1gigabit

So finally have 1gigabit symmetrical up and running.

Main problems I have noticed:

1) My (admittedly, cheapo 5400rpm) hard drives struggle to keep up with downloads (especially torrents which are more random writes than a sequential download). SSD is fine though, but considering you can fill a 250GB SSD in about half an hour on this connection, I don't have pockets big enough to change all my disk storage to SSD.

2) Wifi is way off. I'm not using the hyperhub wifi (which is rubbish and only 2.4GHz) but instead a 450mbit/sec 802.11n 5GHz router. Even right next to the router, it maxes out at less than 200mbit/sec

Overall, it's a bit pointless past 100meg at the moment. Most sites can't keep up with it and my own hardware is the big bottleneck. I think BT with FTTC and vectoring is going to be enough for now.

If you use 5GHz and a mixture of Ethernet devices then you may find you using the bandwidth, but the big advantage would be that you can download/upload lots and not impact your latency.

Just wait until you discover the alternative to torrents.

Wow. That's awesome. I think in anything when your own hardware is the limitation, you're on something good haha.

Does the limited read/write speed mean inaccurate speedtest.net and TBB test results?

None of our testers require read or write to the hard drive in terms of measuring download and upload speeds.

Where's the TBB speed test?

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Seems to be that Chrome maxes out a CPU core on that test result, which may be causing it to peak at 500meg. Not sure.

Should also try http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/ispa

A different way of testing that removes flash issues

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

That's about x200 faster than my connection

Gigabit albeit amazing speeds is not aimed at 1 home user, its aimed at multiple users at home/work/office etc... but not just for 1 cheap pc and torrenting user, you don't in any way have any problems, your connection has no problems it is your cheap hardware, its not your isp's fault your hard drive is only 5400rpm or your processor is a 1.2ghz intel celeron, upgrade and still have "problems" with only receiving 600Mbps, more than we get at work and they are a business with vpns and 1Mb upload,
be grateful for the speed you have not 18Mb in a business in rural England!

Hyperoptic may only have 1Gb/s to the building, so it could be contention.

Not only did you reply to the wrong person, you certainly didn't read the first post either, he openly admits it's his hardware that's restricting the speed.

Bad day at the office?

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

I'm almost certainly going to downgrade to the £10/month 100/100 package next month - it's absolutely pointless having over 100megabit/sec right now.

I tried a 10 thread download to MSDN to download a windows server ISO and it is capped at 100mbit/sec.

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

PS: It's great that I get this speed (and also have BT FTTP as an option if I wanted), so I'm not being ungrateful. I just wanted to prove that this sort of speed is so silly. It reminds me of when everyone had 56k modems and some people were using dodgy firmware to get 10 or 20mbit/sec on NTL cable modems back in the day. Great - but you'll quickly realise that being 100x faster than the normal broadband speed means your held back by infrastructure and the internet as a whole.

It's not contention. There are only a few people moved into this block right now. I can hit 1gigabit/sec by downloading a torrent to a ramdisk on linux, but totally pointless as it takes longer to write to disk than download the file from the internet.

AFIAK they use 10gigabit fibre from the building to the next node.

Edit: even with the non flash test I can't do a speedtest without hitting 100% CPU on a core w/ a Core i7 CPU (not a celeron). It's actually [censored] difficult to saturate a 1gig/sec link even on a LAN, nevermind to a speedtest server with some very questionable javascript.

Edited by mr_mojo (Tue 11-Mar-14 00:49:08)

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

Edit: even with the non flash test I can't do a speedtest without hitting 100% CPU on a core w/ a Core i7 CPU (not a celeron). It's actually [censored] difficult to saturate a 1gig/sec link even on a LAN, nevermind to a speedtest server with some very questionable javascript.

Aha, but thinking outside of la bo�te - take my 5 person family, each with their own PC's, smartphones, Xboxes, smart TV's, YouView boxes.

Line up 5 comparable PC's, set each of them running said speedtest in parallel, combine the results. Granted, you are probably more than likely to move the restriction from the PC equipment to the hub/switch , router/modem.

Whilst my nice new shiny FTTC connection here in this village is great because my download/upload speeds are a tadge better than the 1.5meg / 200k ADSL I had back in August 2013, by far the biggest benefit is not being impacted by what anyone else is doing in the house.
It means not having to schedule my S3/Glacier transfers/backups during the midnight hours, they can run 3 or 6 hourly. Or it allows me to stream BBC News (or sport) on 2nd monitor whilst having to work away on a problem on the other, without impacting #1 son on Xbox, #2 son on Netflix, #1 daughter on Spotify, wife on YouView etc etc.
No more "stop what you are doing for an hour whist I download this latest patch/upgrade/software/video, ok, who's next for the connection".
Twas like having 5 people, one bathroom and always a big queue at certain times.

You give my kids a 1Gigabit connection and they will show me how to use it

but... I do get your point... 100/100 or even 100/20 is probably fine. 330/30 is probably better/enough

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

You're completely missing the point now, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a joke but it's certainly not more than enough. You are forgetting FTTC major problem - distance.

I'm 450 meters from my cabinet, confirmed by a BT engineering from routing charts, I've at best only ever got 47 meg and at worst 38 meg. I know one person who gets barely 20, and there are of course those who's cabinets are enabled but are simply to far away.

Now can you honestly say FTTC is enough?

I think what the OP is suggesting is that the general speeds provided by FTTC (40 or 80 etc) are more than enough for most, and how the internet is used today by the general population. And I am mostly in agreement with this. But for edge cases where people still cannot get these speeds, alternative technologies need to be used and they are mostly not readily available, which is still a problem.

His speed test of 500Mbits/sec is impressive. But way above spec for most people's equipment to handle, as he has stated. Only SSD drives have any such chance at writing at these speeds, not to mention any bandwidth limits encountered on the actual busses inside computers too. My reasons for not needing a connection this fast include but are not limited to:

- no SSDs in any device

- my Linux router is only a dual Atom processor. I would need to replace this unit with high spec gigabit nics with a high spec processor to handle the potential routing throughput of such a connection.

- wireless limitations - I'm only running on 20Mhz single band 144 signal rate, 2.4ghz. This seems to give me maximum throughput of around 50-60Mbits/sec on tests. I could change the access point to dual band 40mhz but any clients also need to match this. Also, due to noise of other networks around me, I may not get that much increase with dual band anyway. So only other option is 5gz faster standards.

All of the above is substantial cost to upgrade and replace, not to mention hassle.

I'm considering upgrading to around 60/20 FTTC next month with Zen. Under my current spec, everything, including my wireless, can handle these speeds. Anything faster will be a waste of resources, so in this respect, as far as I'm concerned, the speeds provided by FTTC are more than adequate for the setup I have. The only possible reason I would move to any faster is if the technology involved is cheaper and/or more reliable, which glass fibre products are as they are not affected by noise due to distance and signal degradation. And even if I could get this kind of broadband, I would still do exactly what he has done (dropping the provisioned speed to 100Mbits) simply because I know I have nothing which can make use of any faster, probably saving a few pennies per month in the process too.

I'm not entirely sure the maximum speed is the main problem.
The method of delivery is the main problem in my opinion.
Lets say you have a gigabit capable connection to your house/building, so if there is a choice of speeds to suit your requirements, fantastic!
A gigabit capable connection to every house/building would be the ideal, with people choosing what speed service they require on top of that.
Having to settle with whatever fttc/adsl can manage out of your copper line is not ideal.

Yes FTTC is great when you get good speeds, we get 36/6 at work, which is OK but it's no where near the 80/20 you get when you are close to the cabinet, and whichever way you look at it this is where FTTC fails as it still use copper which is prone to all sorts of problems.

In an ideal world car manufacturers would be forced to upgrade our engines to more efficient ones, than force us to buy a whole new car...

Get three or more drives and put them in a RAID5 if your single drive can't cope.

You can use iperf to speed test gigabit LAN. This does not require a beefy CPU. My AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L processors can cope with gigabit.

Indeed, However it's harder to compare a car we chose to buy compared to a telephone line we have been "given".
The issue is we are at the mercy of what is available to our property, not as much about "choosing" a car.
At a stretch it's like saying, your local road can only support 30mph, therefore you can only drive a car which has a maximum speed of 30mph. (on the basis that the internet (unlimited speed for sake of argument) is every other road connected to your local road (therefore restricting you based on your locality).
However it's particularly annoying when your mate lives on a 70mph local road, buys exactly the same car and he is only restricted to 70mph on the global scheme of things).
I know it's not a very good argument, but when two people pay the same amount for the same "vehicle" they would be disappointed in unequal service.

But is it made of copper and/or aluminium but also powered by fibre and what's the speedtest result?

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Get three or more drives and put them in a RAID5 if your single drive can't cope.

You can use iperf to speed test gigabit LAN. This does not require a beefy CPU. My AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L processors can cope with gigabit.

I've got a machine with 2 128GB SSDs in RAID 5 - they are really quick, totally pointless but it seemed like a fun thing to do when I was doing my last home build. Alas, no gigabit Internet connection to see what it would do...

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

Thereby ensuring that the people who really need improvements to their broadband speed can't get them, whilst delivering a faster service to people who mostly don't want it.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

Thereby ensuring that the people who really need improvements to their broadband speed can't get them, whilst delivering a faster service to people who mostly don't want it.

Anyone who 'really needs' a particular speed can get it. BT (other providers are available) will install a fibre based Ethernet socket in the Gb/s range any where you want it for a price. What's that you say - you can't afford £10k for an installation? Well then - I guess your need isn't that strong after all

Edited by Andrue (Tue 11-Mar-14 15:45:40)

It isn't always as cheap as £10K. The company I work for had a quote at one point of £350K for installing a fibre service due to distance from exchange and the amount of trench work that was needed. Oddly we decided against it.

In reply to a post by ian72:

It isn't always as cheap as £10K. The company I work for had a quote at one point of £350K for installing a fibre service due to distance from exchange and the amount of trench work that was needed. Oddly we decided against it.

Was that very remote? I oversaw the installation of fibre to a converted barn in a village outside Bicester:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&g...

Install cost (including all the routers) was just over £12k if I remember correctly. It used existing ducting and was classified as a brownfield site which helped keep the cable cost down (I think that part was a flat £1,000 in the end) but I remember when we were talking to the company installing it that BT said there'd be no charge for trench work anyway because they considered it an expansion of their local loop. Of course knowing BT it's possible they said that to look good knowing full well it was irrelevant

Edited by Andrue (Tue 11-Mar-14 15:51:26)

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/download.html Files that are also on a 10 Gbps server and we have people getting over 500 Mbps from the testers

But feel free to support a French service rather than home grown facilities

In reply to a post by ian72:

I've got a machine with 2 128GB SSDs in RAID 5 - they are really quick, totally pointless but it seemed like a fun thing to do when I was doing my last home build. Alas, no gigabit Internet connection to see what it would do...

You mean RAID 0 there, right?

Andrue,

If you don't mind me asking, what was the distance involved?

He must do 'cos RAID 5 need at least 3 drives.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

..
AFIAK they use 10gigabit fibre from the building to the next node.
....

That must be pricey! I'd like to know what their network looks like, I know they have good financial backing but they must be losing a fair bit of money at present.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

Andrue,

If you don't mind me asking, what was the distance involved?

The distance from the exchange is 4.5km but there are FTTC cabinets right on the outskirts of Bicester so only 3km if they can patch into those. However it was curious that BT quoted for blowing from the cabinet.
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

Given that there's no FTTC for that village (or certainly wasn't back then) I'm not sure why they did that. I wouldn't think there was already fibre to that cab so perhaps that's just what they consider the edge of their network in that area. A further complication was that there was already some old fibre providing one unit with an ISDN service but BT told us they couldn't use that.

But ultimately their costings said we were a brownfield site so there was a fixed fee of £1,000.

Our supplier installed distribution kits and cables were laid connecting each unit to the network kit.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 11-Mar-14 19:42:08)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/download.html

there is no 10 GB test file to test?

Edited by adslmax (Tue 11-Mar-14 19:44:42)

I think a 1 GB file is enough until XGPON is rolled out.

Don't read too much into where Openreach will block leased line type fibre from.

The GEA-FTTC with its pre-build for a chunk of GEA-FTTP network is often new build and bypasses a good number of smaller exchanges totally.

I've never really played with those download files, quite interesting, the 1GB file took exactly 2 minutes and 4 seconds, which equates to a download speed of 69274kbps, rather higher than my current sync speed of 65839kbps.

In reply to a post by kasg:

I've never really played with those download files, quite interesting, the 1GB file took exactly 2 minutes and 4 seconds, which equates to a download speed of 69274kbps, rather higher than my current sync speed of 65839kbps.

Time to install tbbmeter at the same time?

Browsers often lie about download speeds, try a download manager, or command line wget.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Install cost (including all the routers) was just over £12k if I remember correctly. It used existing ducting and was classified as a brownfield site which helped keep the cable cost down (I think that part was a flat £1,000 in the end) but I remember when we were talking to the company installing it that BT said there'd be no charge for trench work anyway because they considered it an expansion of their local loop. Of course knowing BT it's possible they said that to look good knowing full well it was irrelevant

I was quoted £7k install and £1k a month for a 10Mbps symmetric fibre internet service in a remote county in north scotland. Locals ADSL was around 2Mbps on a old 20CN very high latency exchange.

The newer 5400rpm~ HDDs use 1TB platter densities which can sustain 125MB/s + for much of the drive. The 7200rpm drives using the 1TB platters are even more capable.

Also torrent clients can be configured to cache writes and write them out sequentially. Going SSD isn't necessarily needed if your using HDDs with the latest platter densities.

Nice connection BTW, do want. Especially the upload.

To be honest, I have no idea what's going on. The drive is a pice of [censored]. I've never seen it read or write more than 50MB/sec even when copying files to/from the SSD in the computer. Who knows.

I think you may be making a big mistake judging Openreach FTTP based on your Hyperoptic experience

Oops, yep, meant RAID 0

It was about 5 miles from the exchange and in a very rural area - the phone was entirely delivered by overhead cable and so no ducting in place.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Install cost (including all the routers) was just over £12k if I remember correctly. It used existing ducting and was classified as a brownfield site which helped keep the cable cost down (I think that part was a flat £1,000 in the end) but I remember when we were talking to the company installing it that BT said there'd be no charge for trench work anyway because they considered it an expansion of their local loop. Of course knowing BT it's possible they said that to look good knowing full well it was irrelevant

I was quoted £7k install and £1k a month for a 10Mbps symmetric fibre internet service in a remote county in north scotland. Locals ADSL was around 2Mbps on a old 20CN very high latency exchange.

Data was the biggest cost (quelle surprise). We took 40Mb/s and divided between four companies (presumably a single connection wouldn't have needed such expensive hardware). It came to nearly £1k a month in total. Roughly the same monthly cost (£250) as the dual bonded ADSL connection we'd been using before. So we went from 4.5Mb/s/1Mb/s to 10/10 for the same monthly cost.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Browsers often lie about download speeds, try a download manager, or command line wget.

A browser may lie, but I was timing it with my watch, not relying on what a browser was telling me.

Have downloaded file and windows says 1,073,741,824 bytes in size

But if the file is actual 1,024,000,000 in size then your 65839 sync speed holds up. I will start counting the bytes by hand now - I may be some time.

I used 1,073,741,824 bytes in my calculation as that is the size of the file - exactly a "binary" gigabyte. Even 1,024,000,000 would still work out at over 66000Mbps. 1,000,000,000 bytes would give 64516Mbps, which is still impossible with a sync speed of 65839, since that gives an IP profile of about 63725.

In reply to a post by kasg:

A browser may lie, but I was timing it with my watch, not relying on what a browser was telling me.

Good move.

I've just timed (Firefox on Win7, saving to SSD) and mine took 2minutes 54.9 seconds - or 174 seconds to download the 1,073,741,824 bytes. Given 8 bits in a byte, that's 8,589,934,592 bits in 174 seconds.

Or around 48,210 Kbps. My sync is 52,842 Kbps, so I probably have an overhead & profile hit of 4,632 Kbps, around 10% ??

Maybe some security software on your PC is doing something to affect the timing, or your ISP?

Edited by jchamier (Wed 12-Mar-14 21:49:33)

IP Profile is 0.9679 of sync.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Maybe some security software on your PC is doing something to affect the timing, or your ISP?

I don't see how that could make a download faster than was theoretically possible.

I have a slight concern about the accuracy of timing something with a watch, at 53Mbps. Even the reaction time within the watch becomes relevant. How did you control the start and stop of the watch and the start of the download, and how did you synchronise the starts?

What kind of watch is it, and how finely calibrated?

And what events on the PC signalled the start and stop time? Was it started the second the mouse button was pressed or was it started when a dialogue showing progress appeared? If it was the latter then it may be a virus checker or browser cached a little before the dialogue got around to appearing.

Hmm, I'm beginning to wish I'd never started this! I just timed it using an ordinary watch at 2 minutes, 4 seconds. Absolute accuracy is not important as a second either way wouldn't have made any difference to the conclusion. I realise now that what must be happening is that the browser is caching some of the download before the point at which you tell it where to save the file - I just tried it again and did it in 1 minute 30 seconds, which is even more impossible.

Edited by kasg (Thu 13-Mar-14 15:24:48)

It had to be something in the timing was all I was trying to diagnose .

Yeap browser start download before you have picked the save location, hence why you sometimes see massive burst speeds if you are slow picking the save location.

Yes, as soon as you click a link in it starts to download in the background whilst waiting for you to say where to save it. That is one of the reasons someone suggested running TBBMeter as you would see when the actual download started.

In reply to a post by ian72:

That is one of the reasons someone suggested running TBBMeter as you would see when the actual download started.

or a command line tool such as wget.

Thanks to you and ian72, I should have worked that out earlier.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Seems to be that Chrome maxes out a CPU core on that test result, which may be causing it to peak at 500meg. Not sure.

Chrome lags because of recent problems with Pepper Flash 12.0.r0, causing high cpu useage.

I have used Internet Explorer for running speed tests for a long time and Chrome for general use, as IE performs more reliably in general on multi-threaded speed tests than Chrome, due to various bugs in Pepper Flash.

Some things that can also slow your system down when you run a browser based speed test:
- The browser cache writes out files to make room for your browser test data, even though it's just in memory. There can be quite a lot of files if they are small images for example.
- Any files written may need to be virus scanned, if you don't have that turned off for those files.
- Any files written may need to be indexed by windows indexing system, which requires writing additional data.
- Windows pre-loads/pre-fetches files and can do this when you don't want it to.

If you run a resource and performance monitor while you run your speed test you can see what exactly is causing the high load:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Monitor

Of course if you're running Linux then most of this advice will need to be modified, but still may be useful.

In reply to a post by MUD_Wizard:

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Seems to be that Chrome maxes out a CPU core on that test result, which may be causing it to peak at 500meg. Not sure.

Chrome lags because of recent problems with Pepper Flash 12.0.r0, causing high cpu useage.

I have used Internet Explorer for running speed tests for a long time and Chrome for general use, as IE performs more reliably in general on multi-threaded speed tests than Chrome, due to various bugs in Pepper Flash.

I seem to get better speeds in IE, not noticed this before.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13948...

Though the TBB speed tester tends to crash in IE for me at these sorts of speeds. The ISPA one works.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

I'm almost certainly going to downgrade to the £10/month 100/100 package next month - it's absolutely pointless having over 100megabit/sec right now.

I tried a 10 thread download to MSDN to download a windows server ISO and it is capped at 100mbit/sec.

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

PS: It's great that I get this speed (and also have BT FTTP as an option if I wanted), so I'm not being ungrateful. I just wanted to prove that this sort of speed is so silly. It reminds me of when everyone had 56k modems and some people were using dodgy firmware to get 10 or 20mbit/sec on NTL cable modems back in the day. Great - but you'll quickly realise that being 100x faster than the normal broadband speed means your held back by infrastructure and the internet as a whole.

If everyone received a perfect service on FTTC and got full 80mbit connection speeds, then yes FTTP would be useless.

As it is now, with people living 500, 1000M+ from the cabinet, over a mixture of 60, 70 year old copper/aluminium, the service cannot be called futureproof at all, or even adequate for some, if they are far enough away.

The main benefits of FTTP which make it such a common sense investment for the future are:

NO interference, line length issues, no CRC errors, interleaving
Can be upgraded over the next few decades to provide more than enough bandwidth by just changing the hardware on each end of the fibre.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

No, my point is that it is ridiculous that so many people say that FTTC is a 'joke' and we should be spending £30bn+ of taxpayer money subsidising FTTP rollout to everyone. FTTC is more than enough for right now.

I'm almost certainly going to downgrade to the £10/month 100/100 package next month - it's absolutely pointless having over 100megabit/sec right now.

I tried a 10 thread download to MSDN to download a windows server ISO and it is capped at 100mbit/sec.

BT has made a very wise decision not to go past FTTC right now.

PS: It's great that I get this speed (and also have BT FTTP as an option if I wanted), so I'm not being ungrateful. I just wanted to prove that this sort of speed is so silly. It reminds me of when everyone had 56k modems and some people were using dodgy firmware to get 10 or 20mbit/sec on NTL cable modems back in the day. Great - but you'll quickly realise that being 100x faster than the normal broadband speed means your held back by infrastructure and the internet as a whole.

I also see you fail to mention how many people are using this connection. Are you living alone? Families could saturate alot of that bandwidth, obvious if you are the sole user you'd be hard pressed to saturate it.

So how would fibre get to the premises here and now if that was what they were doing instead of FTTP? How long would the roll-out take, and who has the money to do it?

Don't forget that (I think) every cable company went bust until NTL owned them all and got the Virgin brand-name as a huge sales aid.

In a few years time maybe FTTPoD will morph into full FTTP. That would involve manageable investment capital, as there won't be the mad panic to improve on ADSLx.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Don't forget that (I think) every cable company went bust until NTL owned them all and got the Virgin brand-name as a huge sales aid.

Not went bust, but had very little income to improve services/grow network.

NTL was CableTel renamed when they bought a transmission business, (which they sold around 2006 to merge with Telewest). The merged company then bought Virgin Mobile to do quad-play and get the licence to Virgin name.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Don't forget that (I think) every cable company went bust until NTL owned them all and got the Virgin brand-name as a huge sales aid.

Not went bust, but had very little income to improve services/grow network.

NTL was CableTel renamed when they bought a transmission business, (which they sold around 2006 to merge with Telewest). The merged company then bought Virgin Mobile to do quad-play and get the licence to Virgin name.

Didn't go bust? Hmmm. Not for lack of trying.

How many profitable quarters has VM had so far? I know it had its first one last year. Did the huge financial success story continue?

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Didn't go bust? Hmmm. Not for lack of trying.

No, the banks realised if they let it go bust they would lose everything they'd loaned - so they changed the debt into something designed for 100+ years long term, assigned that to the holding company and let the operational company work as if it was making money, but also paying any "profit" into the holding company.

How many profitable quarters has VM had so far? I know it had its first one last year. Did the huge financial success story continue?

Don't know, but now part of the Liberty empire, its all different!

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

So how would fibre get to the premises here and now if that was what they were doing instead of FTTP? How long would the roll-out take, and who has the money to do it?

Don't forget that (I think) every cable company went bust until NTL owned them all and got the Virgin brand-name as a huge sales aid.

In a few years time maybe FTTPoD will morph into full FTTP. That would involve manageable investment capital, as there won't be the mad panic to improve on ADSLx.

Fibre gets to premises by laying a fibre cable from the local node to the customer's house. It could be pushed through existing ducting (if it exists), or via a drop cable, or new ducts could be installed. Google will provide you with more details if you don't know how fibre can be installed to a house.

I imagine the rollout would take the better part of a decade. As to who has the money to install it, logic dictates that the government would assist communication providers such as BT, Sky or Virgin Media, or even Google.

It is highly laughable though that in 2014 the UK are still installing copper telephone cables to brand new houses. The UK should folllow other countries example and requires all new houses to be provided with full FTTP, paid for by the developer of course.

The fact that the UK doesn't even get recognised by the FTTH council in europe is simply laughable, compared to the other European counties. Sure, we have tiny companies that manage to connect a few houses every year in the UK. But compared to the rest of europe?

Even if the UK started building a fullscale FTTP network today, we would still be way behind the other counties in 10 years. Sad state of affairs.

Well said, totally agree. Service the masses, the minority get the dregs.

I am fully aware of how FTTP/H/B is provided . It's you that seems to be writing a fairy story.

In reply to a post by dave2150:

As to who has the money to install it, logic dictates that the government would assist communication providers such as BT, Sky or Virgin Media, or even Google.

So why aren't aren't they doing? Are you suggesting the government should subsidise google, or that google should subsidise BT, Sky and Liberty Global?

It is highly laughable though that in 2014 the UK are still installing copper telephone cables to brand new houses. The UK should folllow other countries example and requires all new houses to be provided with full FTTP, paid for by the developer of course.

Is that true? Which countries?

The fact that the UK doesn't even get recognised by the FTTH council in europe is simply laughable,

I find it odd that the FTTH Council of Europe website can't even let me accept or dismiss it's cookies message. Who/what the heck are they anyway? All I can google is a blog.

Not impressed compared to the other European counties. Sure, we have tiny companies that manage to connect a few houses every year in the UK. But compared to the rest of europe?

Even if the UK started building a fullscale FTTP network today, we would still be way behind the other counties in 10 years. Sad state of affairs.

That doesn't seem to agree with the fact we are way ahead of most countries in national coverage of "superfast" broadband.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by dave2150:

Even if the UK started building a fullscale FTTP network today, we would still be way behind the other counties in 10 years. Sad state of affairs.

That doesn't seem to agree with the fact we are way ahead of most countries in national coverage of "superfast" broadband.

Maybe in Europe but there are quite a few countries outside Europe which are way ahead in both FTTC and FTTP coverage. Latvia and Lithuania both have more than 80% FTTP coverage.

In reply to a post by flipdee:

Well said, totally agree. Service the masses, the minority get the dregs.

How else do you propose we do things? Are you suggesting that no-one should have access to a service or a product unless it's available to everyone?

So by your logic:
* Mains sewerage should be banned because some people are still on septic tanks.
* Mains gas supply should be banned because some people are on tanks or another fuel altogether.
* Trains should be banned because only a few towns and cities actually have train stations.
* Broadcast TV should be banned because a few communities are in the shadow of a large hill and are unable to receive satellite or terrestrial signals.

It isn't feasible to guarantee the provision of goods or services to every last man, woman and child in the country. It is horribly expensive to even try. There will always be those left out or suffering a sub-optimal experience. That's human civilisation. That's life.

I'm not saying anything should be banned.
I know what your saying, it's just frustrating when there is no real competition in this area of nationwide roll out,I think it was a bad move allowing the situation of one sole company to be bidding in the bduk project never mind still continuing on that basis.
I know the limitations of the technology and the financial hurdles that must be involved.
Just having a go at the fact that fttc can be considered by some people as "good enough".
In 7-10 years time we'll be sitting on fttc going, for goodness sake, is this still all I can get?

I know what your saying, it's just frustrating when there is no real competition in this area of nationwide roll out,I think it was a bad move allowing the situation of one sole company to be bidding in the bduk project never mind still continuing on that basis.

There were 2 companies selected. And it was realtively recently that Fujutisu announced they would stop bidding. Some contracts had already been let when they made the announcement. At that point BDUK could have pulled the tender and retendered. To be able to retender for a new framework would have taken probably 12-24 months. And only after that would local authorities be able to use the framework.

So, the choice was :
1) carry on and use BT
2) restart the tender process and delay the rollout by probably 24 months
3) not use the central framework and make EVERY local authority run their own EU procurement (at significant expense)

2 would have resulted in even more complaints about UK lagging behind the rest of europe/world.

3 would have cost many millions and would probably have still ended up with BT winning most of the bids as they are one of a very few companies able to provide any risk mitigation for the government contracts (and they have existing networks in place that reduce the investment needed).

So, we ended up with the first option. The rules that are forced via the EU for procurement and state aid meant that it was pretty much inevitable from the start.

And any suggestions we are lagging behind the rest of europe or the world are wrong. We don't have the FTTP coverage that some other countries do. We don't have the lowest cost. However, we do have very high coverage of usable and adequate services and with the build of the network there is potential for incremental change as and when the business case stacks up.

The fact that FFTPoD can exist as a service means that it is an option for moving to an FTTP service where the infrastructure itself is already in place.

If you dig deeper it becomes interesting, i.e. outside the big cities the situation is often worse than the UK rural areas, but the low cost of FTTB i.e. running copper Ethernet around apartment blocks that many many more people live in produces high FTTP coverage figures.

Lots of Europe has lots more true FTTH/P but lots does not. So in terms of average speeds that people actually buy we do not fare so badly.

Invariably where things are working well, people are just getting on and doing it rather than trying to fight the system, be they competitors to an incumbent or municipal roll-outs.

FTTH is the gold standard, but given the level of moans about street works in the UK, I can see a widespread FTTH roll-out having all sorts of delays and people refusing to allow their home to be connected.

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/estimate/ lets you play with some different scenarios across the UK. Base line figures represent roughly currently state of play.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/estimate/ lets you play with some different scenarios across the UK. Base line figures represent roughly currently state of play.

I have had a play and got the UK average speed up to 85Mb/s!

Does this win a prize?

Results
The number of fixed line broadband customers is: 27200000
The average speed for cable customers is: 94 Mbps
The average speed for FTTC customers is: 51 Mbps
The average speed for cable customers is: 370 Mbps
The average speed for ADSL/ADSL2+ customers is: 9 Mbps
Based on the figures you have entered the average speed is 27.2 Mbps

Gigabit internet and can't afford faster disks? #firstworldproblem

In reply to a post by simon194:

Maybe in Europe but there are quite a few countries outside Europe which are way ahead in both FTTC and FTTP coverage. Latvia and Lithuania both have more than 80% FTTP coverage.

(Note: Lithuania and Latvia are both in Europe, as well as Estonia. The baltics are no further over than Finland)

FTTP and FTTB (at high speeds) tends to be prevalent in countries where flats make up the majority of the housing stock of the country. Simply because it is easy to connect these, with considerably more bang per buck.

According to these statistics on housing in Europe, the average across the EU is that 46% of residential properties are flats.

Latvia has the highest percentage, at 72%, while Lithuania is 5th highest at 59%.

Meanwhile, the UK is third lowest in that table at 18% (with only Ireland and Norway lower).

It probably helps that Latvia and Lithuania have a combined population that is still less than 10% of the UK; they match Manchester plus Birmingham, or half of London.

These are significant factors in both the cost of an FTTP/FTTB rollout as well as the duration.

Property outside Europe is a similar story. South Korea, for example, has 60% of the population living in apartments, from a figure of 1% 40 years ago.

So the answer then is to get all of us brits to leave in high rise apartment buildings rather than in our semis and detached houses. I have a feeling that most brits would rather not turn the landscape into blocks of flats/apartments.

Absolutely not.

But so many people point at other places, and ask why we can't have X when (relatively poorer) country Y can manage it. How come *they* make "smarter" decisions than us?

It turns out that the answer is never so simple.

My post was to point out how unlikely it would be for Brits to want to live in apartments just to get fibre. It is a pointless comparison and in the end there are positives and negatives to choices around town planning. We are not going to radically change this just to raise population density to make comms infrastructure cheaper