FTTC below 5Mbps?

Hi all,

I've been waiting for nearly 2 years for BT to make a change to their minimum threshold for FTTC products.

Exchange is NIAL and this is what the wholesale checker states:

Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line speed up to 2Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL Max broadband line speed of 3Mbps; typically the line speed would range between 2Mbps and 4Mbps.

I currently receive around 6976Kbps downstream sync speeds with Fast Path enabled. I believe it reached just barely the maximum 8Mbps whenever interleaving was enabled.

My entire exchanges cabinets have all been enabled. I'm on cabinet P1 which is around 2 miles away. The exchange is just around 20 metres up the road from this cabinet (pretty stupid for people long distances away).

Anyway - I know that my maximum synchronisation speed is 8Mbps at the moment, and that if my attenuation is 35, I could receive speeds of around 10Mbps. This would greatly help as my business is struggling to cope with the bandwidth at the moment.

My question is - when & will I ever be able to FTTC regardless of the speeds predicted? Thanks all for your help.

Jack

What benefits would FTTC give you over and above your current service? Very little, cutting line length by maybe 50m on a 3.2km line will have negligible effect and could see a lowering of speeds.

Wouldn't taking away the 8Mbps limit open the possibilities up for just even a little here? / ADSL2 speeds?

What other alternatives could there be in the future?

That is defined by the exchange equipment - if te exchange has ADSL2 then fine but if it has old ADSL max then there is very little that can be achieved.

That is defined by the exchange equipment - if te exchange has ADSL2 then fine but if it has old ADSL max then there is very little that can be achieved.

I read the question as "Given my exchange only has ADSL would FTTC, and therefore VDSL2, at least give me ADSL2 speeds".

The answer AFAICS is "Probably" but there are some caveats.

First of all even if it did give you ADSL2 speeds at 3.2km you are very much in the territory that ADSL2 is likely to only give a small improvement and VDSL2 not much better than that.

I.e. you might find that FTTC sync speeds aren't really much better than ADSL.

Having said that the fact that FTTC is Ethernet frames on the wire would help your throughput a bit (say 10%).

I now find myself wondering what you're doing where going from 6.5Mbs^-1 to, say, 11-12Mbs^-1 would be a business making or breaking improvement. I went from 3Mbs^-1 to 40 and most of the time surfing is pretty much the same. Some page loads are noticeably faster but a lot of the delays are elsewhere in the network, heavily loaded servers or browsers burdened with javascript-heavy pages. Having FTTC won't change that.

There are other caveats as well. The FTTC VDSL implementation is not just a "superset" of ADSL2. Reaching out that far requires use of the "US0" band - i.e a small band of upstream frequencies low down the frequency scale in the same place as ADSL upstream. However US0 doesn't have to be used and if it isn't VDSL won't reach 3200m. At present I think it is used by OR but there's no guarantee that when they go to the 30MHz band-plan it will continue that way. There's also the spectral power management but TBH if your cab really is 20m from the exchange that won't be an issue.

In short I don't think FTTC will be the panacea you want.

Edited by mr_bean (Thu 15-Dec-11 22:09:33)

Hi mr-bean,

I think it's more the congestion of the network that slows everything down here - we've got over 5 switches & around 15 clients connected minimum (including IP phones, laptops, computers, servers, firewalls, VPNs & file servers connected to the internet).

The could also be around maximum 10 guests connected to the network at any one time.

I use QoS but it doesn't really help much when there's loads happening on the network.

Would there and what would be the future for getting higher broadband speeds? FTTP? I live in a pretty rural area and on a small exchange of around 2k people.

Cheers

From what I can understand you are on sub-15 FTTC product - 3.2km is a long line and therefore the speed you get is already pretty good - the change in bandplan when implemented will drive bandwidth increase up to 80mbps for customer close to a cabinet so I expect that you could also see a benefit in speed - eta for new band plan? Less than 6months hopefully.

Hi there, I'm not on a FTTC product at the moment - just on an ADSL Max Premium service.

Cheers

Jack

When you say 15 clients do you mean in your internal network or 15 external clients connecting in over the Internet?

Would there and what would be the future for getting higher broadband speeds? FTTP? I live in a pretty rural area and on a small exchange of around 2k people.

If you are in an FTTC area then, for the moment FTTP won't be available because it's an either/or thing from Openreach at present (an exchange is either FTTC or FTTP not both).

If you have a lot of external clients then you probably need more uplift in the upstream than downstream speeds.

You should look at a leased line or, if you can't afford one, look at bonding multiple ADSL lines to give you more speed.

3G is also a possibility but if you're already getting 6-7Mbs^-1 it probably isn't going to be much faster. It's also harder to run your own servers on the end of a 3G connection.

Lots of clients internally which are using the internet - we don't get much traffic in to our VPN.