My experience is that, if anything, FTTC is less stable than ADSL2. After a nightmare few years where BT just wouldn't listen, we finally got a BT bloke to remake the connections along the 1 mile route to the exchange, and after that consistently obtained 17Mbit @ 6dB for months on end. Literally. The longest period without a resynch was nearly 3 months. Rock solid, even through winter, thunder storms, the lot.

FTTC though, pushes the capacity of the remaining wire a lot harder, meaning it is more susceptible to noise, which might be weather induced, crosstalk from other lines, or cables being moved around in the cabinet. It seems to resynch every fortnight or so, although just had a 3 week period when it dropped back to interleaved mode, with it going back to fastpath a couple of days ago.

at the same time tho loop loss most likely will reduce meaning more tones that are stroner, and they will be more resistant to external rfi.

When I was on adsl. my tones would get battered at night, that doesnt happen on my vdsl.

Sadly tho my vdsl hasnt been fault free, and right now I am massively annoyed with openreach which I ranted about on kitz forum.

Hi,
I had both of my lines on ADSL only managed about 2 Meg on each of them, they used to re-sync several times a week.
Zen Fibre installed 4 weeks ago on both lines and both sync at 79999 19999 and have been that way from the start. I can only assume that because the cab is only 210 meters away that is the reason it is stable!

Going from 2 Meg to 74 Meg is quite literally life changing and I am one very pleased Zen customer.

Paul.

I used to get a sync of 6.5Mbit on ADSL (not 2) on a 3.5KM line. Any sign of a thunderstorm and my connection would resync on every lightning strike.

3 years on FTTC and its not battered an eyelid.

For me at any rate if we never had lighting i wouldn't have noticed a difference i dare say.

To summarise most of the above.
FTTC is more prone to suffer as a result of problems on the line; but it only has the line from the cabinet to contend with.

If you are close the the cabinet and not close to the exchange, FTTC should be more stable and much faster.
If you are a long way from the cabinet, FTTC may be less stable.
If you have wiring issues in the house, FTTC may be less stable.

Remember in modern parlance

1. If you say estimate people think you are guaranteeing what you just said
2. If you say may or there is a risk, every assumes it will happen to them
3. If you say 90% will get something, people are shocked when they don't get it
4. If you say up to something, people assume you will get that all the time.

regarding #1 no a guarantee as such but I think its reasonable for someone to at expect to at least get close to the estimate.

#4 the isps have themselves to blame, to the original meaning of up to in broadband advertising was the speed can vary due to congestion levels. But then adsl providers changed the expectation to meaning it can be a variable in connection speed and now people expect to hit their line speed all the time. But that is not a that bad expectation, a service having no visible contention doesnt mean its 1:1 it just means the contention is low enough that there is no congestion.

What is classed as stable anyway? Is it reasonable to expect no disconnections on a line or is a resync expect now and again due to rf interference?

Edited by bobble_bob (Fri 05-Sep-14 12:23:39)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

#4 the isps have themselves to blame, to the original meaning of up to in broadband advertising was the speed can vary due to congestion levels. But then adsl providers changed the expectation to meaning it can be a variable in connection speed and now people expect to hit their line speed all the time.

Going to need some substantial citations for this bit of thinking. All the widely available last mile technologies have had variable connection speed except for arguably cable (it's still variable but the variation tends to be fairly small). A 56k "analogue" modem didn't get 56k for most people most of the time, and having been a very early (engineer installed, guy hadn't done many before us) DSL user it was already true there too.

maybe but back then "up to" wasnt used on the headline name of dialup services I paid for.