Long distance FTTC expectations and 40mb vs 78mb service?

Helloooo!

I'm moving into a slightly rural area, and leaving my 74mbps FTTC behind (boohoo!).

Currently there's no cabinet, but luckily it's a rural area near Cambridge, and the local pressure is meaning an increase in availability of fibre, more cabinets etc. Checkout http://www.connectingcambridgeshire.co.uk/ for more info (I'm in Upware, covered by the Wicken area on that site - new cabinet being installed in Wicken).

Currently served by a cabinet 11km away I believe, hence on a community radio broadband scheme at the moment - better than a kick in the teeth, but it has some biggg downsides - namely "for the safety and security of all our users" no access to router to forward ports etc, and a rather variable quality of connection - frequent drop outs and latency all over the place from 40ms to 2000ms.

Anyway, short story, September this year a new cabinet is being installed much closer, but still just over 3km as the crow flies. The overhead lines do follow a fairly straight path though. From a quick look into it, I think I should be able to get at best around 9mbps via FTTC, at worse around 3. I'd love to hear any real life experience, also regarding upstream and latency on long FTTC connections.

One question I've not been able to answer definitively though, would that mean I'd see no difference in service between a 78mbs and 38mbps package? I think it's not quite as simple as an ISP side rate cap, and would like to know for sure

There is no difference between the 2 other than the cap on speed.

More like 3 Meg to nothing I would estimate, we usually say zero at that line length

No point in paying for the faster FTTC product if you do get around to trying to order.

80 v 40 is indeed a simple rate cap, normally by Openreach though my ISP has dropped the 40/10Mbps Openreach one for new customers and provisions a 40/20 internally capped one on the 80/20 service for them.

You will find no difference on a 38Mbps product (40Mbps OR product) compared to a 78Mbps (80Mbps OR product) one.

A bit sad to be so far from the cabinet though .

Aha, I thought the different options were something like the FTTC version of ADSL Annexes, with more to them than just speed caps.

And yeah, it is a shame they're too tight not to just build a cabinet in the [censored] village. I may end up hanging onto the radio as well - unreliable and laggy as it is, it is 5mb synchronous bandwidth on a static IP. Not quite sure how i'd setup the network for that though... especially as I'm stuck with the locked out router for the radio bb. Hmm.

In my village in West Sussex (we have just had cabinet 8 of 8 'upgraded') we are seeing around 4.5Mbps delivered at 1000m+, and a consumer at 1800m is not offered an FTTC connection.

I would stick with 5Mbps sync! Welcome to HMG/ BDUK and rural Britain.

In reply to a post by Awaken:

Helloooo!

I'm moving into a slightly rural area, and leaving my 74mbps FTTC behind (boohoo!).

If I want to move to another house, I will make sure my new home is closer sit next to cabinet with 80/20. End of. I don't want FTTC with a maximum line speed of 5Mbps or less. No way!

Why would u leave your 74Mbps FTTC?

1100m cable distance and pulling in 19 to 21 Mbps on two lines, so 40 Mbps total

But certainly once past 1.5km things get distinctly more random

I wish Ofcom BANNED FTTC over 1.5km!

Why would u leave your 74Mbps FTTC?

For most people there are other considerations of where to live than the speed of Internet - it is more important to some than others but when weighed against the other factors may not be the decider.