FTTC on a long (ish) line

High...

Just had BT Openreach out to fix a line fault. Strange as I cancelled the visit, as the line appeared to clear on its own.But there you go, sounds like no one talks to each other at BT. Seemed a nice guy. So he said "I might as well test it while I'm here". Also offered to fit one of the latest filtered face-plates (current one was an old ADSL Nation), so I took him up on that. He seemed a nice chap and pretty chatty (not always the case).

Got talking about Broadband and that my current connection was Partial LLU with Xilo and that I got around an 11.3 Mbps sync. At that he asked if I had considered FTTC? Now the local village has FTTC and Samknows says it's 1.8miles to the exchange. Though the cabinet that I'm connected to is by the look of it slightly closer. But I had sort of assumed that would still be far too long for a decent connection.

My question is....

Is FTTC viable at this sort of distance in peoples experience?
or is it a case of "better to stick with what works"!?

Extra speed would be handy for me. As Ione of my hobbies is building custom PCs. And updating Windows alone during install time can take a while with a 10Mbps download speed.

Enter your phone number here and see what it offers you. That will give you information about what is available and an estimate as to speeds.

Thanks for the reply.

I know these things are only an estimate. But difficult to see if things would be any better when they pretty much always seem to bare no resemblance to what you can really get.

- ADSL 2+ giving a range of 3 to 8 Mbps. And I already get around an 11.3 Mbps sync, usually totally stable for months on end (thanks Xilo for that ... BT ADSL with DLM was truly awful)).

- FTTC (clean) showing High 4 and low 1.7 ... so even their estimates seem to imply FTTC would be worse than ADSL 2+

O'hum...

That suggests your idea of distance from your cab is pretty much correct then. Without network rearrangement or FTTP you aren't going to see any improvement for a while on that connection. If/when BT start rolling out G.FAST you have more hope but that could be a while.

Thanks again.

Looks like I'll stick with what I've got then.

Not come across G.FAST before. Looks interesting. Though as you say "don't hold your breath".
Though the test/s I've read about appear to have only been tried over what I would consider to be relatively small lengths of copper (IE. 66m). Be interested to see how it performs over longer lengths (EG. 1-2 km).

We live in interesting times, as I'm wont to say.

Due to the higher frequencies G.fast will not perform well beyond 1km at all, but variations to the VDSL2 standards to squeeze more data into the existing frequency bands and a little more frequency offer some hope

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7209-bt-and-alcat...

Has a bit of detail on Vplus - though whether it sees the light of day in the UK is unknown. So lots of tech available to get you much faster the delay is in deciding the cost and who pays to do it.

The idea with G.FAST is that it wouldn't be over long distances. The requirement would be that nodes would be put in closer to houses allowing much shorter copper connections. However, that does have a cost and until BT complete their trials and start looking at possible rollout plans then everything is guesswork. Likelihood is that if you were on that later end for getting ADSL or FTTC then you probably would be for G.FAST as well - BT follow the profit like any other company.

Thanks again for all the information.

Unluckily yes, living in a rural area does have certain drawbacks. As you point out, ADSL & now FTTC etc. came pretty late to us.

Though I suppose I should count myself lucky. As some folks little more than a mile or so from me, struggle to see a stable 2Mbps connection.

In an attempt to squeeze a bit more out of my ADSL2+ link....
I wonder if it's worth considering swapping my TP-Link TD-W8960N for a newer modem/router like the:

Billion 7800DXL

As this appears to allow "target SNR margin adjustment ". Not quite sure how this actually works, as I thought the ISP set this? In my case it looks to be 6dB.

According to router stats, my noise margin appears to be a pretty stable 6dB, dropping only ever so slightly at night (or when the plasma TV is on). According to the router stats, the total ES (Error Seconds I assume) after 1 day 6 hours, is 275.

Thoughts anyone???

I am about 5.4 Km from the exchange and get just over 2Mb/s and also with Xilo.

I was using a Billion 7700N but changed for a 7800DXL due to continual drop outs. There was a very small increase of speed but main improvement was stability and I can change the SNR in the router.