if the downstream is actually higher than 15Mb.

James?
Can you have a look at this thread. The Subject in it is incorrect, basically the problem is he is limited to 2Mbps upstream because the upstream estimate is 1Mbps. Which is clearly rubbish.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

As NuttyMucker says, BT have a sub-15Mbps FTTC product. They just don't call it Infinity and don't shout about it. So Infinity looks artificially fast . I'm not sure what it is called now, as they have re-jigged their products, but it used to be called Option 3 with Fibre.

NuttyMucker also mentioned ADSL24. See also this page. I'm fairly sure some of the others will do it as well, such as vivaciti.

Faster total broadband it's called these days

In reply to a post by Adsl24:

As others mentioned we can do this no problem at all.

What is the lowest speed that your would connect?

As long as the wholesale checker shows FTTC is available, and it will at anything down to 2Mb upwards, we can accept an order for.

Thanks for the replies. Having had a look at who can provide a connection I think for me it is between ADSL24 and Plusnet as both confirm acceptance of an order at sub 15Mb speeds.

If you have any questions about our service please do just ask and I'll advise.

Edited by deleted (Tue 03-Apr-12 18:20:30)

I have been looking further into this and the quality of information given out seems very variable. See the two email replies from ADSL24 and Plusnet below:

ADSL24 said:
In relation to the FTTC service ...its a guaranteed service from BT wholesale, For example they guarantee 15mb sync minimum with minimum 12mb throughput for customers on Fibre business packages and minimum throughput of 8mb for Fibre home customers.
So BT will not offer the Fibre service if your speed estimate is below 15mb sync....however its been unofficially lowered to 12mb sync.
We as an ADSL reseller have the ability to place a fibre order for a customer and have an installation engineer despatched to your premises and then it will be his discretion as to whether he installs the Fibre service or not.

Now we can normally place an order if the Fibre speeds are estimated as being as low as about 10mb in some instances ...any lower than this ...and the chances for successful installation are close to null.

This does not really confirm what James posted about the lowest speed for a fibre connection.

Then we come to Plusnet :

Plusnet wrote by email:
Unfortunately we would only be able to provide fibre broadband broadband if the estimate was 15Mb or higher as these are the conditions put in place by our supplier. We have no way to work around this policy as the order would be automatically rejected based on poor speed estimates and I would assume that this would be the case for any BT based broadband provider. The only exceptions would be fibre broadband providers that do not use BT's network, such as Virgin Media.

Well that did not compute as Plusnet seem to accept orders online for sub 15Mb lines so I phoned them and they apologised and said after conferring that they would offer a connection down to 7Mbps which seems more realistic.

In reply to a post by Adsl24:

If you have any questions about our service please do just ask and I'll advise.

James can you or anyone help with this query ?
Someone round the corner from me cannot get an indication that he has FTTC available at any speed. Its as if the BTW checker has a blindspot. He has a stable ADSL connection at the moment and syncs at around 2.5Mbps as I do. All the other houses in the road show fibre availability at 13.2Mb. We are all connected to a cabinet in the next village.

So my question is how the devil do you get BT to update their database to give this line the same service as everybody else around. It seems a bit extreme to get another line installed just to get a result from the Broadband checker.

Thoughts or advise anyone ?

Normally the checker will show nothing if Openreach records deem the line is too long to receive 2 Mb or over (not 15 Mb or over), so they must think there is no chance of it getting the FTTC service.

I've updated my colleague who replied to you - as we can indeed accept orders for any estimation over 2 Mb, ie as long as FTTC is showing on the checker, we can place an order.

If you PM me the address and if possible a line number I can query with Openreach, but no guarantee they will do anything.

I've noticed loads of errors in the spread sheet data, now I can only assume that this data is drawn from BT's records, which of course can mean that errors are present in the BT Wholesale checker.

Does the spreadsheet data show your connected to the same cabinet as other people who can get FTTC in your street?

We will accept and provision any line that shows FTTC is available at 2 Mb or higher. So no problem at all and we have many customers live already who had a <15 Mb estimation. We've never had a failed FTTC installation yet and in 99% of cases the speed is higher than estimated.

ADSL24 said :
If you PM me the address and if possible a line number I can query with Openreach, but no guarantee they will do anything.

Thanks James PM sent.

In reply to a post by Adsl24:

We've never had a failed FTTC installation yet and in 99% of cases the speed is higher than estimated.

Quite so. My speed estimate was 10.7Mb and this meant that some ISPs would not offer service, but I went with ICUK and connected at better than 38Mb. It was a new FTTC cabinet and I was told to expect the speed to drop as more people connected to it. A month later it is still running at well over 30Mb.