Would you get fibre in these circumstances?

I'll try to give all the information I can:

I am currently on ADSL and getting a stable connection. Very little reduction at peak times.

Upstream: 1155
Downstream: 13792
Sync Rate: 15632
MSR: 13632

SNR (Margin) 3db down (manually tweaked from 6db. No errors / drops). 6db up.
Attenuation: 29.5 (down), 14.8 (Up)

Distance to cabinet: 975m (approx, via roads)
Distance to Exchange 750m (approx)

Fibre has been enabled in our cabinet this week, and I was keen up upgrade - mainly for improved upload speeds so i can take advantage of cloud services.

However, the BT fibre estimator gives:

FTTC Range A (Clean) 14.3 -> 20.3 Down, 0.8 -> 2.2 Up
FTTC Range B (Impacted) 8.7 -> 17.7 Down, 0.6 -> 1.8 Up

Clearly this is potentially slower than ADSL, especially the upload.

My current ISP only quotes the lower of the range A figures, and I'll be stuck on Fibre for a year unless my actual speed is less than 80% of 14.3/0.8.

Do i stay on ADSL and be grateful that it is a lot better than some people get, or risk Fibre for that magical 20/2 possibility?!

Advice sought!

If the cabinet is really 975m away then I would expect better speeds, get http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html... at 1380m as an example.

So suggestion is maybe your distance estimate is wrong, or Openreach is being very conservative.

On your distance to exchange, I presume you mean 1.7km, since the ADSL2+ runs to the cabinet and then onto the exchange.

Hi

Distance to cabinet is me measuring it out via the street, so not taking into accout the actual cable run.

The exchange is actually nearer to me than the cabinet! Both measurements are from my home - imagine a triangle with me, cabinet and exchange at each point. Obviously this makes no difference in cable length from me to cabinet and then on to exchange.

Thanks for the reply.

Stay as you are!

I'm guessing that the exchange is Radnage (Stokenchurch), and your ISP is Zen.

My parent's house is actually slightly closer to their local exchange than their cabinet (0.8k to the former, 1k to the latter). Of course, that's cheating as it's a legacy of when the village exchange was relocated back in the 1960s. The cabinet is close to the location of the old exchange as it avoided re-routing all the existing phone lines. So, electrically speaking, they are closer to the cabinet (as they must be). However, it's a lesson in that assumptions can't be made about routing.

Anyway, in reply to the original posting, the answer on whether to move or not is whether you find the current download or (especially) upload an issue. If it's really about 1km cable length to the cabinet, then I'd expect download speeds of around 25mbps or more (maybe 30-35mbps when/if vectoring is enabled) assuming the wiring is pretty good (and I'd have thought from the ADSL2+ stats it's in good order).

I'm guessing you're either clairvoyant, stalking me from the Zen forum or really are the fountain of knowledge! Either way, its scary!

Hehe - I posted on your thread on the Zen forums earlier

No point if ADSL is better than FTTC. I know a family who was in that situation. They had a good ADSL service, and decided to go for FTTC and found it was not as good as their ADSL.
so after the cost of installation and the cost of moving back to ADSL, they lost nearly £80.

That was because someone who had no idea about what was what and where, told them they would be better off on FTTC, they should have listened to me and saved their money. Oh well such is life.

Granted most people are, but not everyone.

A tricky decision.

In reply to a post by page3:

However, the BT fibre estimator gives:

FTTC Range A (Clean) 14.3 -> 20.3 Down, 0.8 -> 2.2 Up
FTTC Range B (Impacted) 8.7 -> 17.7 Down, 0.6 -> 1.8 Up

On the whole, the top of the range proves perfectly attainable in many cases.

However, as take-up increases, the scope for increased crosstalk is nowadays making it more likely for speed drops to happen, taking the speed further down into the A range. At the same time, the added noise can be enough to get DLM interested - reducing speed further.

When these things happen, there is little that can be done - by yourself, the ISP or BT.

In the past, early adopters tended to get very good speeds compared with the estimation. However, the takeup is now limiting this.

For that reason, I'd probably pass on fibre, for now.

In the future, when vectoring gets deployed, the issue of crosstalk should be largely removed, allowing much better speed consistency, and narrow range estimates (the current A range represents the 20th and 80th percentiles of "similar lines"). Other changes might limit the impact of DLM too.

At that point, it will probably be worth re-thinking.

On the other hand ... if you decide to commit to a new contract term with an ISP, you might find them amenable to trying fibre with a "free" drop back to ADSL if it turns out worse. That way, you'd get an option to try things out...