Question about Milton Keynes

Hi, I will be moving to the UK at the end of the year, sometime around December.
It's not my first time in the country, I've lived in Brighton and Cambridge for 5 years (2000-05), and was always used to getting NTL and high speed broadband.

My partner will work in Bedford and I'll be near Oxford so we have thought about buying a house in Milton Keynes. But as we were checking the house market I just thought I would go and see what kind of broadband options they had come up since I left the country in 2005.

Fair enough I saw that NTL was now Virgin Media and that apparently they're using fibre optic where there was only coaxial cable before (I checked all addresses I lived in the past and they all had now FO). But then I checked Milton Keynes !!!! What's the deal there? I've read a bit about it and what kind of problems they have with ADSL due to aluminum cabling and the works.

So I guess my question is:
how likely is that all MK will have FO broadband from Bt infinity in the near future?
What about Virgin media? Are there plans to get a decent cable network like they have pretty much everywhere else?

We now live in Barcelona and are used to having a FO pipe of 100mb down and 25mb up, with HD IPTV!!

thanks!!!

I know next to nothing about Milton Keynes, but just picking up on Virgin Media Cable. It is still FO to the cabinet, (just like the new BT FTTC). It is still coax from the cabinet to the premises, just like it always was. BT FTTC uses the existing copper or aluminium from their cabinet to the premises, but in some places they now have FTTP (fibre to the premises).

Really?
Then for BT it's not really FO but something more like VDSL..
In Spain Telefonica has something similar, FO to some buildings, then FO to the street cabinet, but in that case they're not allowed to sell it as FO.

Having lived and worked in Milton Keynes since 1977, I can tell you that the rollout of decent (ie: fast) broadband services is a mess. The new city's grid road system - which was ok when we only needed voice telephony services - isn't helping the spread of fast broadband across the city, but even then the availability of services is patchy and sporadic.

My service, which O2 on a BT line, gives me an average of 2.4 Mbps down and 0.89 Mbps up. This is consistent, and I'm within 2 miles of the Bradwell Abbey exchange "as the crow flies". Unfortunately, the cabled infrastructure means that the actual distance is much more than that due to the fact that trunking runs under the horizontal and vertical grid roads and literally "around the houses" in most cases. Oddly, though, some parts of the city that are close to the Bradwell Abbey exchange are currently enjoying 100 Mbps (which is really annoying!). I've heard of subscribers quite close to me - and further from the exchange - enjoying much higher speeds than me, such as 10 Mbps and higher.

Unfortunately, I can't see a solution to this problem anytime soon, but as a person who works at home as a freelance, I desperately need higher down/up speeds. As for Virgin in Milton Keynes, forget it. I'm sure they'd rather forget that they have an MK operation!

More info on MK broadband see: http://mkbag.org/

I live in a village of around 300 houses about 6-miles to the East of Milton Keynes.

We got FTTC here a few months ago. Getting D/L of 25Mbps and am 600 metres or so from the cabinet.

Try the post code checker at BT (Google will find it) to see what speeds you are likely to get. If you don't know any Post Codes, try looking up Businesses in the local area and use that.

Also, with MK's Grid-Road system the wires will invariably be longer than the direct path.

Only parts of MK has FTTP (some of Bradwell Abbey?).

For the rest, we're a long way off 100Mbps in most of the UK!

jmmo20

Quite a lot of Milton Kenyes has FTTC (VDSL) but you need to check each area it it covers a huge geography and some parts have very poor BB speeds..
A limited area has FTTP.

You need to check first the post code of the areas you are looking at, try the BT Wholesale checker, then when you are actually looking at a property, use the actual telephone number to check availability at that property.

I don't think Virgin do broadband in MK. It's an ancient catv network leased off of BT.

BT FTTC, (there are many suppliers, not just BT Retail Infinity), and Virgin Cable are both to cabinet. Only BT FTTP is to the premises.

Neither BT product is sold as FO. Just "super-fast broadband". Virgin is sold as fibre, but incorrectly - as you say.

A couple of posters have referred you to the BT Wholesale postcode checker. Here's the link. Bear in mind that the estimates tend to be low, and for FTTC/P can be dramatically so.

(Edit - typo).

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 21-Oct-11 12:45:42)

I live in Bancroft, Milton Keynes, and have FTTC, but my speeds are lower than many get with just ADSL2. If you are looking for a house in MK and want to ensure fast broadband speeds, then you should look at houses which can get FTTH from the Bradwell Abbey exchange.

Oh yes. Forget about Virgin Media. They do not seem at all interested in upgrading the cable system. It was for this reason that I dropped cable TV some years ago, and switched to Sky

Edited by deleted (Sat 22-Oct-11 12:13:20)

thanks, how can I check if a house has FTTH availability?
The BT checker should show it as having 100mb Bt infinity coverage?

I understand that anything that says 40mb at the BT site means it's FTTC and VDSL to the home.

thanks.