FTTC on long telephone line.

There is about 1.1km of cable between the exchange and the cabinet that serves me and a further 5km of cable between my house and the cabinet.

If the cabinet was upgraded to FTTC could I get a better connection speed? - Leaving aside FTTP.

Recently I have been getting a downstream connection speed of 1952kbps. Usually the connection speed has been in the range 1300-1700 kbps.

In short, NO.

If it was the other way round, 5km from Exchange to Cab and 1.1km from Cab to you, then yes, you might.

In reply to a post by MHC:

In short, NO.

Thank you. Do you have any information on what the customer to cabinet distance limitations are for FTTC?

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by MHC:

In short, NO.

Thank you. Do you have any information on what the customer to cabinet distance limitations are for FTTC?

There are no hard limits but down to line performance - attenuation and noise levels. Attenuation can be affected by wire guage, length, material, joints, and noise by a lot of external factors and other services in te pair.

Typically once a line gets about about 200m it will drop off from full 80Mbps, at 400m it is around 60Mbps. Once the line gets to around 800m to 1km the downstream is probably down to about 20-15 Mbps which is the lower limit of Infinity ... At 2km you are likely to be well below ADSL speeds.

There will be people who get better.

Thanks, do you know what rules BT apply to decide whether a customer should be connected, perhaps to a downgraded service.

The exact criteria, No. They appear to use line length data along with some information local to your cabinet. From that they can estimate attenuation and noise levels. Then, using that they can estimate the potential sync speed and throughput. If the estimate is under 15Mbps then they will not offer Infinity. From 15 down to about 5 they will offer a service, and below 5Mbps they will not allow an FTTC product.

Note that the limits MHC gives are for BT Retail.

Infinity is of course BT Retail. Other providers do not have this 15Mbps cutoff. I think some will even place an order with Openreach where the estimate is as low as 2Mbps. Which will sound pointless to some, but not always to people on 500kbps.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 18-Feb-13 14:52:52)

Yes

Half way down the page at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband....