Where are all the tech queries as fibre takes over?

For years I have found TBB my No. 1 source of technical info and friendly help when things go wrong. As a non-techie I have learned much from the published fixes for many problems.

Over the past year or so, many posts seem to be changing from technical to questions of fibre availability and the significance of this or that cabinet. Has anyone else noticed this gradual change, and has BB become more reliable?

I have noticed it, yeah. Probably for a few reasons:

• Higher speeds due to fibre meaning less need for extensive tweaking and less complaints about low speeds
• Fewer errors on lines due to more fibre in the network and less copper
• Consolidation of the broadband market, meaning most people are with large providers who have lots of bandwidth, rather than in the past when there were smaller providers struggling to cope with bandwidth requirements
• Little or no instrusive traffic management due to the above
• DSLAM and modem improvements over time

Our ASDL2+ drops out about every two days.
Our ISP answer is to stop using ADSL2+ and go fibre - easier than sorting the problem, I suppose but I'm happy with ASDL2+ speed so why should I have the expense of fibre?

For many people the arrival of FTTC has probably meant they don't have to tweak things so much in order to get things like video streaming or gaming working acceptably fast. Once it works well enough, then most people are happy.

There is another factor in that many more people seem to be using ISP-provided modem/routers. They tend to have many fewer things available for tweaking.

Also, many of the lessons from ADSL are directly applicable to VDSL. If you've optimised your domestic setup for ADSL, then you'll probably find VDSL works well enough.

So maybe this is a sign of things maturing somewhat. We are getting to a position where, for the great majority, things are good enough for what they want and need to do. Then it's more about price, availability and reliability.

You have hit most of the points there ...

I did make a suggestion a while back about splitting this forum into two with one for Fibre Technical Issues and the second for questions about "when will I get", "do you know about cab/exchange", "how can I get BDUK to include me" and such like.

And if the fault, which we will assume is an intermittent connection, is on the wires between your house and your cabinet, then the fault will remain. And Yes if you have a good ADSL2+ connection the upgrade is likely not worth the expense nor risk!

When it gets to the point that its needed then it can be done...for now technical issues with reliability/speeds often fit nicely into the ISP section itself.

We had a similar where and when burst in 2003 to 2006 for ADSL based services, then once ADSL2+ became popular it switched to getting the most from it, and suspect that the roll-out of vectoring may be that trigger with FTTC based services.

While its nice to promote 100 Meg and faster services, it needs to remembered that with even just a 20 Mbps FTTC speed you can do an awful lot e.g. https://twitter.com/MrSaffron/status/556464734682480641 five HD streams over a simple Sky FTTC service with a 20 Mbps speed test

Plan to line up a few more devices and see how it copes with 7 all streaming at once.

In addition to Oliver's comments, I suspect that the majority of users are sat5isfied with ADSL.

If I remember correctly, OR/BT announced recently that only about 17% of the subscribers/lines in the VDSL coverage, have actually upgraded to VDSL.

Certainly that seems in line with what I have observed with the local PCP & FTTC combination.

The PCP has a capacity of around 300 lines (not had a definite answer); and those seem to be fully taken up over the many years.

The FTTC has a back-plane of 288/300 depending on how you count them.

At present, it only has 96/100 (Double-) Links from/to the PCP.

Over the 11 months that the FTTC has been operational, the PCP has only been opened about once per month, presumed for VDSL Upgrades as prior to the FTTC being installed, it was only opened about once or twice per year.

In my own case, I upgraded from a very satisfactory ADSL2+ to VDSL (40/10), to make sure that I did have VDSL access, assuming at the time, May/June 2014, that there would be a rush to upgrade.

I hope to have a word with the technician when I next see the PCP opened, as talking to two OR lads elsewhere, it appears to be very easy to get a VDSL Upgrade count in the PCP.

They also concurred that their experiences would not disagree with that 17% upgrading.

----------------

Regarding this forum, we are in degree "self-selected" by having an interest in the subject.

Edited by deleted (Wed 18-Feb-15 18:10:15)

My ADSL2+ has been running at 20 Meg for 69 days with just 2 drops. Who needs FTTC!

A lot of people will feel like that, but if you need decent upload speed, then it would make a huge difference. Far more, proportionately, than download.