Superfast Broadband?

I may not be all that competent when it comes to BB but I am more so confused by what is claimed as superfast BB.

I live in a rural area where according the manager of the BT Chairmans Office [Business] in Glasgow, the conductors providing the telephone service are known to be unreliable, possibly dating back to the 1960s and a mixture of aluminium and copper.

In September last year our nearest cabinet was connected FTTC and I took the opportunity to make use of the facility. I am about 1600 metres by conductor route from the cabinet.

The service provided is described as superfast up to 38Mbps. In fact it is about 18 Mbps and getting slower.

When BT, the Council and the world in general claim percentage success of up to 90% superfast BB, am I included in that percentage? - even though I am not getting superfast BB.

Further, are all those people who could be but are not connected to the cabinet FTTC also included in that 90%.

In short does 90% mean all those who truly receive superfast BB, or does it include all those who in an ideal world might be able to receive superfast BB if they chose to do so?

I get 19Mbps on my FTTC line, similar to my neighbours - but I find my line/area is often described as 'Superfast'.

'Statistics' pfft

It's the number of properties that speeds of 24meg+ are available too.

When connected via FTTC, the "superfast" epiphet only applies if you actually get speeds of more than 25Mbps.

The actual speed achieved depend on the length of the line, quality of joints, material (aluminium/copper), and gauge (diameter). As "standard", the expectation is that superfast speeds reach out to around 1200m. There are around 6% of lines longer than this.
http://postimg.org/image/bp372fcnn/

The targets are indeed to reach 90% of lines which can actually reach the superfast speed threshold. And later, to 95%.

If you don't get a superfast speed from an upgrade, then you technically qualify for further subsidy in future. However, there are other qualification factors that might work against you - such as the one that specifies a " step change" in speed.

As the target rises to 95%, there will be a need for BT to cover people like you - beyond the threshold from an old upgrade - by getting deeper fibre from a secondary FTTC cabinet, or from FTTP. Both kinds of expansion have been seen.

If you goto https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?area... you will see our stats for Glasgow City and you fall into the gap between the two lines you can see when you click the history button i.e. 0.9% of Glasgow passed by a VDSL2 or cable service but not able to get superfast speeds.

The broadband provider should have given you a speed estimate at the time of signing up and before you committed to upgrading.

The UK as a whole has 92.8% able to get something like VDSL2/cable/FTTH but the figure for those superfast is lower at 88.6% to 89.3% depending on whether you call superfast something over 24 Mbps or over 30 Mbps

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

When connected via FTTC, the "superfast" epiphet only applies if you actually get speeds of more than 25Mbps.

BT Openreach have started to change that on there Where and when page.
[FTTC]
"Great news, you can order a fibre service. Please get in touch with your service provider."
The above was for a 76Mbps downstream speeds.

[FTTP]
"Great news, you can get Superfast fibre directly to your home. Please get in touch with your service provider for more details."

However the Where and when page is still more designed for FTTC at the moment, so hopefully this will change also.

Paul

Also do tge figures defereniate between cabs that can achieve superfast speeds vs capacity?

For example my cab is enabled and i could get 50Mbps. However due to capacity issues i cant order fibre yet. So do those stats count me in the 90% target as i can theoretically get those speeds even though there isnt room in the cab for my line?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The UK as a whole has 92.8% able to get something like VDSL2/cable/FTTH but the figure for those superfast is lower at 88.6% to 89.3% depending on whether you call superfast something over 24 Mbps or over 30 Mbps

We've had similar conversations in the past...

I'm still wary about those stats. Looking at myself and my neighbours none of us achieve 30+ (we are all around 19-22) but the 'TBB labs' page says: "Fibre (FTTC) is possibly available and speeds will likely be above 30 Mbps."

Looking on another exchange where I know they get similar speeds the labs page says the same. So surely talk of .6 and .3 of a % isn't accurate and the stats can't be taken serously?

And I believe I've asked for details of the location so that I can manually review it before

There are some locations where the model does not work well, but by and large this is not the case. Saying an exchange is not enough, need to know a postcode to look at.

If people feed back into the model then it will become better.

Yes in that case you would count, since otherwise the figures would be going up and down all the time.

Onus and cost of adding more capacity is purely down to Openreach.