What - they have their own fibre trunking, then?

FTTC is provided by Openreach to all ISPs, and handed over at the fibre headend exchange to one of BT Wholesale, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone via an Openreach GEA cable link. Each of them buys those cable links from Openreach.

The GEA cable links are each connected to the respective backhaul through a switch, not through the DSLAM/MSANs that they have there which only provide ADSLx.

BT FTTC and Sky FTTC are both provided in the same way. Sky is not resold BT.

What is a 'fibre headend exchange' and how would I recognise one? Area SD.

The undeniable fact, howevwr, is that another ISP manges to provide a better speed for a customer than the infrastructure owner.

On FTTC in a large number of cases the fibre does not go from the cabinet to the same exchange as the phone line, even though the phone line exchange is shown as FTTC/FTTP enabled. "Enabled" in this instance means available to users whose copper phone line goes to the exchange concerned.

A fibre headend exchange is where the Openreach handover links are, and may service several other exchanges as well as its own phone users.

In the future it is likely that as phone services move over to fibre that the non-headend exchanges will gradually be decommissioned. At least for these services.

Re the infrastructure provider, as explained earlier the FTTC from the user to the headend exchange is nothing to do with the retailer, or even the wholesaler.

That isn't strictly true, in that they can select three different Openreach DLM settings - speed, standard and stable. AIUI BT Wholesale specify speed, though maybe their retailers can opt for one of the other two. BT Wholesale ( I think) offer standard, stable and super stable matching up to the Openreach three, as those are what they offer on their own ADSLx services.

I believe BT Consumer use the BTW Standard = Openreach Speed.

Bear in mind this discussion arises from your statement that Sky resell BT FTTC, and the context was of retail ISPs. i.e. BT Consumer.

So we end up back at the question in the Subject. Assuming that means the retailer, the answer is yes. But not primarily because of the FTTC service itself. Mainly because of the backhaul and routing capacity used by the retailer. In exactly the same way as with ADSLx.

Thank you for that. I take it there is no way of 'discovering' which are 'fibre headend exchanges'?

So, for the OP, we are agreed that switching to Sky from BT produced a better speed.

In a way, but not because the Sky service is faster in general than BT. The dramatic increase obtained by your friend will be down to some other major factor causing slow speed on his particular connection. Speed differences of that magnitude due to ISP change are not normal.

Possibilities are:

- temporary congestion on BT at his exchange;
- different wireless performance between the two routers if using wireless;
- at some point his modem had re-sync'ed at a low speed during a thunderstorm or other "noise" event, if he hadn't re-sync'ed later;
- for similar reasons to the previous point banding had been applied to the line by the Openreach DLM and was removed at migration time through a DLM reset.

And more.

Did he ever have 17Mbps on BT, particularly at initial connection?

Some posters can establish where the headend is for any particular exchange, but as far as the end user is concerned it is irrelevant.

The problem for the customer is that they don't know what they will get until after it is installed and they are locked into a 12-24 month agreement. The government should ensure that customers can leave without penalty if performance is unsatisfactory, particularly in the first couple of months after installation.

ISPs provide speed estimates as you go through the sign up process. Due to how FTTC is setup (as explained earlier) congestion is very rare on the main providers.

Where congestion does exist it does get resolved almost always on the main FTTC providers, & if users submit enough evidence of said congestion they are allowed to leave the contract penalty free in almost all cases, provided the user actually logs a formal complaint and conducts speed tests using a wired connection etc. That said, usually by the time the complaint has progressed a couple of months have passed and often is the case the capacity has been increased in such time so the user ends up staying put.

In reply to a post by mikejp:

I would say yes - a friend was on a BT 'dis-interested' fibre contract at 12 down. He went to Sky at 2/3 of the price with better phone and other packages when BT would do nothing to improve things and got 17 down. Same line, same exchange. You could say it is down the installed kit of Sky, but then they actually better the performance of those providing the broadband they are re-selling!

That doesn't make much sense. Maybe the Sky router was able to sync at a better rate for whatever reason. However, the rest of the circuit is the same. Openreach manage FTTC connections right back to the headend.