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England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#171
post #119

Just more admin fees and paperwork to build a building, making them more expensive. Make 30cm insulation a requirement so we don't pay £2000 per year for electric heating. I asked my property management company if they would, eghm, _consider_ improving external insulation, they responded they have no such legal requirements, so they won't. We pay 4x more for heating and warm water than in 2018, and have it colder and…

Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house where I'm paying £600-800 a month for the heating right now.

For the record, I'd rather spend that on heating than live under the absolute racket of London leasehold ever again.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) I mean, yeah, I guess normally a 10x increase is deemed a good thing and could be considered "vastly higher". Who wouldn't be impressed with a 10x bump in pay? However, 100mbps is still tragically low. Having anything less than full bandwidth up/down on a fiber line is just cheating the user artificially. Being fiber, I could see offering a cheaper m…

Comcast often isn't FTTP, its is usually coax to the home. There are some services they do with FTTP, such as their 2Gbit service, but most installs are coax.

>but most installs are coax.

Good gawd! It's like cable is in their DNA and they invested heavily in a cable manufacturing company and are trying to keep it alive /s

also, is it pushing the limits of marketing to say you have a fiber connection if the cable coming into your home is actually coax?

edit: just to clarify, is it really fiber if the demarc isn't in/on your house? I get running fiber to the home to a device that then turns that into coax to run to the modem of choice for the vendor. i have fiber to fiber so the demarc is sitting right being my desk with a 6' cat6 cable from it to the modem. if your advertised fiber service brings fiber over long haul to the neighborhood but then breaks that out into standard coax for last mile delivery, is that still a fiber connection?

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#173
post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

I moved from the Bay Area to a rural place in the southeast. It is a mystery how I am able to get 10Gbps fiber here from not only AT&T but also the local utility company, whereas in Redwood City my option was basically only Comcast with a slow upload cap.

It’s not a “mystery.” California makes it expensive and difficult to build infrastructure. That’s why Google Fiber started out in places like Kansas City. I live in a historically red county in the Verizon footprint. I have two fiber lines into my house, one from Verizon and one from Comcast. I get 6 gbps service from Comcast. It’s expensive ($300/month, compared to 10 gig for $300 in Chattanooga). But it’s not even an option in most of Silicon Valley.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street". In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt ne…

Hyperoptic we're great. I could pay £5/month for a static IPv4 so I wasn't stuck behind CGNAT, their IPv6 worked great and I could use my own network equipment and they're provide the configs; though I hear they're less forthcoming with that info for people running not-ISP hardware these days. First monthly contract I've parted ways with reluctantly (I moved home). I got the first year free from one-month discounts b…

I still haven't figure out how to get IPv6 with hyperoptic with my own router. Other than that, I second, good service.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street". In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt ne…

It may be in a duct, but occasionally the manholes are in really awkward locations - like in the middle of an extremely busy road. I've been waiting for symmetric fibre for a year, and they're trying to install it, but getting the permission to close the road to lift up the manhole is proving to be a challenge.

Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full of blockages, collapsed ducts etc.

Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#176
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperoptic we're great. I could pay £5/month for a static IPv4 so I wasn't stuck behind CGNAT, their IPv6 worked great and I could use my own network equipment and they're provide the configs; though I hear they're less forthcoming with that info for people running not-ISP hardware these days. First monthly contract I've parted ways with reluctantly (I moved home). I got the first year free from one-month discounts b…

I still haven't figure out how to get IPv6 with hyperoptic with my own router. Other than that, I second, good service.

Don’t bother. Their IPv6 setup is notoriously broken. They have a number of IPv6 misconfiguration in their core switches which makes using IPv6 with your own hardware almost impossible.

Unfortunately it seems they’ve also let go of all their good network admin. It used to be possible to find someone at Hyperoptic capable of investigating and fixing these issues, but no more.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a really bad idea to mandate that download be no higher than upload. Would just result in few/no plans with high down bandwidth.

but how does a fiber connection even get affected by a limited upload? it's just an artificial limit in order to squeeze larger monthly fees from the user. it's not like extra gear/equipment is needed to give full speed in both directions.

Passive optical networks are usually assymetric at hardware level

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#178
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperoptic we're great. I could pay £5/month for a static IPv4 so I wasn't stuck behind CGNAT, their IPv6 worked great and I could use my own network equipment and they're provide the configs; though I hear they're less forthcoming with that info for people running not-ISP hardware these days. First monthly contract I've parted ways with reluctantly (I moved home). I got the first year free from one-month discounts b…

I still haven't figure out how to get IPv6 with hyperoptic with my own router. Other than that, I second, good service.

I was using a Uniquiti EdgeRouter and it was fairly trivial, then I switched to a pfSense box and it was a little harder but not much.

The hard part is that you have to clone the UDID (I think that was the value, sorry don't quite remember now), they used to allow any hardware to join the network but that's no longer the case; so you have the clone the value from the hardware they provide you with.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#179

Does this mean fiber or will cable be an option as well?

The amended regulations (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/984/schedule/made) refer to a requirement for connection to a "gigabit-capable public electronic communications network". And a "public electronic communications network" is defined in the Communications Act 2003 as "an electronic communications network provided wholly or mainly for the purpose of making electronic communications services available to members of the public".

So I expect that either type of service meeting the requirement on speed would be acceptable.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#180
post #32

How i understand is is Gigabit is two parts: the first part is your home, router, etc supporting the connection speeds. The other is the infrastructure to deliver the gigabit to your home. I can see a regulation that mandates that you wire any new residences up so they can support gigabit, but how is this going to work if the municipality / ISP does not offer it? Not sure about what Gigabit rollout in the UK looks li…

We don't have region/geo locked or infrastructure locked providers. If you have fibre to your home then any supplier in the UK that supports it can be your ISP. Caveat: fibre is telco infrastructure and is not limited, cable can still be limited ie only virgin media on virgin cable infra

Not quite true. Openreach (BT) is regulated and required to let anyone offer service over their network.

Any other provider that lays their own fibre is free to offer only their own ISP service. I don't have access to FTTP via OpenReach, but can get it from one other provider (CommunityFibre).

If another fibre provider ever becomes dominant enough they might well also end up regulated more tightly, but that's not the case for the time being

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