In reply to a post by Anonymous:

... are we going to be waiting until 2015 before the speed increases?

I don't believe 2015 will guarantee you anything

2015 is when the current FTTC roll out is scheduled to end (I believe) but many exchanges may 'never' see fibre the way things are. I guess when the time comes for them to 'weigh in' the copper as it's worth so much they might replace it with fibre

I was watching a BT Infinity ad on TV last night and thought how stupid things were.
It doesn't seem very targeted advertising as a lot of people interested won't be able to get it...

We got ADSL in 2002/2003. I remember meeting you at the BT tower event in London, I was a campaign organiser

I'll get about 18mbit with my line. I currently max out at 8 with no problems and my margins are very good for a 1km line. Calculators says 18mbit, but I'd be happy with anything 12+.

TalkTalk put their kit in just before Xmas, (only LLU we have so far) but they are pants as an ISP and I never considered them. I only recently seen that some ISP's re-sell the backbone Opal service. I'm currently having a chat with Vivaciti about moving over to them.

It's just a damn shame you have to go LLU, or partial-LLU to get a decent service 8 years after my exchange went live. I was just moaning in another thread yesterday about an exchange a few miles from me (Hawarden) getting WBC and Fibre this year, with less lines than my own. They already have about 7 LLU operators there. My mind boggles at how it all works sometimes.

I kind of sympathise with the OP because I am in a similar situation -

I am on the Dumfries (Scotland). WSDMS.

It's the biggest town in the region!

LLU ADSL 2+ - yes

BT WBC - NOPE

Make sense? - NOPE

FTTC/FTTH - NOPE

I guess I am confused as to why BT WBC or FTTC just seems to have missed us out but LLU providers seem happy enough to install their service.

As the biggest town in an entire region I'm not sure there is an argument that says it's not viable?

In reply to a post by Koppo:

We got ADSL in 2002/2003. I remember meeting you at the BT tower event in London, I was a campaign organiser

TalkTalk put their kit in just before Xmas, (only LLU we have so far) but they are pants as an ISP and I never considered them.

I was in much the same position as you, getting ADSL in 2002 on my rural exchange. (Just over 4000 users). On an up to 8meg service (TT) I was getting circa 4.5meg with major contention in the evenings and at weekends.

Three years ago TT put in LLU, and I was migrated to their up to 20meg service. Since then I've had a stable 17meg connection with no outages. Speeds are consistent 24/7.

If you have problems their Call Centre may well be 'pants' but the LLU service, as delivered, is extremely good value. Any minor niggles I've had have been rapidly addressed on the TT user forum.

Cable and fibre are never likely to come here so this is as good as it gets at present. I'm not a gamer, download circa 70gig a month, mainly software/program updates, web browsing and watching HD films.

In reply to a post by Koppo:

I think you got it the wrong way round. It's the non-urban customers, with sub-par services and options, that are subsidising the FTTC connections of the townies by having to pay the same line rental charges as everyone else.

You're overlooking the fact that it's more expensive to provide you with the service in the first place and that there's more of 'me' to share the burden than there is of 'you'. To explain the latter comment:

Running costs may be similar for both of us since distance probably doesn't make much difference. However upgrading the service does cost money. In my case that cost is potentially shared across around five thousand telephone lines. We're also a fairly affluent town in the South East. Yes there's more cabinets in my town but the number of potential subscribers they bring into reach outweighs the additional cost of supporting more lines.

Put simply:It's the economics of supplying services to large urban areas v. small rural areas. There's nothing new or shocking here. No great conspiracy to exclude you from society. It's just the way the world works. That's why human beings invented urbanisation in the first place.

You are getting the best service that can be provided for your area for the same price as I pay. The thread starter is most likely getting better value for money than me. It's possible that their exchange is being run at a loss. Since I'm on a Market 3 exchange most likely I'm paying more for my service and the extra is being used to offset the OP's costs.

Now I can accept that - I'm a believer in the power of society and the better off helping the less well off. However I draw the line at providing people with luxuries and as far as I'm concerned speeds in excess of 4Mb/s are luxuries. I'm not really convinced that anyone with ADSL of any speed is seriously inconvenienced at the moment.

The same will be true in your particular case. None of these companies are being 'mean' and just ignoring rural areas. They'd all love to sign up more customers no matter where live, what colour their skin or anything else. The reason you don't get a particular service is because they can't make money on it.

Edited by Andrue (Fri 11-Mar-11 10:42:40)

In reply to a post by Aurhinius:

I guess I am confused as to why BT WBC or FTTC just seems to have missed us out but LLU providers seem happy enough to install their service.

As the biggest town in an entire region I'm not sure there is an argument that says it's not viable?

Now this intrigues me. I'm sure there's still some reason but it may be technical more than financial. Llandudno is another weird case. One of the biggest and most important towns on the North Wales coast yet it only got LLU last February and was full within a month. Interestingly that was about the same time that WBC went live there.

Here's the odd bit: To me that makes sense. BT upgraded their backhaul so finally TT could rent capacity off them. Either that or the two of them shared the cost of laying more cable.

But here's the rub:My exchange has been M3 for several years. We have pretty much every LLUO there is. Yet we only get WBC this month. We are also supposedly getting FTTC in December. So yeah - the decisions can weird but presumbably someone somewhere understands it

We got ADSL max in 2006.

I am guessing we are going to be on a roll out somewhere but no dates have been issued for WBC or FTTC.

I am slightly concerned because FTTC seems to have taken over WBC.

So we are starting to see those who were at the end of WBC not getting it because BT thought it would be better just to upgrade exchanges to FTTC (I agree but not at the cost of those still left to get WBC).

Problem is that it all seems to have pushed us back another 5 years (guess) in development.

Granted we are a rural region but as the biggest town you'd expect us to get something.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

... exchanges such as mine have not even been upgraded to allow for speeds of up to 20MBp/s & BT have told me they have no plans to do so anytime soon. It may be a rural area but I'd still like to be able to download a movie in high definition without it taking all day.

As in MrSaffron's reply to koppo, what connection speed and download speed do you get now?

If you aren't getting enough to download an HD movie in a sensible time then it is highly unlikely WBC/ADSL2+ would improve things anyway, as it would suggest you have a long line.

WBC/ADSL2+ does not increase everyone's speeds. Even at 6Mbps connection on ADSL Max it can make little if any difference.

Perhaps you are merely with an ISP that doesn't provide 24/7 decent speeds on ADSL Max?

Same here.

Town Centre exchange, 5,000 lines, no LLU, no 21cn, no infinity and no cable as we live in a new build.

Stuck on rubbish 4 meg.

As per my reply to the OP, 21CN won't help. LLU might - not a higher connection speed, but an escape from the BT IP Profiling and noise mis-management system.