UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds • Hacker News Board

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#61

Post by pjc50 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 3:48 PM UTC

yankcrime wrote: post #26

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…

Bogons[0] are involved in a great project to do something about this - check out Balquhidder Community Broadband[1]. Bogons' Twitter[2] also has some fantastic updates about their work to lay fibre and provide connectivity to a few of these remote Scottish areas. [0] http://www.bogons.net [1] http://balquhidder.net [2] https://twitter.com/BogonsNet

That's a fascinating read, thanks!

I see they're based here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-275016... in yet another disused nuclear bunker.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#62

Post by arethuza » Wed, May 23, 2018, 3:49 PM UTC

yankcrime wrote: post #26

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…

Bogons[0] are involved in a great project to do something about this - check out Balquhidder Community Broadband[1]. Bogons' Twitter[2] also has some fantastic updates about their work to lay fibre and provide connectivity to a few of these remote Scottish areas. [0] http://www.bogons.net [1] http://balquhidder.net [2] https://twitter.com/BogonsNet

There are some interesting providers in the area e.g. Fibrecast:

https://www.fibrecast.uk/

Unfortunately the area we live isn't serviced by them - but they were very good at checking availability!

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#63

Post by dodobdob167 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 3:58 PM UTC

Blackstone4 wrote: post #21

wafflebear wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are thinking of ADSL, which is limited to 24mpbs. BT does sell VDSL as fibre, but usually the distance of copper connection is only out to the street.

I think you're right. I spoke to the guys at Plusnet and they said it was fibre to the cabinet and no matter what package I picked it was copper to my house. With that in mind, I thought they were effectively limiting your bandwidth at the cabinet based on your package. From the plusnet page: > Speeds are available as follows: > Average download speeds of 36Mb† or 66Mb† for Fibre (FTTC) enabled areas depending on the…

Adsl is a different beast indeed. It's physically limited because the frequency that it uses and the encoding that was possible or practical in the 90's can't carry more than 24. Vdsl is indeed throttled at the edge router into two products, basically the lower frequency components provide the lower speed product and propagate better over longer lines.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#64

Post by shocks » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:01 PM UTC

JonoW wrote: post #22

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…

It's not even rural areas that suck, I'm in zone 4 London, so pretty suburban, and I get about 7Mbps down/0.5Mbps up! The FTTC roll-out said it was planned for my cabinet, not just says it's not.

I'm in zone 4 too and I get 200Mbps. I could pay for more, and I'd probably get it, but 200Mbps is fine.

I guess it's just a dice roll. /shrug

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#65

Post by sigstoat » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

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?

ubiquiti is the least expensive stuff that actually works.

edgerouter x https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-...

ap-ac-lr https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B0...

total up to $152 at the moment. the wire cutter's suggestion for best router/access point is a $180 netgear product. and based on my prior experience, the netgear hardware won't last more than 12 months.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#66

Post by signal11 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

> everyone sells DSL as "fibre" ... This also makes it much harder for companies that sell real fibre.

Great point. FTTC is sold as a "fibre" product when it's not, really. But customers are wising up. Those that don't live right next to the cabinet know there's a difference. Also, fiber is cheaper to deliver -- e.g. in a pure-fiber setup one can get 1Gbps up and down for around £30 a month, which is a massive win compared to pricing for FTTC which has to factor in the cost of maintaining the legacy copper network.

Funnily, BT's sales team assured me multiple times that G.Fast was a fibre product and that I should "upgrade" to it (I have FTTH).

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#67

Post by tialaramex » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #40

rwnspace wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

House builders are told (unless they're literally building just one or two homes) to call BT at the start. For any large site, or where it's no trouble anyway, BT will run fibre to the new builds for IIRC free, the builder needs to make sure there are the right ducts etcetera in the ground, then a van shows up and blows fibre.

But guess how many people in house building remember to do that?

So instead they have the houses mostly finished and the sparky asks OK where do these phone points connect to? So that's when BT is called. And then BT will shrug and say you can pay our normal fee, you get copper cables, we can't promise how good the Internet service will be.

The part that's sad is people will stand there, talking to a sales person about their £350k house, checking things on their phone, and not think to ask - wait, this does have high speed internet - right? You aren't trying to sell me a brand new house that lacks Internet access are you?

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#68

Post by signal11 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #10

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…

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…

There are specialist ISPs like Gigaclear who have connected up villages in Oxfordshire, for example[1,2]. I believe the model is you get a bunch of families to commit to the service and they deliver fiber to your community, if it's within their service area.

Deploying fiber can be done in a fairly low-impact way and as long as planners don't put up roadblocks, deploying fiber to remote locations isn't a massive challenge, as a number of rural deployments demonstrate.

[1] https://www.gigaclear.com/about/case-studies-testimonials/ [2] https://www.gigaclear.com/fastershire-rollout-schedule/

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#69

Post by signal11 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:28 PM UTC

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.

This is true, but there are a number of data errors in BT's own inventory, so you will need to take this with a pinch of salt. For instance, according to this (and therefore in BT's internal systems as well) I am eligible for G.Fast -- I am not.

Re: UK ISPs have to stop lying about broadband speeds

#70

Post by signal11 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #67

arethuza wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work terribly well for new houses though! Was amazed to see quite expensive new houses (£500K+) with no access to broadband available.

House builders are told (unless they're literally building just one or two homes) to call BT at the start. For any large site, or where it's no trouble anyway, BT will run fibre to the new builds for IIRC free, the builder needs to make sure there are the right ducts etcetera in the ground, then a van shows up and blows fibre. But guess how many people in house building remember to do that? So instead they have the h…

One way councils can force the issue is to deny planning permission unless builders can show they've engaged a telecoms company (doesn't have to be BT, could be Virgin or Gigaclear or Cityfibre). After all, we don't accept houses built without electricity and water. Why should we accept houses with subpar connectivity?