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BT Promises 300Mbps FTTP By 2012
twoheadedboy writes "UK service provider BT has launched its Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) product, pledging it will offer downstream speeds of 300Mbps by spring next year. At present, the service can hit 110Mbps downstream speeds and will be available in just six locations from the end of October. More locations will be added and speeds will rise, however, with a 1Gbps service currently being trialled in Kesgrave, Suffolk. There may be continuing disputes over BT Openreach's pricing of fibre products, given the recent industry in-fighting. Nevertheless, 300Mbps fibre will provide some pretty speedy downloads for end users."
So you can hit your data cap in just hours now! WooHoo!
So you can now hit your bandwidth cap faster than ever? At a certain point, latency is the biggest problem to contend with, not bandwidth.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
In Hong Kong it's easy to get 1Gbps FTTP, e.g. with HGC (aka Three) for HK$198 a month (about US$25 or 16 GBP a month): http://www.threebb.com.hk/eng/broadbandoffer.html
I'd love to be able to transfer files that fast; I can't be the only one who misread the title.
I have 60/60 Mbit fiber for about $100/month here in Norway. All it'd take to have 400/400 Mbit fiber is one phone call and about $1000/month. Some operators in the chain even say up to 1000/1000 Mbit, call us for pricing. No caps and I've had ~6 MB/s both downloading and uploading. Before with cable and DSL it was always how far are you from the central, how clogged are our lines. With fiber it's only a matter of how much you want to pay, really. After all they have to keep some pretty fat pipes to the backbone for that line to be useful, that's what costs money now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
and here I am in downtown los angeles, a city of millions of people, in a high-density area, and my only choices are 5 mbps DSL from AT&T, or 3-6Mbps from clearwire (although at times it dips as low as 160 kbps, it's absolutely worthless)...
Just think about how much faster it would be without the government filtering!
I'll just point you to this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/bt_service_outage/
Look at a map of the UK, consider, this power outage in the Midlands fscked their *Business* ADSl service over the *whole* of Britain.
This cockup was the final straw, don't know what business we lost because of it but it caused me a shedload of grief that afternoon, so I'm in the process of 'migrating' to VM, sick of the poor BT ADSL speeds and service (ok, so maybe a 'frying pan and fire' move as far as some of you are concerned, but VM have been providing a stable service in our area for quite some time)
You seriously think I'd trust my business connection to BT fibre?
I've lived in several areas of the UK, and the disparity I've seen in speeds, especially on the edges of towns, is terrible. At the moment I'm in Bletchley, home of computing, and less that 2 miles from 300Mbps trial areas. I get 4Mbps. On the edge of Scunthorpe I got less than 0.5Mbps, North Oxford (Jericho) was around 2Mbps. Non of these were particularly remote locations, but all suffer from outdated infrastructure.
BT needs to start getting it's infrastructure sorted so that most people can get a decent speed, rather that a few small areas getting much faster.
It's all well and good having a flagship product likes this but most areas outside of cities struggle to get anything more than 1 Meg from BT.
Perhaps they should be focussing more on upgrading their ancient copper/aluminium wiring infrastructure outside of the cities so that everyone can benefit from improved broadband speeds rather than just showboating with products like this.
Wonder if any of those six locations will again include the IT powerhouse of Hambleden, Oxfordshire?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6686406/BT-criticised-over-broadband-access-for-chairman.html/
Since by then we won't be able to do anything that would utilize those speeds anyway. The way things are going, everything will be locked down tight.
BitTorrent, on the other hand works just fine, especially when there are a lot of peers.
Six houses, huh? Those lucky dogs.
I wonder what the latency on the system will be like.
IMHO, I care more about speed than bandwidth.
BT promised me FTTC by end of last month, now that date got moved to end of the year.
Guess if they promised 300Mb/s by 2012, we can expect it in 2099.
UK is decades behind the rest of central europe, and it's not because it's too expensive for BT as they announce profits and pay millions in dividans every year. Rich get richer, the poor sufffer longer.
I have been waiting for FTTP for years after having used it in Japan years ago. If they manage to make it generally available by next year then we will be maintaining our position at about 10 years behind the leaders. Various European countries are 7 or 8 years ahead of us too.
I really frustrates me, and I'm not just talking about broadband. For example Dyson vacuum cleaners are often released in Japan a few years ahead of the UK, despite them being a UK product. Take the Dyson City for example, we got it about 24 months after Japan but still had to wait another couple of years to get the turbine head model. It seems to apply to absolutely everything, even ideas.
We used to lead the world in engineering and technology.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
May i mention that in Hungary i pay 25$ for a 120/12 Mbit connection with no caps? And thats perfectly normal.
BT earmarked my town for Fibre to the Cabinet last November, now their current plans say it's going to be March. Deeply irritating.
That said, I'm incredibly close to my cabinet so when I finally do get it, I should get great speeds, 30mb+ hopefully.
You're only going to have to ban them all.
After all, what's the point of terrabytes of HDD space and a massive download rate if not to pirate movies?
BT is truly the master of disingenuous advertising, particularly when it comes to broadband speed and availability.
"FTTC" does not, for instance, mean "Fibre to the cabinet". It means "Fibre to some of the cabinets served by this particular telephone exchange. If your cabinet isn't one of them, sucks to be you."
Similarly "FTTP" means "We're running fibre out from the exchange to a limited area. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in that area, you can get fibre to the premises. Probably."
I predict BT will crow far and wide that they've got FTTP in every telephone exchange in the country by 2014, but that won't mean 300Mbps for all. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, BT throttle BT. At least they don't quietly ignore it like TalkTalk does.
But you won't find many people able to use Bittorrent and they'll be on a 300/0.7Mbps connection, so you'd need around 500 people to share with (and nobody using their machine as a source) to max out.
Meanwhile try getting 2mbps sdsl anywhere for less than GBP250 / USD390 per month.
BT are just milking the old cheap infrastructure for their own profits, fair enough, but there is little feasible competition and labour costs are far too expensive to overhaul the whole network. FTTC should have been a quick and easy solution with FTTP the longer term - but they can't even do that.
In Spain some farmers are installing what they call "Fiber From The Farms".
That's it, they are buying fiber cables themselves (about 0.5 €/m they say) and installing them with their own means up to the closest neutral point.
They are buying 1Gbit for everyone interested (currently in the thousands) for ~400€/month (AFAIK) bypassing all ISP's (in essence they are their own ISP).
They are registered as a non-profit organization and as a legal ISP.
More info here.
The latest BT offering (infinity, I think they call it) gives speeds up to, I think, 40MB/s if your exchange and local cabinet support it. Part of that bandwidth is ringfenced off to provide a public wi-fi access point to other BT customers. The idea is that if you're a BT customer, you can use any of those hotspots from your phone/mobile device. If enough people sign up, you can probably find coverage in most streets.
I'm hoping they've got the security model locked down though, as I presume it's a condition of the deal that it's enabled.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
...I'm still waiting for a stable 512kbps. Now before you all start with the "you chose to live there" malarky, my village is 10ish miles from Sheffield, and 15ish miles from Manchester, not exactly the middle of nowhere.
The problem is BT don't give a crap about telephone exchanges with less that a few thousand people being served by them. The headline exchanges in the big cities allow them to say that they offer up to a million gagillion so that people will be taken in by the marketing bollocks. Our exchange isn't LLU'd, competition is non-existant, and the copper cable hasn't been replaced for almost 50 years.
JT
You know, up to 300Mbs?
Wake me up when they offer binding contracts to provide minimum speeds. Until then, it's just marketwank.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So open more connections to different servers.
I (the family) have nine devices at home which connect to the internet
2 laptops
1 desktop
3 phones
1 TV
1 Xbox
1 Wii
It is unlikely all will be downloading at the same time, but not impossible.
I only have 30/3mbit and maxing it out is not hard.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I had BT fibre to my place for a while. It was awesome and very reliable (one of the reasons why I went for it). But chatting to the engineer it turned out there is another reason why BT are keen to push forward with fibre - a certain section of the community are pinching copper wire. Fibre does not have much resale value, if any, and can last longer. I was near the sea and it turned out one reason why fibre was installed was because the original wiring was degrading faster than expected. So upgrading has other long-term benefits, other than the obvious.
So a real connection would be around 60Mbps? What the fuck are BT playing at offering assymetrical fibre... I've never heard anything so stupid! What's the contention ratio for this stupid product?
The cheapest way for businesses to send large amounts of data in the UK is to stick it on a hdd and send it via courier. What are BT doing about that?
30mb/3mb connection with Virgin. £27 a month with no need for a phone line or paying any form of "line rental" to BT, infact I dont even have a phone line in the building.
Their trafic management policy is nicely listed here:
http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-faster-uploads.html
I get on average 33mb down and 3.1mb up according to speedtest.net if I manage to hit their cap in the evening (OnLive uses about 2.5gb per 30mins) then I get throttled down to 7.5mb which to be fair is way more than anyone round here gets on BT anyways.
Its rarely down and always works nicely, problem for most people is down to their cable network not covering most places, if you're lucky enough to get it then get it...
Witty Comment Here
I'm a stone's throw from a large exchange in a (UK) city centre with 24mb DSL.
I get thereabouts that speed with some speedtest sites and when downloading Ubuntu. And that's about it. I have hit ~16mb/s from Steam and iPlayer but only occasionally. By far the usual speed is something below 8mb/s, that's all the server will give me.
Sure I can download many things at once, but there's nothing causing me to actually do that in practice. Having the connection is nice and everything but in practical terms there's very little difference from an 8mb line.
It it's just half of London I don't think that really count.
My exchanged was scheduled to get FTTC on March 2011, we have been repeatedly bumped and are now scheduled for FTTC (bear in mind the exchange is in a well populated sub urban area hasn't got ADSL 2+ yet) December 2012.
I fail to see the likely hood of getting an FTTP to any areas any time soon.
Stop lying BT!!! You are making me sad in my brain
Well of course, all transmission systems have to have a bandwidth "cap" otherwise their frequencies would be all over the spectrum.
What?! No, there is no need for a bandwidth cap on a transmission system. They are clearly selling signals that are infinite in the time domain!
PS. Technically, any signal that is time limited has infinite bandwidth, though in all real world applications the Fourier transform is just an approximation. May the math be with you!
Nice! With that kind of bandwidth I can get a lot more warez between each strike!
With speeds this fast, now Grandma can easily download all the user-friendly bits to make this the Year of the Linux Desktop!