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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

#51

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

We don't have Virgin on this premises here in London and the mobile phone signal is so bad it's barely usable at all.

But I have to say that BT has been a very reliable ISP and the speeds are OK (in spite of being copper) with the exception of Sunday evenings.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#52

Post by matthewmacleod »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #46
matthewmacleod wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really true? What's stopping alternative companies from rolling out fibre services, beyond the cost barriers?

The contract that BT signed with the government for all the funding granting it a duopoly with Virgin, where Virgin isn't going to increase the cable network at all. That combined with the wayleave issues at a local council level being waved just for them means that the preferred rollout partner in BT gets all the money, all the profits from it and has all the access. About the only nationwide competition that is eve…

That totally sucks. Someone should really force a lawsuit on the issue.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#53

Post by Rjevski »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #42
Rjevski wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a bit weird that there hasn't been a decision about the mis-selling of "fibre" connections in the UK. Virgin's network is pretty great if you're not in an oversubscribed area, but it just seems weird to bill it as "fiber". To be fair though, DOCSIS 3.1 can push 10GB through coax so it's not all bad.

Yeah, so it's not fibre, and should not be sold as such. Not saying HFC is bad (it's actually an awesome way of reusing a deprecated cable TV network), but it's not fibre.

HFC for example is a shared medium across the entire neighbourhood, and in fact if you get root access on your modem and run tcpdump on the HFC interface you may see everyone else's packets as well - there's optional encryption built into DOCSIS but I've never seen it enabled.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#54

Post by tialaramex »

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…

Yup. To invoke the inevitable car analogy, if your problem is it takes too long to get to 40mph from a standing start at the lights, upgrading from 200mph to 250mph top speed won't necessarily help. Even more so if the problem is sometimes it won't start on a cold morning or there aren't enough seats.

The pro-fibre lobby is convinced that somehow 1Gbps will enable an as yet undetermined application and countries where people have 40Mbps will get left behind. But the application doesn't exist. I had 1Gbps for several years, now I have 40Mbps. It's not just that I don't miss it, I don't even notice. I could easily afford faster, but I could also easily afford a giant cardboard Han Solo, and I didn't buy that either.

Reliability matters, but in practice copper reliability isn't bad enough to be a significant factor compared to consumer gear.

Latency matters, but most of the work needed there is in consumer gear, not in the last mile or elsewhere in ISP networks.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#55

Post by antihero »

Rjevski wrote: post #3

Not sure if that's going to change something. The main problem was never peak-time congestion (I've never experienced it personally), it's just the fact that 1) the infrastructure is shit and 2) everyone sells DSL as "fibre". The infrastructure is a mess. Unless you've got actual fibre to the home, you're stuck with DSL, aka rust. The problem is that it's impossible to tell just how rusty it is without subscribing to…

Does DOCSIS3 count as DSL?

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#56

Post by LiquidFlux »

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…

Could you recommend modem / router equivalents ( whichever applies to replacing ISP supplied equivalent, I'm assuming both? ) at a few different price brackets?

Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#57

Post by pjc50 »

ksec wrote: post #36
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 in…

> Copper Ethernet RJ45 is the best

Not to be That Guy, but RJ45 is a plug standard; normal ethernet cable is "cat5" or "cat6", and normal 10/100/1000 Ethernet is limited to just 100 meters. Which is completely useless given the average cabinet distances in the UK.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#58

Post by oicie0uD »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #24
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…

Does it matter though? If the ISP is responsible for the "last mile", does it matter if they screw up the last meter of it? It's one thing if customer supplied boxes are causing problems in the last meter, but if the last mile is end to end controlled by the ISP, and they still screw it up, does it matter what meter is the problem? The only benefit I see here is that a confident/educated customer could implement the…

You are paying for that ISP-supplied router, either explicitly as an item in your bill or implicitly factored into the overall cost. People will either go with the cheapest option if there are any options at all or the ISP will simply save costs to do the minimum necessary to provide internet access.

And of course those routers are crap and only do the bare minimum.

For example they often have comically bad firewalls/NATs that can overflow their state tables when you do any P2P, run your own DNS resolver or run a home server through dynamic DNS.

And then there's buffer bloat.

A custom router with OpenWRT and enough RAM will cope with those use-cases and will offer all the nice linux traffic shaping plugins like fq_codel and cake.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#59

Post by LeonM »

LiquidFlux wrote: post #56
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…

Could you recommend modem / router equivalents ( whichever applies to replacing ISP supplied equivalent, I'm assuming both? ) at a few different price brackets? Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?

Well, in my case, I use a Edgerouter-X with an SFP module that connects directly to my fiber line. Remember, a fibre lines does not even require a modem. I don't have experience with DSL equipment. The equipment my ISP send me (it's still in the box) came with a 'fiber modem', which is a fiber-to-ethernet converter, and a no-name brand router with build-in wifi. The firmware on it is a custom branded build of 3 years old, and I don't expect they ever released a security update for it (KRACK attack, anyone?).

For wireless connectivity I use a Unify AC pro, which has proved highly reliable. See [0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unif...

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#60

Post by Lio »

oldcynic wrote: post #30
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…

If only that were true. The Thatcher Government stopped BT's already running rollout of FTTH in 1990. That gave us cable competition from Blueyonder who did bugger all and a BT regulated against playing in that space any more. Hell Hastings and around Martlesham Heath (OK that doesn't really count) had FTTH in the mid 80s. If BT had been allowed their way it'd be all FTTH by now. Regulation pushed a lot of the subseq…

This. BT didn't ignore FTTH because they thought it was a bad technology. BT invented _alot_ of technology that makes fibre deployments world wide cheap enough to be feasible, including fibre jetting.

They didn't role it out because first of all they were barred from selling TV over fibre in the late 80s early 90s in favour of foreign cable companies. Those cable companies eventually merged to form Virgin Media.

Later BT opted for cheaper VDSL technology because it wasn't clear they would be allow to profit (due to wholesale price regulation) from FTTH investment. The expensive bit of deploying FTTH is in "holes and poles". i.e. digging up roads.

None of the other UK players want to invest in FTTH outside of major cities and only BT is legally compelled to provide any form of broadband nationally at all. Firms like CityFibre just want to cream off the most profitable areas of the country and kill off cross-subsidising the rest.

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