How can I get FTTC or FTTP at my address?

Hi there!

I live in a small pocket of semi-central London that suffers from pretty dismal broadband. I'm lucky to get 28Mbps down, and it's prone to severe spikes in latency.

My postcode is: N87NB

My exchange, LNCED, appears to be hooked up to FTTC and FTTP, however they don't appear to serve my address, or indeed any of those my side of the high street (put the postcode into a map, you'll see what I mean).

Is there anything I can do to get FTTC or FTTP support? I've registered interest with Openreach, but just received back "Unfortunately, your address isn't part of our current rollout programme.".

Cheers!

Edited by deleted (Fri 13-Sep-19 19:13:10)

Do you have a phone line at the address? If so paste the result from the availability check http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.welcome
What service are you using to get your current 28Mbps?

Yes, here's the result.

I'm with Vodafone at the moment, on Superfast 2.

Hi SamHH,

You are on FTTC as superfast 2 is a fibre to the cabinet product. That said your speeds are low and in-between the hand back speeds

the cabinet (8) is at the junction of linzee road and priory road
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5868681,-0.1247045,3...
possible cable route/ walking route suggests 0.4miles
my next step would be to check home wiring

Is 28Mbps your actual connection rate from the router or a speed test result?

Which raises the interesting question as to why the original poster is thinking FTTC is not available to them, when they already appear to be on it.

I think on the whole many (as in Joe public) don't realise "fibre" is fttc [mostly]. Again I'm not suggesting that the OP realised that voda superfast 2 was fibre.

Anyhoo, the main issue right now, is the low speeds.

Ah, indeed you're right, I didn't realise that was FTTC. I didn't think "fibre" could be so slow - TIL!

My ISP-supplied router, which I'm essentially using as a modem and have hooked up to Google WiFi, says in the admin UI:

VDSL - 27.4Mbps down - 6.7Mbps up

Google WiFi, which everything routes through, reports average speeds of 23Mbps down and 6.1Mbps up in the app, which is more inline with my experiences, including on devices connected over ethernet, with nothing else downloading anything, from a source that should easily saturate this connection in my experience (e.g. Steam).

I did find a map online a few months ago when I was last researching this and found that there were many slow speeds at my postcode, but one postcode away, barely 50m away, they were much better. So I'm not sure it's an issue with wiring in my home, but if that's likely then I'll certainly investigate that.

What do we think?

Edited by deleted (Sat 14-Sep-19 11:12:44)

In reply to a post by samhh:

Ah, indeed you're right, I didn't realise that was FTTC. I didn't think "fibre" could be so slow - TIL!

I call fttc, by its proper name - vdsl2 and thus is a copper product. You can go as low as 7mbits with vdsl (actually you can go lower but i believe it wouldn't be sold to you)

In reply to a post by samhh:

My ISP-supplied router, which I'm essentially using as a modem and have hooked up to Google WiFi, says in the admin UI:

VDSL - 27.4Mbps down - 6.7Mbps up

Right, can you do a test via a wired connection preferably via the Voda box. We want to eliminated your wireless infrastructure. Does the voda box give any more stats than that?

In reply to a post by samhh:

Google WiFi, which everything routes through, reports average speeds of 23Mbps down and 6.1Mbps up in the app, which is more inline with my experiences, including on devices connected over ethernet, with nothing else downloading anything, from a source that should easily saturate this connection in my experience (e.g. Steam).

I wouldn't use steam as a good test despite being able to saturate most connections.

In reply to a post by samhh:

I did find a map online a few months ago when I was last researching this and found that there were many slow speeds at my postcode, but one postcode away, barely 50m away, they were much better. So I'm not sure it's an issue with wiring in my home, but if that's likely then I'll certainly investigate that.

What do we think?

How is your voda modem router connected to the socket, do you have any extra wired phone connections ?

The vodafone router is pretty bad at dealing with lines, so might be behind the low speeds

Also the vodafone device does not have a modem mode, so probably running double NAT which should not impact speeds massively but with things like mismatched MTU may not be helping.

Getting an actual VDSL2 modem might help, assuming you can get the username/password for the Vodafone service and create a PPPoE session in the Google Wi-Fi router.

If on superfast 2 then you are below the guarantee and should be claiming your 15% discount each month

In reply to a post by Taras:

Right, can you do a test via a wired connection preferably via the Voda box. We want to eliminated your wireless infrastructure. Does the voda box give any more stats than that?

We don't need to eliminate Wifi interference, we've already done that by having the DSL checker results for the line, showing a 27mb/s sync speed

Though the variations in latency could still be down to poor Wifi conditions.

In reply to a post by Taras:

I call fttc, by its proper name - vdsl2 and thus is a copper product. You can go as low as 7mbits with vdsl (actually you can go lower but i believe it wouldn't be sold to you)

My FTTC runs at 6mbits on a good day, most of the time it's 4 to 5 mbits, if I was on same speed as OP I wouldn't be leaving TT to get BT FTTP.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

In reply to a post by Taras:

Right, can you do a test via a wired connection preferably via the Voda box. We want to eliminated your wireless infrastructure. Does the voda box give any more stats than that?

We don't need to eliminate Wifi interference, we've already done that by having the DSL checker results for the line, showing a 27mb/s sync speed

I think you have misread something somewhere. The DSL checker estimates are way above 27Mbps..

samhh

It looks like you should be able to improve your speed. You will need to check for extensions and may need to remove these if you don't use them. Plugging the modem into the test socket to isolate all the internal wiring is a good start. Leave a gap between unplugging it and connecting it to the Test socket of a couple of min to ensure you get a new session from the distant end.

If the speed then improves ask for guidance on improving/removing your extension wiring.

As Mr Saffron says a non Vodafone router is also likely to help.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The vodafone router is pretty bad at dealing with lines, so might be behind the low speeds

Also the vodafone device does not have a modem mode, so probably running double NAT which should not impact speeds massively but with things like mismatched MTU may not be helping.

Getting an actual VDSL2 modem might help, assuming you can get the username/password for the Vodafone service and create a PPPoE session in the Google Wi-Fi router.

If on superfast 2 then you are below the guarantee and should be claiming your 15% discount each month

apparently getting the username/pw is a case of speaking to live chat

https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/Other-broadband-quer...

vodafone setting are

Vlan ID - 101

enable 802.1q (not on every router)

Username - ******@broadband.vodafone.co.uk

Username - ******@businessbroadband.vodafone.co.uk ( for business customers )

Password - ********

PPPoE

MTU Size : 1492

Yep, just ask live chat. I had 2 x voda VDSL, going into Draytek 2860 (one via vigor 130) before I got my FTTP. It was cheap because both lines got the extra 15% discount and I didn't have to worry about voda's apparently appalling backhaul as it still wasn't fast enough lol.

But getting PPPoE details out of them was never an issue. You do need the voda router connected when you chain the extra 15% discount though.

In my case the problems of the Vodafone router are clear...

With the Vodafone device as modem and router I am below the guarantee in terms of sync speed

With a TP-Link 9970 running in bridge mode and using the Ethernet WAN port no the Vodafone I am above the guarantee in terms of both throughput and sync speeds. Never bothered claiming on the guarantee as don't want to run the vodafone as modem long enough to claim in case the DLM gets annoyed and slows us down.

Difference was around 7-8 Mbps, so managing 27-28 Mbps in terms of throughput on a 1.3 km line to cabinet

You didn't read to the bottom

VDSL
Max Observed Downstream Speed (Mbps) 27.4
Max Upstream Observed Speed (Mbps) 6.71
Observed Date 2019-09-04

A relatively recent addition to the DSL checker, in some cases it shows this which gives you the actual sync speeds achieved. So we know it isn't Wifi that is limiting the speed.

This is true, I didn't . I did know about that newish data but fell asleep scrolling down the earlier stuff and forgot about it.

Ooh, lots of discussion since I was last here!

What's my way forward?

My Vodafone contract ends this month, so if I'm likely to get a better speed with someone else - provided I'm able to forward all traffic via Google WiFi as I am doing now - I'm happy to do that.

Or is there anything I can try before then?

Cheers all!

In reply to a post by Taras:

I call fttc, by its proper name - vdsl2 and thus is a copper product. You can go as low as 7mbits with vdsl (actually you can go lower but i believe it wouldn't be sold to you)

You can indeed! I am on VDSL at (typically) 4.2 mbps and had to switch from BT to PlusNet (yeah, I know they are owned by BT) in order to be sold it. It may be slow but it is a damn site more reliable than the (similar speed) ADSL on the same line.