In reply to a post by candlerb:

Individual experiences here are pretty meaningless, unless you can get a statistically significant sample.

Overall, the "last mile" fault rates for FTTP are much lower than copper/FTTC, at least for Openreach. There's just very little to go wrong: splices are permanent, water can't get in, there are no active cabinets. Storms can still bring down overhead lines of course.

Problems with the ISP's network are something else. These are likely to be the same for both FTTC and FTTP customers of that ISP.

In the case of an Altnet (except for wholesale providers like Cityfibre), they are providing both the last-mile connectivity *and* the transit network. The reliability you get will be determined both by how well they lay fibre and how well they can run an IP transit network. As Pheasant says, many of them are clueless.

just saying the Openreach can have problems with fibre as well and is not the best thing since slice bread which people seem to think it is.

When my fibre went belly up, it was the whole network in the city I live in, Zzoomm said it affected other providers as well. A fibre broke somewhere, and it meant all traffic had to go through one trunk. So while it did not fail completely, the speed at peak was worse than FTTC here. It seems as if Zzoomm uses a third party. since then, I have had slow-downs and a complete lack of broadband for a couple of hours once.

This fibre we were told and the people on here before i changed to zzoomm was supposed to be more reliable than FTTC. Sure, they mean as a whole, but that don't help the people who are having problems. But it puts people off and chatting in a group a few days ago, a few people who know about my problems and this lad in Coventry problems have decided not to bother changing to FTTP. One of them have just don't another contract for a FTTC, so she will not be bothering with FTTP for a couple of years at least.

My router says i have been connected to the internet for 12 Days 21 Hours 26 Minutes, the longest so far since I have been with them and the speed as well, so let's hope it stays like it, otherwise I will be going back to FTTC next year.

We've had Openreach Fibre since March 2022. We had one outage that knocked out the connections for the 10 homes in our small hamlet that lasted about 24 hours - unsure what the issue was. We have EE 5G where we are so tethered mobile during this time.

Other than that, it's been rock solid and always the stated speed.

Previously with copper, there were times when our connection would drop at least once a week (often more) due to the line length.

Crazy to think in the space of 2 years we've gone from having poor VDSL and mobile signal, to brilliant connectivity!

Rock solid fttp here in rural Norfolk for 3+ years now. Only one significant outage and that was down to fallen tree bringing down the cable from the exchange to the village so hardly openreachs fault. Fixed within 24 hours!
That is why in my opinion it's good to have the big players behind your network of choice as they have the manpower and resources to fix it quickly when it's goes pear shaped.
My connection was even done on New year's Day some years back, we got up about 8 ish and there were two vans in the drive with the pole to house part of the install already in place. They were being nice and not knocking too early to wake us!!! Mucho coffee and bikkies followed and the rest of the install was done within an hour.

Edited by threelegs (Wed 01-Nov-23 11:05:15)

I've had my BT FTTP for about a year now with no downtime. So no complaints from me on that front, nor any complaints about it's FTTC VDSL predecessor. As for my VM circuit, well that's a different matter .....

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

otherwise I will be going back to FTTC next year.

If you can.

My understanding of BT's "stop sell" program is that that option may not be available to you (but I'm happy to be corrected).

In reply to a post by smouty:

The 'whole' Swish network did not go down

Pleased you weren't affected. Yesterday afternoon the Swish service status webpage was showing "Degraded Performance" across the whole of their network, and at the time of writing this it still is. So I assumed it was a network-wide problem.

I guess at least part of the problem is that the outages are of a different kind. FTTP is much more binary than FTTC: when it's good it's very good, but when it's bad it's horrid. With FTTC I was at the end of a longish (800m) mixed Cu and Al cable to my cab., and the crimp joints were a perpetual source of noise (or so an OR engineer once told me). I never got much more than 30Mb/s from it, even when the sun shone. It would lose sync 2 or 3 times a day typically, which was very annoying if I was on a Zoom call at the time, which I often was. It would usually resync within a couple of minutes, so overall not much downtime. Life was a continual 3-cornered fight with my ISP, OR, and the DLM, which every few months would worry about the line's performance and start reducing the sync speed. When it got down to 15Mb/s or so I would have to phone my ISP, go through the ritual of connecting to the master socket test point (which never made any difference) before the ISP could be persuaded to pester OR about getting the DLM reset. I'm not sorry to be rid of all that. But long outages of hours were rare.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Individual experiences here are pretty meaningless, unless you can get a statistically significant sample.

Overall, the "last mile" fault rates for FTTP are much lower than copper/FTTC, at least for Openreach. There's just very little to go wrong: splices are permanent, water can't get in, there are no active cabinets. Storms can still bring down overhead lines of course.

Problems with the ISP's network are something else. These are likely to be the same for both FTTC and FTTP customers of that ISP.

In the case of an Altnet (except for wholesale providers like Cityfibre), they are providing both the last-mile connectivity *and* the transit network. The reliability you get will be determined both by how well they lay fibre and how well they can run an IP transit network. As Pheasant says, many of them are clueless.

just saying the Openreach can have problems with fibre as well and is not the best thing since slice bread which people seem to think it is.

When my fibre went belly up, it was the whole network in the city I live in, Zzoomm said it affected other providers as well. A fibre broke somewhere, and it meant all traffic had to go through one trunk. So while it did not fail completely, the speed at peak was worse than FTTC here. It seems as if Zzoomm uses a third party. since then, I have had slow-downs and a complete lack of broadband for a couple of hours once.

This fibre we were told and the people on here before i changed to zzoomm was supposed to be more reliable than FTTC. Sure, they mean as a whole, but that don't help the people who are having problems. But it puts people off and chatting in a group a few days ago, a few people who know about my problems and this lad in Coventry problems have decided not to bother changing to FTTP. One of them have just don't another contract for a FTTC, so she will not be bothering with FTTP for a couple of years at least.

My router says i have been connected to the internet for 12 Days 21 Hours 26 Minutes, the longest so far since I have been with them and the speed as well, so let's hope it stays like it, otherwise I will be going back to FTTC next year.

A classic example of how the internet allows misinformation to run riot.

In reply to a post by binary:

Re copper being problematic - certainly for broadband yes, but I think in its mature final years, the PSTN ended up broadly being pretty good for voice. Hopefully, given that FTTP is built for data from the outset, it should be and hopefully remain pretty reliable.

We still have copper for the landline, at times it can be dire due to crackling TTB say it's fine, but back when it carried our FTTC it plainly showed problems at times and TT would get OR out to fix it.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

This fibre we were told and the people on here before i changed to zzoomm was supposed to be more reliable than FTTC. Sure, they mean as a whole, but that don't help the people who are having problems. But it puts people off and chatting in a group a few days ago, a few people who know about my problems and this lad in Coventry problems have decided not to bother changing to FTTP. One of them have just don't another contract for a FTTC, so she will not be bothering with FTTP for a couple of years at least.

Quoting this as I'm responding to a couple of points here, though OP your issues are nothing to do with FTTP. An equipment failure and issues deeper into the network. FTTP can only, and does, improve reliability in the part where it replaces copper.

Your issues were nothing to do with FTTP. Had you been on FTTP, FTTC, copper or carrier pigeon you'd have experienced the same issues. What were the problems with the person in Coventry?

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

just saying the Openreach can have problems with fibre as well and is not the best thing since slice bread which people seem to think it is.

When my fibre went belly up, it was the whole network in the city I live in, Zzoomm said it affected other providers as well. A fibre broke somewhere, and it meant all traffic had to go through one trunk. So while it did not fail completely, the speed at peak was worse than FTTC here. It seems as if Zzoomm uses a third party. since then, I have had slow-downs and a complete lack of broadband for a couple of hours once.

This fibre we were told and the people on here before i changed to zzoomm was supposed to be more reliable than FTTC. Sure, they mean as a whole, but that don't help the people who are having problems. But it puts people off and chatting in a group a few days ago, a few people who know about my problems and this lad in Coventry problems have decided not to bother changing to FTTP. One of them have just don't another contract for a FTTC, so she will not be bothering with FTTP for a couple of years at least.

My router says i have been connected to the internet for 12 Days 21 Hours 26 Minutes, the longest so far since I have been with them and the speed as well, so let's hope it stays like it, otherwise I will be going back to FTTC next year.

Lets start by making it absolutely clear that the outage you suffered was an issue with backhaul.

When it is said that full fibre is more reliable than a copper service they are referring to the connection between the exchange and the customer, you an experienced person on this forum should known that. The fact you chose to jump off the Openreach network and go onto Zzoomm because of contract lengths is a reflection of you.