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I have a puzzling problem. My neighbour and I are both 1500m from Cabinet 9 at Llanidloes, which is new FTTC enabled. Wires down the same poles! He is offered VDSL2 (according to BT wholesale line checker). I am not. BT retail have been useless in finding out what the issue is. I have an expert friend has told me to ask BT retail for a tags search. I have yet to find anyone in BT retail who knows what this is. Will it help? What else can I do? My expert has suggested moving my line to a company able to provide customer service but I don't really want to lose the BT calls package at the moment.
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At 1500m the key to the puzzle may be the speed estimates the neighbour is getting, i.e. they are not going to be superfast and if at the low end it may be that BT Wholesale/Openreach think that you might not get any benefit.
Have you looked at what all premises in the postcode say is available via BT Wholesale, do the speed ranges make sense or are you say the only one out of 12 not able to order, and what speed ranges are the others seeing?
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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The easiest way to check all the addresses in the postcode, as MrSaffron suggests, is to use the Address option in the BT Wholesale checker, but only enter the postcode. (Note, the Address option, not the Postcode one).
The Address checker then gives you a drop down list and you can check each in turn. (I right-click each and open in a new window which I then close after checking. Keeps my place in the list).
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 59500/14989kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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As our local delivery drivers will attest (probably with some f words) our postcode covers quite a large geographical area at widely differing distances from the cabinet. It's rural. Thanks to MrSaffron for the suggestion re, the Address option. If I look up by address instead of phone number it shows as VDSL available to me so I suspect a data cock-up on the BT wholesale database..
My neighbour is bang next door with wires down same poles. My ADSL stats are not great but in the middle of the range for the distance I think. Next door is still on ADSL same as me, I will post stats for both shortly.
Anyhow looks like its not a technical issue, but a data management one.
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Put up both sets of ADSL stats. They will not mean much in terms of what you can get VDSL wise, however they will show if the two lines are very very similar in characteristics. If it is possible, use your modem/hub on your neighbours line for his stats along side yours.
It is always possible that the pole to cabinet uses more than one cable and that they can be routed differently or of a different gauge which can lead to differing attenuation figures. If the two sets of ADSL figures are near identical then that issue can almost be ruled out.
One trick on address look-up is just enter te postcode, that then brings up every address and you can select in turn rather than entering each one yourself.
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M H C
taurus excreta cerebrum vincit
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One trick on address look-up is just enter te postcode, that then brings up every address and you can select in turn rather than entering each one yourself. Keep up at the back please  .
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 59500/14989kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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And I only entered that as an after thought! Did the first bit, previewed, corrected spelling, preview again then "ahh, better tell him to ..."
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M H C
taurus excreta cerebrum vincit
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Good luck, I'm having the same issue.
As soon as my cabinet went live at the end of March, all my neighbours could get fttc, but I can't. A brand new pcp cab and fttc cab were built for EO lines, and is about 30m away from my front door. My address says available, phone number doesn't.
According to my BDUK group all the work is finished in my area, so unless somehow I wasn't moved over from an EO line to the new cab then I'm assuming a records issue as well.
I've been trying to get this resolved since the start of April but getting nowhere sadly.
MrSaffron is looking into things for me with his connections, but nothing as of yet. Very frustrating though.
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My immediate neighbour got 0.7Mb/s and they are offered FTTC superfast.!
I get 1.5M bursting to 1.7M which is OK for 1500m I believe. All my neighbours that I checked are being offered Superfast so I think that the data from BT Openreach is probably wrong. I am having a tooth and claw battle to get BT retail to ask BT openreach what the issue is. I am being given stock answers such asl "there may not be room in the cabinet to give you superfast". I find this a bit hard to believe. BT retail seem to have time and energy to spin out my complaint but none to actually address it. Maybe will get more joy when it goes to arbitration. Is there any friendly person in BT Openreach who could look up status of Cabinet 9 Llanidloes and let me know whether, despite being newly installed, it is short of capacity?
Many thanks to all who have responded so far.
Would like to hear from anyone else who is in this situation.
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Given postcode for the affected properties can usually figure out what is the probable cause
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Thanks for responding. My local independent internet provider has suggested changing line provider, to one which offers customer service and would be willing to take this up with BT Openreach. I will probably try this if all else fails. Just need to buy an ansaphone as we rely on 1571 at the moment. Can do without the calls package as we will get an O2 repeater installed once we have decent broadband and use up our mobile units. Very weak mobile reception up here in the hills of Wales.
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Post deleted by MrSaffron
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Posting your full phone number on the public part of the forum is not recommended. I suggest you remove most if not all of it and PM him.
Google crawls this forum so your post will show up in somebody or else's search for whatever. Not necessarily broadband related either.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 59500/14989kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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For your house now FTTC is offered but the neighbours house has a 4.2 to 15 Mbps download, so not superfast. Where is actually saying superfast speeds?
The possible error is that checker is not offering any FTTC to your address, beyond that no sign of a problem, but I would say possible because two houses in the same postcode can be different speeds and without access to properties to see wiring and Openreach records it is a very hit or miss scenario in your case.
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Post deleted by RobertoS
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My stats are 1.5Mb bursting to 1.7M which I think is quite acceptable for 1500m from cabinet. My neighbour (who is offered FTTC) perversely only showed 0.7Mb on the only test we have done, but I suspect his set-top box or other gadget was busy. On address lookup it shows that I CAN get FTTC. But of course doesn't help my battle with BT retail.
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I am mixing up technical and marketing terms. VDSL at around 12-15Mbs would be offered as BT infinity wouldn't it, and would be adequate for my current needs. "superfast" is marketing speak.
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BT Retail do not offer Infinity if the estimate is below 15Mbps. That isn't looking at the top of the A band either. They use a much lower figure than that.
Other ISPs do offer FTTC at lower speeds.
BT do this so they can claim the high marketing figure of 10% getting the 76Mbps in real life on Infinity. An ASA requirement.
They do offer a product called "Faster broadband with Fibre", or did, for these lower estimates.
Edit: If the BT Wholesale checker isn't showing it, there is either a technical reason for your line, or simply an Openreach database error for it. That is out of BT Retail's control. BT Wholesale and all ISPs can only go by Openreach databases.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 59500/14989kbps @ 600m. - BQM
Edited by RobertoS (Tue 21-Jun-16 11:26:24)
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What I don't understand is why BT retail can't be arsed to find out what the reason is. I have had so many ping-pong exchanges with them, it would have been less effort for them to raise a case with BT Openrach to find the reason. At least if we were third world I could bribe customer services to find out for me 
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In their management philosophy and instructions to staff it is more profitable to gain another or retain two others in a tenth of the time it takes to sort out a real problem like yours.
Kindness isn't going to cure the world of all its awfulness but it's a good place to begin. Daisy Ridley.
My broadband basic info/help site - www.robertos.me.uk. Domains, site and mail hosting - Tsohost.
Connection - AAISP Home::1 80/20. Sync 59500/14989kbps @ 600m. - BQM
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I get that, which is why I will create as much grief as possible, and take it all the way to arbirtration, possibly involving my welsh assembly member whose researcher has offered any help he can.
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Openreach don't appear to be much better.. My local BDUK project have finally managed to get them to confirm there is an error on the data they hold for me, but they don't know what is causing it.
I'm now starting month 4 since my cabinet went live, pretty much ready to give up on the whole thing.
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The issue is now resolved: it was bad data for my line on the BT Wholesale system. This was exactly what me and my techie friend thought all along.
BT Residential complaint handlersl were 100% useless. They spun it out the full 56 days without lifting a finger other thant to trot out stock answers. I have taken them to the Ombudsman to try and get some kind of compensation or even some free months of FTTC broadband.
How did get it fixed? The Welsh Government Superfast Cymru team sent an email to BT Openreach to check the data on my behalf, which of course is what BT Residential should have done back in May. I am very grateful to them.
I will update the thread on whether Ombudsman Services get me an offer from BT.
I will also update on speed once I get hooked up to VDSL. Hoping for around 12M, for 1500m line.
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Glad yours is sorted.
I've given up. Openreach haven't responded to my enquires for over a month, my local BDUK scheme (Fastershire) haven't responded to my last 3 emails. MrSaffron didn't appear to get anywhere when I initially contacted him at the start of all this, so it seems all my options have been used up.
It's already been confirmed by Fastershire there is bad data for my line. How complicated can it be to sort out? Coming up on 6 months chasing this.
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Did you go the full nine yards and escalate the BT complaint to the Ombudsman Service? One suggestion I had from my techie friend was to transfer the line contract to another company who could do the chasing for you. There is bound to be a bit of cost involved, and you would lose 1571 and the other BT titbits for a while but you could transfer back in to BT later. If you are interested I will send a private communication with the name of a small line provider company who could do this.
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Thanks for the offer, but I'm already currently switching over to Uno's Talk Surf package as I wanted to get their fibre package bundle when it eventually launches. I contacted Uno yesterday (who replied very promptly to my query), and Matt said they can push Openreach to get it resolved if I still cannot order fibre once that service is launched. Obviously no ETA on that but I've waited this long anyway. So we'll see how that goes.
It's nice to have some positive sounding advice from a company I'm not even a customer of yet. Talk about customer service done right.
Edited by deleted (Tue 23-Aug-16 16:43:40)
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Guess what? The optimism expressed earlier in the thread that I could get FTTC was dashed. The VDSL availability immediately disappeared from BT Wholesale so I was unable to order it from any ISP.
I raised another case with BT back in August as my ADSL download speed had dropped to about 0.2MB/s. They finally got hold of the local Openreach fault expert, based in Aberystwyth who fixed a couple of bad connections and I got a stable 2.8MB/s with 0.5MB/s upload.
But wait for it...
Magically my line was then marked as VDSL available. I chose Plusnet as they have a cheaper all-day calls and "fibre" package. I get, not the promised 4M, not the ~10M I expected, but a respectable 22.5MB/s. So I do wonder if my line is shorter than the 2200m BT were insisting all along.
I also wonder why I had to go through all that pain with useless BT support, useless ombudsman, useless Welsh government "Superfast Cymru" to finally end up at the right place.
My download speed on the PC is limited to about 10MB/s by a slightly flakey home mains network so I will post a button when I have sorted that out.
Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Dec-17 11:40:57)
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Is that your line length to the cabinet?
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My house is 1500m from the cabinet by road. BT after insisting over a long wrangle that it was "too far" for VDSL, after much badgering stated that it was 2200m implying a very roundabout route. 22.5MB/s would be very very good for 2200m is my understanding, so I think it is probably nearer the 1500m which I estimated in the first place. Techie question: do Openreach engineers not have use of a reflectometer which would tell you the length to a few cm?.
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Cable gauge matters as much as length. Use copper that is 0.9mm instead of 0.5mm, and you can get the same speeds at 2x or 3x the distance. 0.6mm gives an improvement, but not as good.
Thicker copper is in use in some places - particularly where it was needed to get the voice signal back to the exchange ... and the thickest parts of the full run would tend to be in the D-side.
In the end, actual length is irrelevant. It is all about the insert loss, or attenuation. Openreach does have records of the insertion loss between each DP and the parent cabinet, and it is this figure that feeds into the estimation tools. Those records can, of course, be wrong sometimes.
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I never posted the final chapter of this saga. A while later, our line had a fault which interrupted voice and ADSL. We had an experienced line engineer on the ticket who called me for a chat, he explained he had fixed three faults between property and the exchange so ADSL was measurably improved, which indeed it is was by 50% or so to around 3MB/sec.
Mysteriously VDSL was then offered on the checker website a few days later with estimated 4MB/sec download.
I purchased this service (from Plusnet) and guess what, I consistently get over 24MB/sec, despite the long line. (ca 1800m)
This is great but I am angry at the runaround I received from BT retail and in particular the Ombudsman service who were not impartial, parroting BTs assersion that the line couldn't possibly work with VDSL..
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I never posted the final chapter of this saga. A while later, our line had a fault which interrupted voice and ADSL. We had an experienced line engineer on the ticket who called me for a chat, he explained he had fixed three faults between property and the exchange so ADSL was measurably improved, which indeed it is was by 50% or so to around 3MB/sec.
Mysteriously VDSL was then offered on the checker website a few days later with estimated 4MB/sec download.
I purchased this service (from Plusnet) and guess what, I consistently get over 24MB/sec, despite the long line. (ca 1800m)
This is great but I am angry at the runaround I received from BT retail and in particular the Ombudsman service who were not impartial, parroting BTs assersion that the line couldn't possibly work with VDSL..
Other factors/upgrades could have been changed that enabled VDSL.
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