EE can give me Fibre, but BT says not until 31st December???

I've been keeping an eye on FTTC coming to my exchange. According to Sam Knows & BT, FTTC will only be available from 31st December 2012.

However, I just spoke to EE who told me that even though they use the same fibre infrastructure as BT, EE are able to give me fibre immediately, at speeds of 40 down and 6 up.

Is this true? How can this be the case?

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html what does that say for your telephone number?

If yes to fibre to then you can order, if still December then EE are lying or just plain confused

For fibre that currently says:

Your cabinet is planned to have WBC FTTC by 31st December 2012. Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a fibre technology with an estimated WBC FTTC Broadband where consumers have received downstream line speed of 40.8Mbps and upstream line speed of 6.1Mbps.

So is that a yes or a no!?

It's a no!

It is a yes it will appear, but not available yet.

EE buy from BT Wholesale, so one presumes the BT Wholesale checker should be up to date, but a small chance it is not. Much larger chance that EE is wrong.

Ah ok, I'll just wait until next year then.

Is the 40Mb down estimate likely to be accurate? If so, I presume there is no point in me going for the 76Mb package?

EE's website looks very poorly designed.

I agree with mr saffron, if BTw says no then I think a EE sales bod has got it wrong.

The 40.8 is probably on the low side, until you are enabled there is no real way of knowing whether you will get just 40 Meg connection or 50 Meg or maybe even 60Meg. The estimates on FTTC are usually on the low side.

I did moan about that in news when it first appeared thinking it would change, but alas no, and now there is scope for lots of confusion as people flip between EE and Orange.

Sounds similar to me - OR's checker says 31st Dec, even though the cabinet is live and has port availability.

Do some ISP's have different interfaces into the OR ordering system?

Edited by Stoo (Wed 07-Nov-12 16:28:46)

Similar issue here, FTTC went live where I live (Sandwich, Kent) I believe around the 4th November, yet Openreach still lists our exchange as 'Coming soon - December 2012'. Strange that they're so slow to keep information like this up to date, you'd think they want people buying into contracts asap no? But hey what do I know!

Edited by deleted (Fri 23-Nov-12 21:59:40)

Says 31st December here in m26 too but no sign of any cab work at all. I have only located one cabinet (lots of VM ones) so not hopeful for a new year FTTC
install

Yeah I wouldn't get your hopes up, Sandwich was supposed to have FTTC enabled in March of this year, they started cab work in February iirc, finished around 3-4 months later, then spent the remaining months going back and forward between other areas in Kent, and feeding fibre/clearing out blockages.

if openreach say its not live then who is saying its live? EE?

looks like my cabinet is up. (on openreach check)

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a fibre technology with an estimated WBC FTTC Broadband where consumers have received downstream line speed of 65.9 Mbps and upstream line speed of 20 Mbps.

sky not up to date, I assume best to ring them?

Edited by Chrysalis (Sat 24-Nov-12 23:19:28)

Have Sky enabled your exchange for FTTC? What does the Plusnet checker say?

what do sky have to do to enable? isnt it just updating their computer? I assumed it just needed to be LLU enabled so their backhaul could be hooked up.

sky say just adsl.

plusnet is same only adsl.

infinity will let me order now tho.

this is what I am having to put up with at the moment , 5 seconds for any page to load.

My Broadband Ping

also for the others in this topic the openreach checker is still "coming soon", its Bt wholesale who say yes and infinity.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 25-Nov-12 00:02:37)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

what do sky have to do to enable? isnt it just updating their computer? I assumed it just needed to be LLU enabled so their backhaul could be hooked up.

Sometimes they need to upgrade their exchange equipment for fibre, not often though. Usually they start offering it from the following day to a few weeks after BT.

Odd that PN don't have it if Infinity is there.

For an exchange to be usable for FTTx even after Openreach declare it enabled, a GEA link to the relevant DSLAMs/MSANs has to be provided , reported by MrSaffron as costing £2000. So BTW, Sky and TT each need one if they are to supply.

Sky seems to be often a little behind BTW. I don't know about TT.

In reply to a post by simon194:

Sometimes they need to upgrade their exchange equipment for fibre ....

Always . (See my reply just now to Chrysalis). Maybe sometimes they do it in advance of Openreach enabling the exchange.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

this is what I am having to put up with at the moment , 5 seconds for any page to load.

My Broadband Ping

also for the others in this topic the openreach checker is still "coming soon", its Bt wholesale who say yes and infinity.

Link not working for me.

(I wonder if the BTW checker, reflected in the Infinity one, is jumping the gun?)

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 25-Nov-12 00:35:56)

2 grand for 1 cabinet with 200 or so slots between all isps? seems bit pricy, no wonder sky havent done it yet.

end of the day if there is no certian date from sky "might take some weeks" then I guess I will order with infinity but with business package as there seems some bad horror stories with frequent ip changes (several a week) from infinity users. Which makes me wonder how stable FTTC is if people are having dozens of ip changes every month.

try this link

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-thumb/b57b9...

Both links worked for me, and look very bad.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

2 grand for 1 cabinet with 200 or so slots between all isps? seems bit pricy, no wonder sky havent done it yet.

The GEA link is done at the Exchange not the cabinet. So it will be literally thousands of potential customers using the 1 link.

In simple terms, from the cabinet to the local exchange everything goes through BTs equipment like BT infinity would.

Then at the local exchange, Sky install a link (imagine it as a cable) that connects all of the sky customers from where the fibre cabinets go to in the exchange to their own SKY LLU equipment.

So anybody in your area - perhaps on 100s of cabinets that go back to your exchange will use this 1 link for SKY.
It's not cabinet by cabinet install - it's 1 link that links every cabinet back to their own equipment

So your SKY fibre connection does not go via the same backhaul as BT infinity (as people often mistake).

SKY therefore install it quite quickly. It's very often already there in advance and takes a couple of days for sky to show availability after infinity.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 25-Nov-12 03:54:59)

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

SKY therefore install it quite quickly. It's very often already there in advance and takes a couple of days for sky to show availability after infinity.

It depend whether they need to upgraded their exchange equipment, not very often now, and the local network topology plays a part.

Round my way one of the smaller Sky LLU'd exchanges was offering BT fibre a couple of months before the main exchange went live and Sky couldn't offer fibre until the main exchange was done.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Odd that PN don't have it if Infinity is there.

For an exchange to be usable for FTTx even after Openreach declare it enabled, a GEA link to the relevant DSLAMs/MSANs has to be provided , reported by MrSaffron as costing £2000.

Just to mention this is a link to a switch rather than each DSLAM. All devices connecting to a particular handover point will terminate on one or more switches depending how many of them there are and an operator needs to pay 2k per GigE per switch to get access to the devices being handed over via that switch.

Weirdly it's perfectly possible for some customers on an exchange to be told they can have service from TT or Sky but others refused because the cablelink to the switch that serves them isn't in place yet.

Ah, I didn't kow about the possible multiple switches. Any idea if that is dependent on exchange size? I.e. the number of cabinets and/or lines.

What happens if (say) Sky has one MSAN but there ar two switches? Can an MSAN handle more than one GEA link?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Ah, I didn't kow about the possible multiple switches. Any idea if that is dependent on exchange size? I.e. the number of cabinets and/or lines.

What happens if (say) Sky has one MSAN but there ar two switches? Can an MSAN handle more than one GEA link?

Multiple switches are indeed dependent on number of cabinets, and a switch can cover multiple exchanges where there are exchanges using other exchanges as a handover point.

The only restriction as far as number of lines go are running out of VLAN tags to use and keeping bandwidth per line within limits. Each operator gets 1 or more VLANs allocated to them and each subscriber gets a VLAN within that VLAN - Goggle IEEE 802.1ad for more info on QinQ.

The cable link doesn't go into the Sky MSAN it goes into a Cisco 3750/3750-E switch.

No operator will have their MSANs daisychained with the backhaul at the end unless they really threw the network together on the cheap. Switches are not expensive compared to MSANs. TalkTalk and Sky, at least, have one or more switches in each exchange depending on their backhaul and port requirements.

I'm only aware of one operator who might've built their network in that manner, daisychain of MSANs within exchange rather than using a switch, originally.

A bit of a show-stopper for Sky is only really going to be backhaul, where upgrade of a backhaul from 100Mb to 1Gb has been delayed, a daisy chain needs additional Gb backhauls added at a few exchanges or a migration from a n x 1Gb to 10Gb.

Ta .

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/super-...

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/pricin...

The links in case people think its an imaginary thing

http://blog.thinkbroadband.com/2012/11/spotters-guid...

Go down to the handover at the bottom, and you can see the GEA links on left hand side

ok thanks for the correction of info.

still since whenever sky will install that link seems a unknown, I probably wont wait much more than a few days.

I ordered with infinity, too impatient and have a workaround for the static ip issue.

Almost £15 line rental was bit of a shocker so I paid it upfront for year to get much better price.

Sky is an example of an ISP that has their own backhaul - so the cablelink there is to connect from the handover node into the backhaul. I imagine TalkTalk have their own too.

BT Retail (almost certainly) have their own backhauls, provisioned through the WBC products. I guess that means they have their own cablelinks.

But there is a third type too...

Plusnet use the WBMC product line, where the backhaul is a shared commodity between many "smaller" ISPs. The WBMC backhaul is provisioned separately from the WBC, so I guess these have separate cablelinks.

Overall, that means you could indeed see different acceptance dates for Sky, TT, BT Infinity and Plusnet.

To me that's a very confusing post.

"Handover node" in this context is usually taken to mean a WBC or WBMC node. Which by definition Sky and TT are not using. The GEA cable link is at the exchange, linked to the BTW; Sky; or TT MSANs there, via switches as expanded upon by IgnitionNet.

At WBC and WBMC nodes the BT Wholesale using ISP rents one or more MSILs, with specific contracted throughput capacities. All rely on the huge BT Wholesale backhaul from the exchanges to there. I'm not aware of any differentiation in provision between WBC and WBMC "cloud" backhaul capacity, though the routing mechanism is considerably different.

WBC ISPs, the only one I absolutely know of is Entanet, have to pick up at every one of the 20 nodes. I omit BT Retail, the only other probable one, because a long time ago someone, (I think MrSaffron), intimated BT Retail may have some more direct link than MSILs, in the same way as they apparently had a direct link into Colossus - not normal Centrals or Central Pluses. But I could be suffering from incorrect memory there .

WBMC ISPs, comprising I suggest all the rest, can pick up at one or several nodes, their traffic being routed there by BTW. Plusnet use two nodes.

So far as I know the only important factor is the MSIL capacity an ISP rents at each node that they use. They don't "share" a restricted backhaul other than perhaps some proportional allocation of the BTW capacity based on that, if the total backhaul available is less that the total MSIL capacity for all ISPs. Including the WBC ones.

Perhaps I have mixed some terminology up related to the Handover node. I'll look again at that.

However, the picture I have of the way WMBC uses MSIL's comes from This document, page 7.

If it is still valid, it suggests that an ISP using WBMC connects to the WBMC infrastructure using HostLinks, but that the MSILs are owned by WBMC, and shared.

Even the WBMC dedicated solution (p9) seems to distinguish the MSILs from the HostLinks to the CP.

Hmmm. That doc also shows an "Interconnection Node", co-located at the 20 core 21CN nodes; That was the node I meant - but it obviously isn't the same as the "Openreach Handover Point" as seen in the GEA products such as this one, where the cablelink is required "at each exchange."

I guess this is the point that BT wholesale intervenes, and has the backhaul for WBC and WBMC from the individual exchanges (or at least the parent exchanges with fibre head-ends) back to the 20 core nodes.

I'll have a read of that doc some other time, to see how it squares with my understanding of WBMC from the SINs. Bedtime now and a busy few days coming up.

Hmmm. That doc also shows an "Interconnection Node", co-located at the 20 core 21CN nodes; That was the node I meant - but it obviously isn't the same as the "Openreach Handover Point" as seen in the GEA products such as this one, where the cablelink is required "at each exchange."

I guess this is the point that BT wholesale intervenes, and has the backhaul for WBC and WBMC from the individual exchanges (or at least the parent exchanges with fibre head-ends) back to the 20 core nodes.

Correct . That is the basic difference between BT Wholesale supply and LLU. LLU ISPs don't use the BT Wholesale backhaul from the exchanges. All others do, but not by renting capacity on it. They rent capacity at the nodes and it's up the BTW to supply to the ISP's MSIL(s) there at up to the throughput rented.

7 week wait for my installation , have to say thats aweful, I almost cancelled.

I was going to post its good now can dual install phone and broadband but in the past appointments for installs I always had within 2 weeks so this is overall slower.

I hope my cabinet doesnt fill up before then.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 26-Nov-12 11:36:08)

complained, and didnt hear anything back, but now engineer here installing line so I guess a result.

No home hub yet tho, and I dont know if he also doing the broadband.