FTTC on a bad line

Morning all, hoping to benefit from the practical experience of some, for this query.

Regarding FTTC on a bad line.
I'm looking at putting in FTTC to a premises which has ADSL2+ at the moment. The actual download speed is around 6 Mpbs, and Upload only about 0.4 Mpbs.
There are two lines in the premises, both report about the same.
I've monitored this for a long time, it's quite consistent.
I'm not at all interested in trying to improve the ADSL speeds, I'm looking at that as a lost cause now.

My query is :
Given such poor actual speeds, is there much hope that FTTC would deliver anything faintly decent?
The checker suggests FTTC 'up to 76.5 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s Up'.

I can be optimistic, but in reality, is a bad line only going to disappoint with FTTC?


Would really appreciate any experience of such a scenario.

In reply to a post by clyde123:

The checker suggests FTTC 'up to 76.5 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s Up'.

Which checker are you looking at? The one you want is https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/

A line with 6Mbps ADSL is likely to be 3km+ from the exchange. However, what actually matters for FTTC is the distance to the cabinet. If you are less than 400m from your fibre cabinet then it's certainly possible that you'll get the top speeds you've quoted. Essentially, this was the whole point of deploying FTTC.

There are some old-ish graphs here:

https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2012/graph-...
https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/chart-of-bt...

Actually that's very helpful, candlerb , thanks.

That checker shows a Low Impacted down speed of 52. Which would certainly be quite acceptable for this premises.

Screenshot of checker : https://imgur.com/a/Y1bzFSI

Now all I need to do is convince people they can sign up to an 18 or 24 month contract without holding me responsible

Cheers.

There are one month contracts available for FTTC if people are sceptical

Yes there are.
I might investigate that.

Thanks, jpm

That confirms what you posted before. The ADSL line is not a bad line, just a long one!

52Mbps at the low end of impacted - the chance of being down there is small provided the premises wiring is in reasonable condition. With some providers they will get a minimum speed guarantee - probably in teh 40s or 50, so if it fails, which is unlikely, they can escape the contract. So, start twisting a few arms.

No need. Find an ISP with te Minimum Speed or Stay Fast Guarantee, such a BT and they will send an email that says something like:

The minimum guaranteed speed

We estimate your download speed will be between 52Mbps and 76Mbps, and your upload speed will be between 14Mbps and 20Mbps.

The minimum guaranteed speed you can expect from your broadband will be 48Mbps.

BT details are at: https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/learn-about-broadb...

Many thanks, MHC

In reply to a post by clyde123:

Morning all, hoping to benefit from the practical experience of some, for this query.

Regarding FTTC on a bad line.
I'm looking at putting in FTTC to a premises which has ADSL2+ at the moment. The actual download speed is around 6 Mpbs, and Upload only about 0.4 Mpbs.
There are two lines in the premises, both report about the same.
I've monitored this for a long time, it's quite consistent.
I'm not at all interested in trying to improve the ADSL speeds, I'm looking at that as a lost cause now.

My query is :
Given such poor actual speeds, is there much hope that FTTC would deliver anything faintly decent?
The checker suggests FTTC 'up to 76.5 Mb/s down and 20 Mb/s Up'.

I can be optimistic, but in reality, is a bad line only going to disappoint with FTTC?


Would really appreciate any experience of such a scenario.

Our ADSL max speed is 2.5mbps and we are in a city - however FTTC was 76/19 and now g.fast is 150/21 so yes it's reasonable to assume this is correct

Thanks for that, Username26

Just to reinforce the point, we are about 5km from our exchange. AFAIK the cabling follows the road between us and the exchange.

On ADSL we were connected to the exchange via a cabinet about 1.5km from the house. On a good day we got over 2Mbps download over the 5km of copper.

When VDSL first came to us, we were connected via the same cabinet and would get 12 to 14Mbps download. That would be on fibre as far as the cabinet then the exiting copper infrastructure to the house. Not very good in the overall scheme of things but a dramatic improvement on what we had previously as a result of 3.5km of copper being superseded by fibre.

Then we had another major upgrade with a new All-In-One cabinet installed at the entrance to the village about 250m. from our house. This brought fibre right to that cabinet then the old copper. We now get 75 to 80 Mbps download sync.

Low ADSL speeds are more usually due to distance than the quality of the line.