There are many charts for VDSL2 performance, ours is fairly pessimistic because it takes into account crosstalk .

In essence once you get a speed estimate from the BT wholesale checker, you are probably going to get something between our checker and the wholesale estimate

Steel is not used by BT to carry signals in the local loop, there may be aluminium if you are unlucky

So the TBB one and the one I posted I should basically meet in the middle for the estimate really then.

And yes my mistake I meant aluminium, Its funny that people cuss aluminium as when I was on ADSL with BT in my previous property I was able to get 12/1.2mbps connection then some issues at the exchange resulted in the pair being changed to a copper line which didn't fix the issue and brought my speed crashing down to 7/1mbps, A 5mbps loss.

Though I'm almost certain that FTTC technology will react differently to aluminium than copper.

Is there any more info regarding Profile 30a on FTTC

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

well my main worry is that I will pay for 80/20 and only get 50/10,

Upload was my main reason for moving from ADSL. As was always the case with ADSL the price is for the service whatever speed your line connects at. I paid BE for 4 years for an upto "24 Mbps" service that only connected at 16 Mbps.

Openreach currently offer the ISPs two products, 40/10 and 80/20 but when I ordered BTretail only offered unlimited usage on the 80/20 product and I had no idea how much I would use (I now know I average around 150GB /month).

I don't know if Openreach will eventually allow ISPs to sign people up at the 80/20 plan and then move to the slightly cheaper 40/10 if their lines don't sync faster than 40. That would be logical and customer friendly but doesn't fit with the 'minimum term' approach that these big corporates go for.

Virgin Media with coax should be able to provide the paid for speed anywhere, but I had enough problems with NTL in my old flat (with 512k and 1meg services!) that I decided to keep well away from. They also don't have very fast upload speeds. My friends have 60/3 for example.

Well I'm using Virgins 50/3 service which is fine on download side of things but my uploading on Virgin isn't just speed, its mainly the way its shared bandwidth and using it at more than a 1/3 of its capacity

(so 100kBps)

will saturate the connection and make most demanding tasks impossible (Streaming and Gaming)

Profile 30 is further away than vectoring

I suppose its going to be something they roll out after they finish there nationwide roll out so 2015-16 maybe.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

Well I'm using Virgins 50/3 service which is fine on download side of things but my uploading on Virgin isn't just speed, its mainly the way its shared bandwidth and using it at more than a 1/3 of its capacity

(so 100kBps)

will saturate the connection and make most demanding tasks impossible (Streaming and Gaming)

That is an odd effect you are getting, and I wonder if there is a fault in your area. (Each Virgin area for some reason is still technically set up in different ways). You should be able to upload at 300k/sec maximum, and that would slow down your downloads, but shouldn't affect anyone else.

Virgin is shared in the area but that means shared at a higher level, there is a few gigabit of download capacity that is carved up into the speed services (30/50/60/100/120 etc) and there is a about 50megabit of upload that is shared to give each customer their share. Its all complex because the cable TV coax was designed for TV, not for broadband, and so the amount of space on the coax for sending from the home is limited.

Cable Labs have worked wonders in the DOCSIS specifications but the cost of changing the coax and having more and more fibre to coax convertors (re-segmenting) is very high. The hardware costs of FTTC are probably lower once the cabinets are in.

That's what I said,

I can achieve 300kBps easy but it will knock streaming, gaming, VoIP out of use so I can only upload at 100-150kBps so my other services will still work adequately.

The Virgin network in my area is pretty good in relation to speeds and utilization though since the supercharged upgrades I have noticed the network struggling at peak times but never enough to cause great issues to my connection.

My main reason for wanting FTTC is so the upload has more bandwidth and isn't shared with local community...... (Local Loop)

One thing I do know about my local community is that many torrent constantly and don't understand anything about bandwidth or broadband what so ever... So they don't restrict there uploading so as you said such a small amount of upstream bandwidth being shared with many here as ADSL is only available and is around 1mbps so most are on Virgin and can really rock the boat.

Virgin have in recent years put a lot of upgrades into this area for upstream so it can cope and they have done well with battling the problem, but now they are giving out free upgrades and not upgrading the main head-ends.

So the network is being run close to its limits again.

I'm around 400m and was getting 72/20 until the 22nd April ago when it dropped suddenly to 49/19 when the line resynced at 10:35 in the morning and its stayed that way ever since. Openreach say it's OK because its still above the minimum for an impacted line, although I beg to differ.

In reply to a post by mlmclaren:

I can achieve 300kBps easy but it will knock streaming, gaming, VoIP out of use so I can only upload at 100-150kBps so my other services will still work adequately.

That's normal TCP/IP if you saturate the uplink on any service, you stop the ACK packets working for the other streams. If you have a router with QoS features you could limit your uploads to ensure that the tiny ACK packets get through whilst your upload runs at 280 or 290 kbps. This has nothing to do with Virgin at that point.

My main reason for wanting FTTC is so the upload has more bandwidth and isn't shared with local community...... (Local Loop)

If you have FTTC with 80/20 and you upload at 20mbps, you will still stop downloads working reliably.

One thing I do know about my local community is that many torrent constantly and don't understand anything about bandwidth or broadband what so ever... So they don't restrict there uploading so as you said such a small amount of upstream bandwidth being shared with many here as ADSL is only available and is around 1mbps so most are on Virgin and can really rock the boat.

They shouldn't need to, why does the general public need to understand TCP/IP ? Surely the ISP should sort this out. One house should be able to upload at max without affecting others; its a limitation of HFC networks (Hybrid-Fibre-Coax) which isn't a problem with twisted-pair/fibre networks.

So the network is being run close to its limits again.

They are locked in a marketing battle with the FTTC ISPs. Headline speeds are virgin's weapon, rather than quality. The fact they all market 'fibre' to the home is the main problem, nobody is told they are on a shared system.

The FTTC and ADSL ISPs have better effect sharing at the DSLAM/Switch level, rather than Virgin's sharing at the coax level.