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.

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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.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

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

Regarding people upgrading to VDSL that is the whole point. In my case I was getting an unreliable 2-2.5 mbps so upgrading was a no-brainer. My sister gets a solid 7-8mbps, so despite being some 250m from the cabinet with the prospect of a full 76mbps, it is not worth the extra expense.

I said it before, I think it would have been more economical for Openreach to have focused their upgrade efforts on people getting less than 10 Mb, I'm pretty sure their ROI would have been higher then.

It would be interesting to know actually, a study of how fibre take-up correlates with existing ADSL2+ speeds.

Trouble is that users of less than 10Mb are generally on cabinets with users with more than 10Mb. I doubt if there are many cabs overall that have users primarily below 10Mb.

And if there are cabs that haven't been done that have a lot of less than 10Mb users then I am guessing they probably have a smaller number of users on them (as BT are tending to target the larger cabs). From their perspective 10% of 500 is better than 20% of 100 (or whatever).

Obviously these are made up figures but it isn't as simple as getting higher takeup from slower ADSL lines as there are lots of other variables that potentially still make it more cost effective to do it the way they have. Without doing full modelling it is all guesswork and conjecture.

Ballpark figure is that 7000 cabinets are over 4km from the exchange in terms of line length covering around 1 million lines

85,000+ plus cabinets at the start of the roll-outs.

Only around 1,500 of these are of the sort of size that was considered in the commercial roll-out
Around 1,900 are below the size where phase 1 BDUK work usually sees them enabled

Along with others I've noticed the same here on TBB recently

FWIW
In addition, I don't suppose the locked Openreach modems have helped. Previously the first thing people would ask for would be the router stats! Then troubleshooting could begin.

There were lots of people on ADSL running blind by choice, now lots on VDSL - not by choice if they are using the standard ECI modem like me.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Who needs FTTC!

It all depends on peoples situation!
You have a similar DL speed to my FTTC one. But it's been a worthwhile spend for me on a 20CN exchange - going from around 4.5 > 20.
I would have been happy to have your line stats and been able to have saved some money!

Even if I was getting 20 Meg on ADSL2+ the extra upload has made a big difference to working from home even though its not as fast as most people at only 3.5 to 4 Mbps.

Going from 12/1 to 50/15 was definitely worthwhile for me.

Yep same here - but the decision to upgrade would have been tougher if I already had a decent DL speed. As it was, it was a no-brainer.

Unfortunately BT's estimator is proving very overoptimistic in my area.
Checked a neighbour yesterday - estimator shows clean max 57, impacted low 26.
They actually get 22. Clean as can be BT install etc.

My line showed similar figures and after running for a while on FTTC the estimator has dropped to match my actual figures. Crosstalk, DLM etc. perhaps not being taken into account with the estimating?

In reply to a post by b4dger:

Unfortunately BT's estimator is proving very overoptimistic in my area.
Checked a neighbour yesterday - estimator shows clean max 57, impacted low 26.
They actually get 22. Clean as can be BT install etc.

It's the opposite for me, BT's checker says 6.5 to 15 Mb for my line, which can happily do 18 Mb. Perhaps it would become more accurate if I had ever used WBC, but I never have, I've always used LLU for ADSL2+.

In reply to a post by b4dger:

Unfortunately BT's estimator is proving very overoptimistic in my area.
Checked a neighbour yesterday - estimator shows clean max 57, impacted low 26.
They actually get 22. Clean as can be BT install etc.

I think the estimator works OK, mostly, but has a flaw... I think it calculates estimates for all properties off a DP to have the same speed. It looks like it has reasonable ways to estimate for the DP itself, but then makes a standard allowance for the drop wire. If a property has a long drop wire, the estimator tends to be high.

My line showed similar figures and after running for a while on FTTC the estimator has dropped to match my actual figures. Crosstalk, DLM etc. perhaps not being taken into account with the estimating?

The estimator bases its figure by comparing your line characteristics against groups of similar lines. It then sets the top of the range to be the 80th percentile of the similar group, and the bottom to be the 20th percentile. And, apparently, will investigate your line if speed drops below the 10th percentile.

You'd imagine that this means the range covers a lot of variation due to crosstalk, DLM, etc. And that you should expect your speed to vary across the range as both crosstalk & DLM take their toll over time.

If the estimations change, the best guess is that they're now comparing your line to a different group, or the percentiles have changed.

Both the Huawei and ECI HG612 can be unlocked.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/routers/hg612unlock.htm

Edited by APTMAN (Sat 21-Feb-15 19:15:20)

Hmmmm.

In reply to a post by APTMAN:

Both the Huawei and ECI HG612 can be unlocked.

Yes but the ECI isn't a simple firmware flash. It's a hardware hack - attaching UART, etc. etc.