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UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

wired.co.uk

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Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#31

Post by stuaxo »

signal11 wrote: post #6

> The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, the…

In the 80s we were going to get investment in fibre, to every home - building factories to get economies of scale.

This was stopped, and everything sold to South Korea, and we know how good their internet has been for years.

https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#32

Post by wjoe »

Interestingly, Virgin Media now advertises slightly faster speeds than it did before this came into effect. Where it's fastest package was previously 350Mbps, it now advertises the same package as giving "Average download speeds of 362Mbps". "Average" still leaves a wide range of speeds, and as far as I can tell they don't quote different speeds for different locations.

I don't think quoting the average speed of all users in the country for each package is going to give much more of an accurate picture than maximum speeds. Especially since the abundance of FTTC here means your speeds are much more dependant on local infrastructure.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#33

Post by dodobdob167 »

bytematic wrote: post #25
LeonM wrote: post #20

> or make a Skype call that doesn’t drop out every two minutes. When will people learn that bandwidth has nothing to do with this? You don't need 50mbit for a skype call! It's usually not the 'last mile' problem, but what I'd call the 'last meters' problem: most SOHO/consumer grade network equipment is just total garbage. Replace your ISP supplied equipment with something more reliable (I highly recommend Ubiquiti ge…

Latency is way more important. My last company gave me 100down but it took 3 seconds to load google. I couldn't play any games or even talk online with friends. I switched over to another company for similar price, no speed change, and everything works fantastically. If I had incredible ping/routing I would take 20 down, I'd love to see what the most I use is, probably less than 10.

Probably errors / transmission or a vlan issue

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#34

Post by _kyran »

oldcynic wrote: post #8

The UK could have had world leading broadband were it not for Mrs T. She decided BT's late 1980s decision to rollout fibre was anti-competitive and killed it in 1990 when we were pretty much leading the world [0]. So the grindingly slow reality of ADSL isn't especially surprising sadly. [0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

Likewise, the NBN (national broadband network) in Australia was a disaster.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#35

Post by dspillett »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #14
gmac wrote: post #11

This doesn't appear to address the two main issues I encounter when choosing UK broadband, which are that (a) advertising of upload speeds seems entirely unregulated, so that some providers offer ridiculous deals (e.g. 38Mbps down, but 1Mbps up, with the latter figure hidden in small print on another page), and (b) unless I choose Virgin, I will have sporadic disconnections sometimes for hours at a time depending on…

Completely agree on the upload speeds...I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.

> upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed

This is not directly due to the technology involved, it is due to congestion on the upstream side slowing down IP control packets (ACKs and such) as they are queued with the rest. When you have a slow upstream pipe it is very easy to see this effect. It is even worse when there are multiple upstream connections trying to use as much as they can (as seen in torrent transfers and similar), and it affects interactive traffic like SSH connections significantly too.

You can work around this by shaping your upstream traffic to reserve a little bandwidth for small interactive/control packets. If your router runs Linux there are a number of simple scripts to setup the basics (wondershaper is one I've used successfully in the past) or you can be more specific to your needs by setting up your own config with the appropriate tools.

If you usually only use one PC then you can run the shaper there instead, of course, but running shaping on one individual machine on a crowded network will have no useful effect.

(see http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-... for an example of using wondershaper)

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#36

Post by ksec »

signal11 wrote: post #6

> The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, the…

Having had three few provider and different tech, unless I have a need of 1Gbps+ broadband speed in the future, I would much rather have copper RJ11 or RJ45.

Copper Ethernet RJ45 is the best. No more modem, just plug and play. Installing a Ethernet cable is, assuming enough space in the pipe, can be easily pulled through using whatever force you like, I don't think you can actually do any damage to the cable while installing it.

The telephone wire, It is a little hard to imagine a home without these wires. ( May be there are parts of the world which don't have them a default? I don't know ). There is no need to do installing. It is Modem then plug and play. G.Fast A3 actually allows 212Mhz and Dynamic allocation of Upstream and Downstream bandwidth. And gets 300Mbps + for 300M from Cabinet, and 500Mbps or those within 200M.

I used to long for Fibre, but then when the installation comes, it either works perfectly in pipes that get pulled through, or you have to lay them out in the open and are warned they are extremely brittle. Which gets me a few phone call from friends getting nervous saying they would much rather stick with Cable or telephone wire with VDSL. Or in one case where she only has a 6M ADSL she just flat out cut the services and didn't want fibre's hassle. She is mostly on Mobile Phone anyway and her unlimited 4G plans is fast enough for what she needs. The only time she needs WiFi is when she is doing IOS update and that could be done in Office. And when the times Massive MIMO, 5G NG comes with high increase in capacity and speed. I can only imagine there will be more doing just that.

A lot of times we nerds, geeks, tech savvy enthusiast just wanted faster speed, cheaper, better tech whatever. Fibre allow us going to 10Gbps! ( Yes there are 10Gbps Internet services to Home ), without actually asking if or do the many user cares. Last mile is a hard problem, and I wish more thoughts will be put in design and installation parts.

Luckily we have people working on TerabitDSL, with spaces in between copper wires and using Waveguide-mode that is similar to use of millimeter-wave transmissions in 5G. [1]

[1] https://www.assia-inc.com/terabit-dsl/

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#37

Post by dodobdob167 »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #12

In the UK, the central network is fibre but the "last mile" from the exchange to home is always copper. The "last mile" can turn into 2+ miles if you're unlucky. UK ISPs sell various different speeds including 'fibre' at the high end. However it's never true fibre and you'll have copper cable no matter the package you pick. I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part w…

I live in the UK and have fttp from BT, there's an optical terminator in my looking room.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#38

Post by Rjevski »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #19
signal11 wrote: post #6

> The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The reason the UK is on a mix of copper and fiber is because the entrenched monopoly, BT, didn't think fiber to the home (FTTH) was worth investing in. To protect their investment in their existing copper network, the…

Every home I have lived in for the past 10 years or so has had Virgin fibre to the home. BT don't have the monopoly at all, they just have poor infrastructure and are the defacto that most people choose. Our unit didn't have a direct fibre connection when we took the lease, we rang Virgin and they used infill money to lay a fibre cable to all the units on the trading estate at no cost to us other than the initial £20…

Are you sure it's actually fibre? Or is it their bullshit coax cable (HFC) they mis-sell as "fibre"?

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#39

Post by matthewmacleod »

It would definitely be really nice if the UK rolled out comprehensive fibre connections – it seems like a good long-term investment for as many homes as possible to have a direct FTTP service.

At present domestic internet connections using DSL top out at 76MBps – and that's if you live on top of the cabinet. Aside from niche providers, the only other high-speed network is Virgin, which runs a HFC network at up to 350MBps (which, to be fair, is pretty cost-effective and widely available).

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#40

Post by arethuza »

rwnspace wrote: post #17
arethuza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying a house in a rural area is a nightmare as you don't really know in advance what speed you will get and the speeds quoted on sites like Rightmove are for entire postcodes - not the property in question. We bought a house last year in a rural area in Scotland - not far from Edinburgh and were appalled at the broadband options. We get 20Mbps down and 1 up which is enough for most things (barely) but that was one…

https://www.dslchecker.bt.com/ About as accurate as you'll ever get.

Doesn't work terribly well for new houses though!

Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.

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