Moving from FTTC back to ADSL

We are in the fortunate position of having just had our BTOR cabinet enabled and Accepting Orders for FTTC under BDUK, and within the foreseeable future having FTTP via Gigaclear. (They are laying fibre now).

For the time being I want to retain a landline and ADSL, as backups for phone in case of power cuts (mobile signals are flaky) and Broadband.

But the current intro offers on FTTC are sufficiently attractive to make it worth considering upgrading to FTTC anyway to cover the period until FTTP is available.

I would only consider doing this if there will be no problem in migrating back to a cheaper ADSL solution for backup once the initial FTTC contract ended.

Are there likely to be any technical or other issues arising from migrating back from FTTC to ADSL.

Thanks in advance for any advice

The only issue being that every migration no matter the combination carries the risk someone will mess something up. So FTTC back to ADSL is rare, but people have done it.

I thought it was just a matter of having an BTOR Engineer go into the Exchange to put in an ADSLx Line Card for his line and then remove the fibre to copper bridge link between PCP and Fibre Cabinets) and then have the ISP change broadband package back to ADSLx.

Or am I missing something here?

Paul

No technical issues other than the simple risk involved in any physical change to the connection. Just like upgrading to FTTC in the first place.

You shouldn't need to migrate, as you should be able to downgrade with the same ISP. Whichever you do you would be subject to whatever minimum term applied to the target ADSLx product.

In reply to a post by woodlander:

Are there likely to be any technical or other issues arising from migrating back from FTTC to ADSL.

The only issue we've seen with recent new orders is where people have gone from FTTC back to an ADSL-based service and although the work at the exchange is done, the work in the cabinet is not which then has to be raised to another engineer after.

As to what % rate this occurs at, I don't know but suspect it might be quite high.

Matt

I know someone that done that with BT, they had a pretty good ADSL speed, went to FTTC and realised that the extra cost was not worth it, so after their contract ended they went back to ADSL. No technical problem at all and only a couple of hours if that of lost of service.
The main problem was BT getting in a mess with their bill and carried on charging them for infinity, it got cleared up eventually.

It is, but as with any changes scope for mistakes exist and as FTTC back to ADSL is fairly low volume may have a higher error rate.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

It is, but as with any changes scope for mistakes exist and as FTTC back to ADSL is fairly low volume may have a higher error rate.

This could be true, I know we had an issue a while back going from ADSL Max (temp line card) to ADSL 2+ for a couple of hours we was using somebody else's connection along with their phone line, so maybe the engineer was installing a few cards at the exchange or messed up in the cabinet.

So yeah it can happen.

Paul

woodlander depends what sevuce you are going to get with the alternative vendor -- so if you are clase to the cabinet you could be better off whith 80 meg fttc raither than basic FTTH serice from alternatie provider which is this is 20/20 service

Thanks for all your comments.

You've all been v. helpful

W