Any body knows how it works. We've just had our exchange upgraded to it and I'm thinking about getting it as we are quite heavy users of the Internet with music streaming, two children Xboxingand general net surfing. On a good day I'm getting about 6mbps and the last six months I've had a very stable connection, it used to drop out so much. Now my questions are will I see better speeds or is it a myth? Do they feed me a fibre optic cable from the exchange or is the exchange is fibre optic and then it does it's last bit off journey down the old fashioned copper cable which to me defeats the object?
yes it's quick they replace the copper wire to your house with a round tube (about the same sized) then blow fibre optic down this tube and take the fibre optic all the way into the house up to the first master phone point
Not sure how it works, but if you're quite a heavy user, and find that when you're streaming, things tend to pause for buffering quite a lot, then you'll definitely see an improvement. We're with Virgin Cable and therefore have Fibre Optic Broadband, they recently upgraded us to 20mb and buffering while watching iplayer/4OD/demand5/itv player now seems to be a thing of the past. SKype conversations with my sister in Florida are now only disrupted by the fact that she has a rubbish internet connection. I did a speed test and we're getting 18mbps pretty consistently.
As i deal with fibre and copper cable all day at work i do know a bit about this.....as i discussed with virgin media when they upgraded mine, basically it all depends on the amount of fibre (and quality) they use, our house for example is about 500 yards from the router in our street and god knows how far from the exchange...... whatever they like to tell you then you need to realise the data transfer speed of fibre is of course loads faster than copper but at the end of the day it's like a pop bottle - the neck is thin and the body is wide - once it hits the copper it will slow down and you'll always be limited to the speed copper cable can take - copper cable goes up in catagories (currently Cat 6 is the popular install speed (we sell limited cat 7 but i doubt it is much quicker as it isn't moving much) and it also depends if it's pure copper cable or (like some cheap cabling) ali coated copper..... at the end of the day the speed from the exchange will be turned up and whizz along the fibre but somewhere it will slow down....you pay your money and take your choice as the virgin guy said to me - it's not many people who understand or work with cable - it's a good sales gimmik!
BT Infinity based solutions usually run fibre to a green cabinet in the street and then it attaches to the copper phone lines that run into your house. They can can faster and more reliable speeds than traditional ADSL because the copper is much shorter. They still call it fibre optic though. Virgin runs fibre to your house, the quality and customer service is variable from what I can understand, Virgin also runs their TV services over this so no satellite dish is required. I think the buzzword acronyms if you want to do some googling are FTTC = fibre to the cabinet FTTP = fibre to the premises
I think virgin are the only company to offer fibre to the house installs but don't let that make the decision for you. I'm with sky fibre and currently get 32mb steady. That is fibre to the cabinet (the green box on the side of the road) then copper from there to my house. Copper can handle 100mb. But the issue with copper is it tends to suffer from outside interference. The further from the exchange (if your on standard broadband)/cabinet the more speed you'll loose. If virgin or BT hasn't installed fibre in your area yet then you won't get fibre from any other company, they rent the lines from the two company's. Another mis-sale which I think should be changed is the 'Meg' bit they advertise. The ads are talking megabits not megabytes. A standard mp3 track is 3Mb (megabytes) my connection, for example is 32mb (megabits) there is 1024 mb to a mB. So my connection can download a track at 3.2Mb a second. Technically a song a second. Not, as you would assume, 10 songs a second. It's miss-selling as it make you think your getting a faster connection than you really are. I could go on all day. Ask if you need more advice.
I'm with sky, so am assuming that it's will be to the green box a few hundred meters down the road. What makes me reluctant (thinking if its not broken dont play with it) is that after moaning for years and I mean years I've got a stable connection after having numerous BT engineers out to try and diagnose the faults. Every time the phone rang the Internet cut out and the the phone had a rubbish line. They always insisted that the exchange was not at fault. They came out and fitted a socket in the wall that gives me a separate adsl line and phone line. Then suprise suprise six months ago they upgraded our exchange the fault disappears. Where will the speed stop it seems to be getting quicker and quicker, I can remember good old dial up and how slow that was.
forget what the cable is made of the important issue is that (certainly where i am) virgin cable doesn't go anywhere near BT's flakey RADIUS server setup
Are you all sure about how far the fibre goes ?? I'm am a virgin customer and have once or twice opened up the little brown junction box on the outside of this house and the one we had in Luton, and both had cooper running into them. So this says to me its only fibre the the green box in the street same a BT are doing. Coming into the brown box is one cable for phone line and another for tv/internet which goes into a splitter. It is the tv/internet connection I have changed in the past as I have moved where I have my main router. Cable is the way whether with BT or Virgin.
ah no in Chelmsford United Artists cabled the town in the 90s and everything fibre goes back directly to a hub in Basildump and then straight off to Telehouse in Docklands. you may well have virgin ADSL which like most ADSL is just someone else reselling bits of BT's bandwidth
No its cable as we had it installed back in the late 80's (i think) company was Diamond Cable Nottingham then NTL took over and Virgin. Maybe with the newer installations the fibre does go to the house but it don't here.
Test results http://www.speedtest.net/ http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/ And again with the first one bit better
If it's stable and you are getting good speed from your current setup - why change / pay more? I live in the sticks and the max I can get is 6mbits down but that is fine for me. When it does increase I'll probably look to stick with the speed I have but get a cheaper subscription. If you can stream successfully (which will have a lot to do with site being accessed, capacity of their hosting and contention in your area) - what is the extra bandwidth for?
I swapped to BT infinity and was sort of impressed but it wasn't as fast as I expected. A bloke in the local Apple store suggested this was because I was using wifi and the BT supplied router isn't very good. I don't use it anymore and have now put an AirPort Extreme in its place. Result is super fast wifi that is really stable. if you want max speed I think you need wired connection not wifi though.
