Guaranteed 10mbps broadband for Britain - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:10:47 pm
content: They are going guarantee broadband at 10mbps in Britain.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7814115/Half-UK-homes-ultrafast-broadband-155-000-decent-connection.htmlRead URL: ultrafast, decent broadband.QuoteA right to broadband sounds great but shouldn't they be aiming higher than 10mbps?QuoteI wouldn't call 30mbps ideal.Also for 10mbps jobsworth of effort in delivering it in such areas I think whether reliability would be put into question.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:17:12 pm
content: I don't see where they're calling 30Mbps ideal, however that's what I have and I've found it to be more than adequate for everything I've ever wanted to do.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:18:19 pm
content: 10 mbps is really slow: last time I had such a slow connection was some 22 years ago. It took a long time to download a 300 bytes file.10 Mbps is not that bad.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:38:26 pm
content: Sounds like they are taking a page out of Australia's National Broadband Network. We have a guaranteed downstream sync speed of 25 Mbps, anything higher than that is a lottery.People are happy to pay more for higher speeds but the infrastructure in many places is just incapable of it. For example, here I'm stuck at ~38 Mbps down/9 Mbps up and there is nothing I can do to make it any better. My only option would be to pay for my own fibre to be installed which would cost many tens of thousands of dollars.I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering 4G/LTE services as a replacement for my home internet connection.

author: Syntax Error
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:41:52 pm
content: The British Government does dial-up speed thinking.I'd sue if myuploadspeed went down to 10 meg. Running here at a respectable 62/18, but we do live close to the 'green box' in the street. It's copper to the box, then fibre to the exchange. Recently I was connected to a 4G LTE router (possibly a Netgear Nighthawk M1) with line-of-sight to the tower, that reported 300 meg. Who needs wires?

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 09:44:51 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on December 22, 2019, 09:38:26 pmIMHO 4G/5G is going to kill fibre internet at some point in the near future. It is much more cost effective compared to bringing a fibre to every home / building.I've already had some first hand experience with 3G in Indonesia about 8 years ago. Over there 3G works way better than wired internet due to the poor telephone infrastructure which makes having ADSL reach decent speeds nearly impossible. And at that time ADSL was extremely expensive as well.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 10:22:15 pm
content: Wireless internet delivery always seemed like such a waste of valuable spectrum to me. I'll take wires any day and save the precious wireless bandwidth for applications where a wire is not practical. My mobile phone internet slows to a crawl anywhere with a high density of people using it, such as on the bus or in a public space.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 10:27:20 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on December 22, 2019, 10:22:15 pmJust add more bandwidth... And what is valuable about frequency spectra? There is lots of it anyway and the old GSM bands and digital terrestrial TV are being repurposed. Wireless is already cheaper compared to wired especially looking at the amount of bandwidth. Pulling fibre to each home is more expensive compared to putting up one cell tower which serves a couple of dozens of homes.

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:08:23 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 22, 2019, 10:27:20 pm4G/5G was dog slow and unusable slow night / weekends.I've got Fiber to the home with a 900Mbs/400Mbps plan which was installed and paid for under a government intuitive. Fiber on the street with copper to the premises is a good compromise between fiber to the home and 5G. I think likely this will be the direction at least in cities / suberbian. Rural 4G/5G makes sense since the infrastructures not there and the cost will never be recovered to put fiber down every rural road.

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:11:08 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on December 22, 2019, 09:17:12 pmThe BBC streams 4k video at 40Mbps, so 30Mbps is no longer sufficient for the kinds of basic uses people expect from their internet connexions.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:12:32 pm
content: We all need understand the physical makeup of our wired connections and the HW and connection types used.Typically your 'last mile' of copper is from a local cabinet which may or may not have a fast backhaul connection.Then there might be old HW in your local cabinet that only supports an early DSL protocol so while our modem might support some high speed version of DSL your copper connection quality and the cabinet HW in use dictates your 'last mile' connection speed.Then the cabinet HW performance is dictated by the Telco's backhaul physical HW be it copper, the DSL HW or fiber.Cellular data connections are affected in similar ways by their backhaul connection type beit microwave or fiber but mostly by the cellular providers data connection policy of limiting the # of dedicated data connections to preserve their existing customers connection quality (speed) or in many cases unlimited connections so that all suffer badly at peak data demand times.10MBps is misleading as it could be copper DSL theoretical speeds to your local cabinet OR guaranteed data download speeds although both can still be impacted in times of peak data demands.One must remember these claims when made to the media are little better than BS without qualification of the type of HW that will provide such a service.

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:27:36 pm
content: Quote from: tautech on December 22, 2019, 11:12:32 pmIn some markets there a shift away from fiber to the home to instead put Fiber down the street and then connect homes to fiber access points significantly closer to the home thereby significantly reducing the cooper to a minimum. This is not the same as an ADSL connection back to the exchange. It uses the existing cooper to the street rather than replacing it with fiber but it still requires that fiber is installed along the street.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:30:28 pm
content: Quote from: coppice on December 22, 2019, 11:11:08 pmI guess it depends on what you're trying to do. I have nothing to display 4k video and thus have never had any interest in streaming it. Looking at 4k TVs in the store I can only barely perceive a difference compared to 1080p and only when when I stand closer than I would normally sit. 4K TV streaming is IMHO a huge waste of bandwidth, even 1080p is often compromised at the source by over-compression.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:38:20 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 22, 2019, 10:27:20 pmYou can't "just add more" beyond a point, the airwaves are a finite resource. Slices of spectra sell for many Billions of dollars and there is very little of it that is truly unused. Every time you repurpose spectrum you turn millions or billions of working devices into scrap. I never suggested that pulling fiber to each home is the way to go, I think the sensible approach is to pull fiber to neighborhoods and then do the last few blocks to a mile or so in copper. Point to point microwave links are another good option for connecting more isolated neighborhoods. We've already got to run electricity, plumbing, sewer, etc so a data cable is not really a big deal to have as well. A huge majority of the USA already has coax for cable TV so the infrastructure is already largely in place here. Not sure about other areas.It's another topic entirely but I personally believe the airwaves belong to everyone and should not be offered for permanent sale to any commercial entity. They should be public property that is leased to the licensed users.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:44:10 pm
content: Quote from: blacksheeplogic on December 22, 2019, 11:27:36 pmThat's all fine if you live in a city but for the rural populations around cities I can assure you reality is vastly different.QuoteMaybe you don't understand rural and urban fringe Telco 'exchanges' are supported by a number of mostly copper connected remote cabinets that each qualify as local exchanges. Voice is converted to a Telco VOIP protocol and DSL data can also be converted to different protocols just for the backhaul to the 'district' exchange.QuoteYes, these are the typical upgrades that are happening slowly in NZ, fiber is rolled out to local cabinets but usually only for Telco backhaul purposes where data and voice use the same fiber. Sometimes at the whim of Telcos or if there is sufficient demand additional fiber is added to the ducts to allow for individual consumer fiber connections.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 22, 2019, 11:56:58 pm
content: You can't "guarantee" a certain speed except maybe to the local exchange, and of course all bets are off if you're trying to communicate with a server halfway around the world.I have 8M/512K down/up and never thought it wasn't enough. I know someone in Japan with a 1Gbps(!) connection but it never gets anywhere near that speed, except to very close sites in the country.

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 12:07:43 am
content: Quote from: tautech on December 22, 2019, 11:44:10 pmNo, that's not what I'm refereeing to at all. I'm commenting on putting fiber infrastructure in place. Where I live fiber was taken into the home, the cheaper option being looked at in some markets where fiber into the home was looked at is now to only doing the fiber down the street and connecting homes to this on the street. This is quite different to using the existing cooper back to telco's connection point where your limited based on how far away you are.This is still essentially fiber to the home, except your not including the cost of taking the fiber from the street into the home.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 12:19:55 am
content: Quote from: amyk on December 22, 2019, 11:56:58 pmSpeed is entirely relative to the Telcos HW and demand.We had a copper connection ~1km to our local cabinet that with backhaul copper and old DSL HW could supply us with 1.7MBps in the middle of the night. Our modern modem capable of 20+MBps reported a copper link speed of some 6.5 MBps yet for all practical daytime purpose connection speed rarely exceeded 500KBps. Peak times were measured in the 10's of KBps !I researched DSL connection problems for years and even set up a local action group to have our data service upgraded which is only being addressed now some 4 years later.Long gone to a 10km P-P microwave link and the Telcos can stick their copper where the sun don't shine.Quote from: blacksheeplogic on December 23, 2019, 12:07:43 amOK yep, my buddy member hendorog has not long had fiber to his house in the North Shore and the bugger sent me a speed test better than 1GBps !

author: blacksheeplogic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 12:40:24 am
content: Quote from: tautech on December 23, 2019, 12:19:55 amI would pay for that, however the best Spark offered me was 900Mbs/400Mbps but I'm right on the verge of 1Gbps (speed test to Auckland sever).My cost was a 1Yr contract, the provider installed Fiber into the home and installed a temporary connection at the post. The permanent connection occurred 18 months latter (required several days of work on the street). If you have the option to get it installed do it. There's no way we could have paid this and once the work was done others on the street have also had fiber installed. At some point I assume people will have to pay a lot more of the install cost but right now the only cost is the 1yr contract.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 12:44:05 am
content: How come the idea of broadband over power line hasn't really taken off? I understand it has EMI issues with above ground lines, but what about using it just on underground lines?

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 12:54:07 am
content: Quote from: james_s on December 22, 2019, 11:38:20 pmCopper doesn't cut it in this day and age. ADSL was already stretching the limit (literally). For modern internet speeds you'll need at least fiber. If you are going to install new copper then it is outdated before you start installing it. Remember current applications are streaming high resolution video over internet infrastructure and demand for bandwidth will only increase.Old devices becoming obsolete is just tough luck. Last year the old digital TV frequencies got repurposed over here so I had the choice between upgrading to new decoders or going for TV over internet (well, if it was entirely up to me I would have cancelled the TV subscription). However the old decoders where already over 15 years old so they did serve their purpose.You also need to realise that the range of (for example) LTE is very low so the same frequency band can be used many times over a large area. All in all the required frequency spectrum is not that large.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 06:08:28 am
content: I don't think 10Mbit is all that unreasonable.Okay sure you might not be streaming multiple videos in nice quality on that but for using it as internet for even multiple users its perfectly fine. It will load webpages pretty much as fast as a lot of web servers are willing to serve them to you, it will also download a multiple GB file in a reasonable enough time to be useful. Sure it might not be all you would ever want from internet, but id certainly take it over having to use 3G/4G/LTE or whatever mobile internet.10Mbit is also about the most you can expect to reliably fit trough a old phone line using ADSL. Unfortunately that is what most homes have installed so the only wire they can reasonably get internet trough. Yes powerline networking is also a thing but its already difficult getting lots of speed trough a phone line designed to carry signals, power lines are even worse, so this sort of power line networking thing only really works over small distances(like between two electrical outlets in the same house)Yes 4G/LTE cellular networks do seam like a pretty good solution since they can provide some pretty impressive speeds. But its not a solution that scales very well. There is a good reason why cellular providers have data caps in the 10s of GB while ADSL/DSL/fiber has no data caps at all. While your LTE modem might be capable of tons of bandwith the poor cell tower has to handle many many of these LTE modems at the same time on the same spectrum. To make matters worse some modems don't have a 100m line of sight to the tower, instead they are 2km away behind a bunch of buildings, the tower has to be nice to them and speak LOUD and slooooowly at a lower bitrate so that they can hear it. This results in perhaps 1/100 the advertised speed for that LTE user while the tower is wasting lots of time on its valuable radio channel by having to speak slowly enough for those unlucky LTE modems to hear it. All of this means that the speed of these cellular internet connections can be really really variable going from "Yay i can watch 5 full HD video streams" to "Why the hell is this website taking 15 seconds to load". It gets even worse when you put a lot of people in one area like a large trade show or convention, cellphones genuinely have a hard time working at all in those places due to the poor overworked cell towers.I have a 200Mbit fiber connection and i can utilize it to 100% for 24/7 and my ISP won't mind at all, so could every house in my whole street and it will keep working at full speed with rock solid 2ms ping times and no dropped packets. Similar can be done with DOCSIS 3.0 DSL that we used to have before over copper coax (Yes it can also do 1Gbit over DSL). Try doing that stress test on a local LTE network and see how it goes.Oh and i only really use all of that 200Mbit for maybe 1% of the time. If i did use 200Mbit of bandwidth for one week i would have downloaded 15 000 GB of data. I don't even have that much harddrive space in the entire house put together.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 06:18:49 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 23, 2019, 12:54:07 amGigabit ethernet is copper, DOCSIS (coax) is copper. I'm not talking about POTS.My wireless experience overall has been mediocre at best. I'll take a proper wire or fiber over land any day, hands down.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 07:28:46 am
content: The problem is that 10 Mbit/s internet today also comes with >100 ms latency due to bit error correction in the copper medium modulation.Even coax has a minimum latency due to error correction on both sides.4G is even worse, especially when you're in a busy environment. And it's expensive due to the equipment, maintenance and the temporary operating license.Compared to fiber, which has negligible delay, it is superior to all other technologies out there. And maintenance free, until some idiot slices it with his digger. But you don't pay the repair, the idiot will.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 08:03:42 am
content: Quote from: Jeroen3 on December 23, 2019, 07:28:46 amMy 5 GHz microwave connection is not too bad giving ping times as low as 6ms to the data centers locally however it's traffic sensitive.QuoteNot entirely true when project managers aren't aware of all buried services and say it's safe to dig.Helping a mate out one day when he put a 300mm digger based auger right through a local company's fiber LAN.That was some years back and I've still got a short length of that fiber cable as a souvenir.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 08:08:47 am
content: Well latency on ADSL is not all that bad. I remember having a consistent solid 40 to 50 ms ping with no easily observable packet loss. I only noticed spikes in packet loss during thunderstorms (perfectly understandable and surprisingly resilient even). So in terms of latency and stability i had a very good experience.The one that had issues with this is older DSL. The uplink on DSL requires modems to share the link via timeslots, to account for timing slack in the whole system these slots are made fairly long and many modems want to use them, so as a result your modem could end up waiting a good bit to get a time slot for dumping out its upload traffic. As a result the ping times there are pretty erratic and long in general (commonly >200ms). The new DOCSIS 3 DSL systems are more polished tho and give pretty consistent <20ms ping times.For 4G/LTE this is obviously a much bigger problem, the latency is going to be constantly jumping all over the place. But then again to be fair most people use WiFi to distribute the internet trough the house and in practice this also does horrible things to ping times where you can easily have ping spikes >200ms within your own LAN. Sure WiFi is also fast and reliable when operated in ideal conditions, but when its operated with 3 walls between the devices and all of your devices and neighbors devices yelling over its 2.4GHz spectrum it just turns to shit. If getting reliable internet into the next room over wireless is so difficult to do, how difficult must it be to get it across a town.

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:05:52 am
content: Quote from: tautech on December 23, 2019, 08:03:42 amWe have a register with underground infrastructure. Anyone digging need an extract from this register, a digging permit and must have taken precautions. For example, if a gas pipe could be damaged. Also any undocumented infrastructure must be recorded. And mechanical digging is considered reckless. Shovels should be used.We still have many idiots pulling cables from the ground or bursting gas pipes though. You can't fix stupid.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:24:55 am
content: Quote from: james_s on December 23, 2019, 06:18:49 amBut LTE (4G) is already ahead compared to DOCSIS where it comes to throughput. And LTE offers symmetrical uplink/downlink speeds. The only real competition for 5G is fibre where it comes to data transfer rates. Copper wiring just can't cope with 'modern' data transfer rates.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:33:38 am
content: Tens of thousands of mobiles at the same time in the same cell is mission impossible (imagine a stadium full of people), there's no way they can have good latency or throughput. But in rural/not densely populated areas, if the cell tower is close enough 4G works fine because there aren't many clients.A city or a crowded area is a completely different scenario in which wireless can't work as well as wired no matter what.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:48:21 am
content: Quote from: Syntax Error on December 22, 2019, 09:41:52 pmRemember 4 or 5 years ago when the UK grubberment were going to guarantee at least 2Mb/s toeverywherein the UK.Three weeks into the initiative it was being discussed on TV, the question came up was it 2Mb/s or 2MB/s, no one including the minister responsible knew, and one even said "Well that doesn't matter".

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:51:05 am
content: Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on December 23, 2019, 09:33:38 amYou are mistaken. In such a case the cells are made smaller and more towers are used.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 09:54:12 am
content: Quote from: nctnico on December 23, 2019, 09:51:05 amRight, and the minimum cell possible is a wired connection

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 10:55:07 am
content: Quote from: Jeroen3 on December 23, 2019, 09:05:52 amMore than once i had to call the ISP to send out a technician to come splice together a coax cable that people digging around the street ripped up. On one occasion i had to call him over twice in the same day because after he spliced it they just tossed dirt back into the hole without packing it underneath the cable beforehand so it just pulled the splice apart under the weight. The guy with the digger doesn't give a rats ass about your precious cables.Quote from: nctnico on December 23, 2019, 09:24:55 amWell the most commonly deployed DOCSIS 3.0 can do 1.2Gbit down. For residential costumers its the downlink that matters more anyway (As long as the uplink is not ridiculously slow). The newer DOCSIS 3.1 can do 10Gbit down and 2Gbit up over that same copper coax (4.0 does 10Gbit symmetric but i don't think that is deployed yet in any sizable way). I'm pretty sure LTE can't keep up with that.Tho for home users speeds above 100Mbit mostly become a dick measuring contest. The only reason we as a 3 person household have more is because the higher speed is part of a package with cable TV service. But most importantly what DOCSIS does over LTE is consistent performance. Back then i had a 150Mbit package and i could run a speed test at any time of the day, be it at its busiest or at 2 in the morning and i get the same 150 to 160Mbit result on speedtest.net every single time. Try that with LTE and see what fraction of the advertised speed you end up getting even at 2 in the morning when nobody is on.Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on December 23, 2019, 09:54:12 amCell towers often have microwave backhaul, but yeah you at least 10Gbit internet to the tower in order to reliably provide the claimed LTE performance to costumers. So yeah most of these towers would need some sort of fiber running to them. If you keep chaining towers together with microwave links you would eventually clog them up when enough traffic gets collected down the chain.In terms of cell networks at large public events with a lot of people, things have gotten a bit better with the newer cell network technologies but yeah still the cell towers are not having a good time at these big crowded events.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 11:08:25 am
content: Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on December 23, 2019, 09:33:38 amDon't be so sure. Welcome to Sydney on any given major event; Mardi Gras, New Years Eve, concerts, sporting events etc... We have hundreds of thousands of users within a small area on a regular basis. Our mobile networks are about the only thing that are actually built right and keep working even under demanding situations. Now that we have 5G, this is only getting better and faster.Last year, over 1.8 million people were in Sydney for New Years Eve and the major telco's handled the traffic just fine.The vast majority of cell sites in Australia (even in rural centres) are connected by fibre.Just sitting here right now with marginal reception at my desk (-108 dBm) I'm getting 85 Mbps down on a Samsung Galaxy S10.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 01:26:33 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on December 23, 2019, 06:08:28 amHow close are the latest DSL standards to the safety voltage limits of telephone wiring? I presume running at just under the limit would give the best possible performance over a distance, obviously at the cost of more power usage at the line driver.What should be very easy to implement is for streaming services to allow downloading to a local cache.

author: GeorgeOfTheJungle
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 02:02:35 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on December 23, 2019, 11:08:25 amIt helps that most people on the street or at concerts aren't streaming youtubes and netflixes as much as at home. But my experience with mobile wireless data is that it usually works well for a while, when it's still new and not many people are connected/using it yet. Do you remember what happened to the mobile network in NYC and many other big cities around the world, shortly after the first iPhones came out?"Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T"https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 03:26:05 pm
content: I use to get 10mbps in 2009 when I joined NTLBusiness I never had any problems, no caps or restraints, good enough low latency, it did what it said on the contract right up until the end after VirginMedia finally took them over and made some changes and about then in 2013 I saw my neighbours getting over 30mbps download and I think 10-15mbps upload on vdsl when I tested it and I was a bit envious.Just noticed this post:Quote from: StillTrying on December 23, 2019, 09:48:21 amAlsothatwas back ten years Gordon Brown wanted to tax broadband at 50p to fund a something similar that was 2mbps and I thought that was a little bit too low.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8105068.stmQuotehttps://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2009/09/23/50p-tax-on-uk-phone-lines-to-fund-next-gen-broadband-to-become-law.htmlQuoteThen they had second throughts to raise the tax to £6https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1193293/Every-household-Britain-hit-new-6-broadband-tax-fund-national-rollout-superfast-internet.htmlQuoteIn 2012 they wanted a minimum of 2mbps then 40mbps by 2017 if it was taxed.https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2019-12-04/worst-area-for-broadband-in-wales-has-50-times-slower-download-speeds-than-the-fastest/QuoteI would like to see how they will implement this "right" to 10mbps broadband in places like Carmarthenshire.

author: Syntax Error
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 05:16:00 pm
content: An issue for British broadband connectivity is that much of the UK's domestic digital infrastructure is built from cabling that was only ever meant for POTS. My building is served with copper that was cast in concrete before the modem was invented. Other places do not even have copper cables, instead the conductor is aluminium. OpenReach customers have the luxury of FTTP or FTTC, the rest get a 3kms copper backhaul to the exchange. Openreach is an infrastructure company that does not do joined-up-thinking.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 23, 2019, 10:31:38 pm
content: Quote from: MrMobodies on December 23, 2019, 03:26:05 pmThey might have started 10 years ago but they're StillTrying to achieve it now.Scheme designed to ensure all homes have a minimum upload speed of 2Mb extended until the end of 2019.https://www.choose.co.uk/news/2018/better-broadband-scheme-extended/

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 24, 2019, 04:56:30 am
content: Quote from: Syntax Error on December 23, 2019, 05:16:00 pmThe cables were cast in concrete? That's bizarre, one has to wonder what they were thinking. How much more could it have possibly cost to use conduit?

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 24, 2019, 05:59:03 am
content: Quote from: james_s on December 24, 2019, 04:56:30 amOh you mean back when they also used lead pipes to carry drinking water, had salmonella breading ground unpressurized open hot water tanks in the roof and the aluminium wiring coated in tar cloth insulation that ran in a single ring circuit around the whole house on a single main fuse? Yeah those ware also some great ideas.... for the time.EDIT: But yeah if we could predict the residential installation needs for the future i would have CAT6 cable running to every room of the house. But instead i had to take a jackhammer to the walls in order to run it afterwards to the few rooms that need it(about 1/3 of the whole house).

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2019, 12:47:11 am
content: Quote from: james_s on December 24, 2019, 04:56:30 amI've never seen underground telecoms cables in the UK which are set in anything. They are always in tubes. Power cables generally go straight in the ground, but if they pass through a wall or other concrete, brick, etc, structure they do it through a tube for stress relief. They means they are set in something when someone has strewed up.

author: chris_leyson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2019, 02:35:09 am
content: My provider says I have FTTP but it's fibre to the cabinet and coax to the house, allegedly DOCSIS 3. I get 14Mb/s download plus a lot of HF QRM since the cable went in, maybe a few turns on a large piece of MnZn ferrite will fix the common mode noise.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 25, 2019, 03:56:54 am
content: Quote from: chris_leyson on December 25, 2019, 02:35:09 amIs that Virgin Media by any chance?14 megabytes a second sounds okay.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 12:02:11 am
content: Slightly off-topic but I did a test on the Telstra LTE mobile network last night in the Sydney CBD, with over 1 million people in a relatively small footprint to watch the new year's fireworks and still managed 148 Mbps down and 41.4 Mbps up on my Samsung Galaxy S8.Even with high traffic, it's still miles ahead of our fixed wire National Broadband Network.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 01:30:51 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 01, 2020, 12:02:11 amAnd that was with a 3G, 4G or a 5G cell tower connection ?

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 02:38:56 am
content: Quote from: tautech on January 01, 2020, 01:30:51 amLTE-A

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 02:44:23 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on January 01, 2020, 02:38:56 amWhich equates to ?Never heard of it.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 02:54:22 am
content: Quote from: tautech on January 01, 2020, 02:44:23 amIt's basically 4.5G. It's rolled out across most of Australia. Telstra brands it as "4GX". Started being rolled out in late 2014. It supports downstream speeds of up to 450 Mbps.

author: GreyWoolfe
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 08:52:08 pm
content: Quote from: MrMobodies on December 22, 2019, 09:10:47 pmPerspective is interesting. Here in Central Florida, I would call 30 Mbps slow, I have 100 Mbps down, 10 Mbps up over copper coax and get easily 110-116 Mbps, any time of day or night. Super fast would be the 400 Mbps if I want to pay an additional $25 a month. My co-worker in Jacksonville, FL recently got fiber, don't know if it is to the house or street, is getting 450 Mbps down and isn't paying any extra. Yes, a little jealous here. Cable internet is really the only option as far as I am concerned. No DSL as we are too far from the CO and I won't do satellite as the provider here is junk.

author: SL4P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 01, 2020, 11:54:34 pm
content: Wait until the 5G ‘system’ is fully implemented (late 2020 in Australia), the full mesh topology will become more widely available, but the problem with radio will always be atmospheric attenuation and penetrating abilities of the higher frequencies, along with the lower data capacities of the lower frequency bands, but they have better range and penetration !Commercial imperatives will make some use case situations nearly impossible.If it’s done properly (politically unlikely), 5G is going to upset a lot of copper apple carts.One of those cases, where a vision is needed, not a committee!