Fibre speed estimates - Northamptonshire Superfast rollout

I live in a small village just outside Northampton. BTOR were last week feverishly working on a new Fibre cabinet next to my current ADSL cabinet, with an estimated Go Live for the end of the year. According to Sam Knows I'm 388m from my exchange, but my cabinet is approx 180m walk in a direct line down my street.

Am I right in saying that Fibre speeds are dependent upon distance to the cabinet, not the exchange? If so, what speeds might I expect once I move away from superfast ADSL Max?

Depends how long your actual copper cable to the cabinet is (and therefore how far the fibre cab is from the PCP to some degree).

I'd suspect that you'd get an attainable of greater than max up/down at that distance though.

Cheers,
AP

Thanks for your reply.

They'd have to loop the cable around the entire village for me to get much worse than I do now: I'm 6.75 down and 0.34 up at the moment. Not the worst in the world I know but it can run painfully slow at times.

Is there no way of estimating anything more accurate?

Try http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband....

If you're only 388m from your exchange, then they must be looping the cable around the village for you only to be getting those speeds!

I'm more that 3 times as far away, and getting 14Mbps!

Strange...!

Edit, and are you really on ADSL Max as you say, or a 21CN product?

Edited by AndyPandy (Mon 15-Sep-14 13:23:40)

Yep, ADSL Max (which should be done for blatant false advertising). We are the village that 21CN forgot. Frankly I'm surprised we're even getting fibre!

I didn't think it was possible to get more than 8Mbps on Max?

thanks. So the way I read that is if the cable is stretched taut, I would get around 65Mbps, but I should probably hope for around 45mbps or so?

The figures in that table are highly pessimistic, I would be surprised if you don't get full speed.

Thanks Kevin, that's certainly encouraging!

BTOR were playing with the new cabinet for several days last week (it's been there for a few months), so I'm hoping that means it will be enabled soon. The Superfast website still has it listed as the end of the year but I'm hoping that's a worst case scenario rather than a definite date. I guess there's no way of telling short of asking an engineer next time I spot one there?

That goes half way to explaining your speeds then, though that close to the exchange, and you should really be getting, the full 8Mbps speeds.

It's worth checking your internal wiring, and ring wire etc.

On fibre, you really should be capable of 80/20....

My parents used to get 7.6/0.45 on a 1.2km line before 21CN hit their exchange so there could be an internal wiring issue or the line is genuinely longer than expected.

well, my IP profile is 7.15 but I invariably get around 6.7 down and 0.37 up. I did change all my wiring which definitely improved things, although mainly from a stability point of view.

I seem to have a relatively high downstream attenuation of 15.0dB, don't know why,but overall I'm not too worried about the small loss, especially since I noticed the new Fibre cabinet in the village and saw on the Where & When website that we would be getting FTTC by the end of the year.

I'm keeping a beady eye on the cabinet as it's the only one I've seen in the village and I think there are a few more than 288 households competing for lines. Want to make sure I get one of the first! Don't know why OR are so vague about timings, though. They must have a better internal idea of Go Live.

I certainly hope so! it would be nice not to have everything grind to a halt every time my kids go on YouTube...

Until the very last sign-off and commission there is always the risk of a hold up from failure to pass earthing tests to a high rate of line port failures, that may require a DSLAM swap.

If it was just say 20 cabinets per week going live across the UK then simpler to manage, but with the scale of roll-outs and a need to stay within budget things are less than perfect in answering all the questions.

In reply to a post by shure:

well, my IP profile is 7.15 but I invariably get around 6.7 down and 0.37 up.

It is a while since I was connected this way, but those profiles seem like the top-end for ADSLMax, corresponding to an 8Mbps sync. IIRC, I had the same with a 30dB attenuation, and a length of around 2km.

I'm keeping a beady eye on the cabinet as it's the only one I've seen in the village and I think there are a few more than 288 households competing for lines. Want to make sure I get one of the first!

Your speed may well turn out to be affected by the other houses as much as it is affected by the distance.

My first connection was about 650m from the cabinet, and got 40/10 on the old packages, but was affected by crosstalk from other lines from day 1. Once 80/20 speeds became available, the modem showed an attainable speed of 50Mbps.

My second connection (different address) is 350-400m from the cabinet, and has run 80/20 almost all the time. However, as takeup has increased, the attainable speed has dropped from 90Mbps to around 78Mbps, which is what I get now. I've recently had a short spell under the intervention of DLM, running at 72Mbps, because the crosstalk is also causing my error rate to creep up.

Don't know why OR are so vague about timings, though. They must have a better internal idea of Go Live.

There will be parts of OR that know *exactly* what is going on, but they never know where or when they will encounter something that delays them - a blocked duct; unsuitable power, weather, flooded chambers etc. The internal plans will have leeway to cope, and re-direct crews to other work. They (used to) give the public a vague-ish date, to allow for some reasonable amount of delays.

Unfortunately, a few long delays, on a few cabinets, caused the date to just keep stepping back repeatedly. Someone complained to ASA that this was false advertising (presumably hoping that OR would make the dates more accurate); ASA agreed; OR did the obvious thing - they added 6 months onto the publicly-available expected date of every cabinet, to allow for reasonable & exceptional delays. Result: dates became extremely vague.

Now we are in the BDUK rollout, and the dates started out even more vague than this. As the work has progressed in most areas, the date predictions have improved somewhat.

yeah, I don't mean to be overly critical of OR. I'm sure they have to build a safety net in to avoid being accused of exactly what you described. Just impatient to experience "proper" speeds for a change!

I appreciate that crosstalk may affect speeds. But anything in the high double figures will be an improvement on what I have now. My main issue is upstream (I think) as e.g. Skype can be very unreliable and i should have thought that 6Mbps down would be more than enough for it. I also work from home a fair amount and use VOIP, so I'm looking forward to the day when that will run a lot more stable. Gaming is the other area where I'm hoping to see a massive improvement

Out of curiosity, do you really notice much difference between 90mbps and 78Mbps? I ask because I can't say that I notice a massive increase in (non VOIP related) daily activity from when I improved from 2Mbps to 6.5Mbps. When I stream certainly, but otherwise I can't say I've noticed a sixfold increase, and I should have thought that even with streaming etc one would be hard pushed to notice any difference in performance btween even 40/10 and 80/20, unless I guess you are in the habit of doing a lot of HD downloads. Or am I wrong?

In reply to a post by shure:

Out of curiosity, do you really notice much difference between 90mbps and 78Mbps?
...
hard pushed to notice any difference in performance btween even 40/10 and 80/20

We never actually saw 90Mbps as a sync speed, because it is capped at 80. The 90 came from the modem reports of what is attainable - which is a calculation it makes from the spare SNRM over the target 6dB.

However, I can say that we didn't see any difference between the 80 and the 72 while DLM had intervened. Gamers would probably notice the extra 8-10ms of delay, but it wasn't obvious to us.

We don't notice much difference in day-to-day activities between the original 40/10 and the 80/20 we've had for 2 years. You can see differences only when downloading multi-GB files, and even then, you have to sit there watching the clock.

The wife is almost always on some VoIP call during the day, and this has proven to be highly reliable at either speed. It doesn't get affected by anything I am doing, or any video being streamed by the kids.

We don't do gaming online, so have no real experience from that side.

We *used* to be able to work fine from home on 8/0.5 (three years ago) except the wife would have a dedicated phone line for her calls, and the kids didn't watch much online video. Multi-GB downloads were noticeably slower then; even popping for a cup of tea didn't solve that one

Now, I'd probably say we could cope on around 25/5, would be fine on 40/10, and are perfectly comfortable on 80/20 with plenty of overhead.

that's what I thought. Many thanks