Benefits of faster broadband.

What difference has getting faster broadband made to your life, and how long did it take you to adapt?

Considering 90% of my internet usage is web browsing, not a great deal. Obviously going from 2mbps to 8mbps at present things load quicker, but not bothered with Fibre as i wouldnt see the benefits compared to the extra cost

For work, we have 72mbit with the cabinet just around the corner, it's essential for us as we're always transferring massive files (images/videos - had to download 30gb of data the other day) and have staff working remotely.

For home, I had around 25mbit wireless connection (VFast), and never really felt like I needed more bandwidth. As long as I can watch YouTube in HD, perhaps do some streaming, download a few things relatively quickly I'm happy.

I've just moved house and have the option of 2.5mbit DSL connection, with fibre coming soon although I am around 1.5km from the cabinet... Really, I'd be happy with a 20mbit stable connection.

Mostly TV!
Instead of only one person in the house using iPlayer or similar, now 4 people can stream at the same time. Our Smart TVs are used a lot more on the internet.

My move to FTTC has only seen a modest speed increase unfortunately.
My rural line has gone from an IP Profile of 5Mbps to just under 20.
Initially I saw 30Mbps but as others got connected my speed reduced. My current speed is fine - just hope it doesn't drop anymore!

As for "how long to adapt". Not sure what you are after but I guess straight away

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

What difference has getting faster broadband made to your life, and how long did it take you to adapt?

about 2 minutes to adapt went from 6mbps to 160mbps - currenty have 160/12 and 76.19.9 bonded together. also have a works LLU line which I will also be coverting to Fibre soon. I can run 4.

In terms of usage. Nothing dodgy. But my children love their videos and games. PS3 game being 60GB means it can download pretty much over tea as here 1GB can be gotten in around 35 seconds.

I can brag about how fast my connection is now whereas at 3Mbps on a long ADSL line I couldn't

Seriously though, it makes large downloads for software updates and installations a pleasure.

Another benefit of moving from ADSL to FTTC is that I previously had a bandwidth cap and now don't. That means I don't need to worry about downloading television programmes and films. That's something I rarely did when I had ADSL.

I'm pretty used to fast broadband having worked for an ISP so there wasn't any adaptation required - it just put things back to normal.

Watching YouTube and BBC iPlayer without them stalling is nice. Apart from that, no difference. I didn't really notice when my speed dropped from 14Mbps to 8Mbps recently.

In my household it means my two teenagers can be doing whatever they want web-wise (my daughter is surgically attached to her i-pad, streaming constantly) and I can do whatever I fancy at the same time.

As with several other replies, I had no real need to go on to FTTC/VDSL; but decided to do so, on the assumption that the demand would be high.

My ADSL2x connection generally achieved 17/.9 Mbps.

Even my Dial-up was good at normally 44 Kbps, occasionally achieving 52 Kbps.


The local PCP handles about 300 Subscribers, based on Postcode coverage.


The linked FTTC has a back-plane for 288/300 VDSL connections.

When first activated, sufficient links/filters for 48/50 upgrades were actually set up, March 2014.


The next 48/50 were added about 5 weeks back, so at most there had been only 48 upgrades in that first operational year, say about 16% absolute maximum.


There has been some more activity at the PCP about 1 week back, with an OR vehicle parked by it for about an hour, compared with the 5 to 10 minutes for a single upgrade.

==================

The FTTC Back plane has strictly 300 sockets, in 2 Columns, each containing 6 segments of 5 rows by 5 columns.

The lowest row of each segment is coloured differently, whilst the the right-most socket in that row is generally unused at any time apparently.

Hence my 288/300 and similar.

Edited by deleted (Wed 29-Apr-15 19:21:17)

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

What difference has getting faster broadband made to your life, and how long did it take you to adapt?

Very little, really. I don't download a great deal and my previous connection (12Mb/s) was fast enough for my occasional iPlayer use. My line is a bit more stable now and gives me 74Mb/s (jumped up from 64Mb/s last week when G.INP was rolled out) but not hugely so. I've gone from one or two drops a month to one or two drops a year. Frankly the main reason I changed was because I could.

Edited by Andrue (Thu 30-Apr-15 10:25:56)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Frankly the main reason I changed was because I could.

Same here really- first to a 40/10 connection as soon as it became available on my cabinet (which was about a fortnight before BT announced it ) then upped it to 80/20 as soon as that became available.

Hasn't made much difference to the way I use the internet, I suppose the biggest is when I want to download something, anything from a document to a Linux distro, I don't bother to check how big it is or how long it will take.

With my rural exchange expected to be fibre enabled in the next few months I am thinking exactly the same as the poster. Most of my internet use is web browsing and email with very little streaming except short BBC News streams which work well enough on ADSL. Faster download of large software upgrades would be good but this is only every couple of years or so! The most important thing for me is stability so I am interested in everyone's views/experiences of the transition to FTTC. I am on a long line from the exchange but have a rock solid connection at over 3mbps on ADSL and I am about 1200 metres from the cabinet. Am I likely to have an equally stable connection on FTTC? Are there likely to be initial problems with stability when first connected to FTTC?

Am I likely to have an equally stable connection on FTTC? Are there likely to be initial problems with stability when first connected to FTTC?

In short, no.

Ummm .

Surely the two parts require different answers?

Stability will almost certainly be better. It's hard to imagine what might cause it to be worse. As for speed you might end up over ten times faster. Certainly at least five times faster. I think you'd notice that. You might not notice it immediately but I'd be surprised if you didn't notice the difference a few months down the line if for some reason you find yourself back on 3Mb/s. I'd advise anyone with single digit ADSL speeds to consider FTTC. It's only those in the mid to high teens of ADSL where the difference becomes harder to justify in the absence of known issues.

Edited by Andrue (Thu 30-Apr-15 12:38:09)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I'd advise anyone with single digit ADSL speeds to consider FTTC. It's only those in the mid to high teens of ADSL where the difference becomes harder to justify in the absence of known issues.

When it comes to download usage, I'd agree with you.

In our case, the driver for upgrading to FTTC was greater upload speed. We had 17/1 ADSL2+ and went to 80/20 FTTC. We are heavy cloud storage users, also we connect back to the home network using VPNs. We sometimes have to send large files to people. We use VoIP, video conferencing and have a 3G femtocell. For our usage scenario, there is a vast difference between having 1Mbit/s upload speed and 20 Mbit/s upload speed.

80/20 FTTC is fast enough that we don't have to worry about what others are doing.


Another bonus of moving to FTTC is that Zen offer unlimited usage FTTC products, but not unlimited usage ADSL2+. In our case, this wasn't a driver to upgrade, as the unlimited usage FTTC products came about after we initially got FTTC. We rarely got close to the limit, but it is nice not to have to think whether you're wasting valuable usage. I think nothing of streaming media at the maximum available bandwidth on unlimited usage FTTC.

Likely to be stable and it seems more stable for many.

19 to 22 Mbps speeds on 1350 m long line here (two lines so two slightly different speeds, Sky Hub seems to connect faster than ECI kit on the ECI cab)

Initial problems, so long as the engineer switches you over at the cabinet correctly they no problems, so if any urgent WORK type stuff on switch day, have a back up plan to hand.

I am in a good position to answer this question as at my home I am still on ADSL at 3.5 mbps, but work away from home for months at a time and have a flat with a FTTC service running at 68 mbps.

The main benefit I find is not what most would immediately think of... Upload speed! In the apartment I get about 18mbps upload, at home I get 0.4 (so 45x times faster upload) - Download is "only" 20x faster).

The benefits of this massive difference in upload speed is that it allows me to use cloud services - things like DropBox, WebApps and such are now a real pleasure to use and work well. Video conferencing also now allows 1080p HD Skype calls to be held bi-bidirectionally with excellent quality and clarity.

So upload speed difference is the main thing I noticed.

The main benefit in download speed is with streaming or such. I am happy to kick off a download overnight but "real-time" content greatly benefits from the download speed.

I have no chance to have good Netflix (SD buffers every 20 seconds or so) at home, in the flat it's flawless - 1080p HD

I do think we need a USO of about 10mbps with ping times of 40ms or less (to rule out satellite) and with a packet loss average of less than 0.01%

Having said all this, reliability is, to me, of far greater importance than speed. Fortunately both my ADSL and FTTC connections are reliable.

Having a wife with a tablet (Netflix), a son with a desktop (gaming/streaming), a daughter with a laptop (streaming) and myself with a desktop (gaming/downloading/streaming) our original 2.5Mbps/1Mbps connection was abysmal. I now have a 64Mb/20Mb connection and the difference is night and day.
"How long did it take me to adapt"--strange question, but I suppose it was as soon as I logged on.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Ummm .

Surely the two parts require different answers?

Yes, please.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Likely to be stable and it seems more stable for many.

19 to 22 Mbps speeds on 1350 m long line here (two lines so two slightly different speeds, Sky Hub seems to connect faster than ECI kit on the ECI cab)

Initial problems, so long as the engineer switches you over at the cabinet correctly they no problems, so if any urgent WORK type stuff on switch day, have a back up plan to hand.

Do take this advice,my change to BT resulted in a working phone but no broadband. Done on a Friday and did not get broadband until following Tuesday!