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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!
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
Yes but not just infrastructure to the home: having suffered as little as 300kbit/s peak-rate speeds out of an 8Mbit/s line from BT I'd like them to sort out capacity to the exchange before showboating ever faster technologies.
That was in a city centre - there are some exchanges in the UK which have been oversubscribed continuously since ADSL switch on nearly 10 years ago.
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.
> So you can now hit your bandwidth cap faster than ever?
Well of course, all transmission systems have to have a bandwidth "cap" otherwise their frequencies would be all over the spectrum.
Oh I see, you're mis-using an engineering term you don't understand. You might as well have said "hit your LCD cap" for all the sense you made.
Are you serious? :)
First off, it is not his fault. Secondly, he did use it correctly. "Bandwidth cap" is an actual term, because it has been effectively made into one, by the industry to indicate the total transmission of data is limited. Obviously to less than what is possible in a given period.
You're applying an engineering interpretation that no reasonable person would make in the context of the conversation.
His point about latency is spot on. If you offered me a 1 Tbps connection at 250ms latency and a 1 Mbps connection at 2ms, I am thinking I would choose the latter. My greatest issue right now managing several branch offices for a client is not the amount of data I can transfer at one time (bandwidth), but how fast the packets are being sent back and forth (latency). The branch offices are oversupplied with bandwidth. Using maybe 20-25% of their connections at any one time, but there are periods of high latency that significantly affect operations. Reliable low latency connections (expensive fiber connections, etc.) are not viable right now given a double dip recession and the need to trim operational costs practically everywhere. I don't have, or know, of a single company out there making huge infrastructure investments right now. It's about maintaining (barely) what you have right now and waiting for the economies to pick back up. Only companies with bailout money, and access to corrupt politicians, and executives that just don't give a shit are acting otherwise.
In the future it will become more about latency and less about bandwidth. Was there not an article recently about a transatlantic fiber run that was expressly for the purpose of speeding up (latency) connections for trading on stock exchanges?
About it not being his fault, Marketing Douchebags are the one responsible for the massive confusion about terms. To make it easy to understand it would be like being sold gasoline in liters but your car tells you everything in terms of gallons. It also does not help that different amounts of gasoline are deliberately used to imply how fast the car can travel instead of how far it can travel.
That is it in a nutshell. I've told all my clients that try to understand just what they are getting that 1 Mbps connection allows them to download a file at 125 KB/s, which is what Firefox or IE shows the speeds in. It makes it pretty easy then for them to understand that an office of 30 people can't watch Netflix (executives working hard for the bonuses) and YouTube (regular employees hard at work) all at once on a 6 Mbps connection.
Cut the guy a break. He had a valid point and was only using terms that have been used by the industry for years.
BitTorrent, on the other hand works just fine, especially when there are a lot of peers.
I agree with the grammar nazi - "download cap" and "quota" both make complete sense and are commonly used. I have never heard it called "bandwidth cap", which makes no sense anyway.
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
Yet bandwidth cap has a Wikipedia page.... go figure.
Migrate to Virgin Media then, I live in Birmingham and VM was down for over 24 hours this week, this has happened for the third time this year. It went down fro both domestic and business FTTP. BT goes down for an hour and everyone moans.
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.
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.
That sucks, I have a 300/300 connection, when I manage to download a very popular torrent shortly after it is put on a public tracker (and does not have that many peer yet), my upload on that torrent alone reaches about 20MB/s, add the other torrents and it comes quite close to the advertised upload speed.
On the other hand, making the upload be that fast over a single TCP connection requires some tweaking of the TCP settings which require lots of restarts.
With a 300/0.7 connection you will never be able to achieve 300mbps download using TCP - there will be not enough bandwidth for ACK packets.
You want to complain then. Obviously your contract specifies the availability precisely and you'll entitled to something for that kind of outage if you're running a business on it? No? Shocking.
But even so, just complain. My 10Mbps VM home connection slowed to slightly less than 1Mbps for three days until the engineer came out - they refunded the entire month's cost for the broadband and some more BEFORE THE ENGINEER HAD EVEN VISITED.
However, to provide my own useless anecdote, the BT Business ADSL2 connection in work (which is a large school literally METRES away from the town's exchange) has two lines, for which I designed and built a little power circuit for that can remote-cut-off the power to the modems (because that's often the only way to get them to reconnect).
It goes down THAT often that we are always bouncing between the two connections throughout the day (luckily, a couple of kernel patches and our Linux gateway handles it seamlessly for the 150 desktops it serves) and at least 2-3 times a week they BOTH go off and have to be reset (either automatically, or by text message). We know if an off-site backup fails because we get an email from our online backup provider and when it does, we just text the box to reset the modems and the next backup will (probably) succeed. Myself and the bursar both have the number in our speed-dial.
Even then, we carry two 3G stick's in the school (one supplied by BT) for emergency use that the network can run off (albeit slowly) for about a day before we hit the usage limit on one of them.
And that's on their special "educational" service where they provide extra support and greater service.
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.
Virgin Media just rolled out 100Mb/s here (only 10Mb/s up though), and in most urban parts of the UK, so it's not like BT has no competition. I'm on their 10Mb/s plan at the moment, but I'm quite tempted by something with a bit more upstream.
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So? It's not as if anyone's going to move to Hungary for an internet connecction.
And wages will be much smaller, it's not as if that means it'll be any more affordable in practice. Probably also why it's much cheaper to deploy.
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.
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
I can't say i've noticed a whole lot of difference. Both BT wholesale ADSL (i've never bought directly from BT) and drop out from time to time. Sufficiantly rarely that you put up with it as a home user, sufficiantly frequently that I wouldn't rely on either for a buisness.
If you are trusting an internet reliant buisness to a single "broadband" link you are being an idiot. Either get multiple broadband links from different providers or get a proper connection with a service level agrement.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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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.
The big problem with "download cap" is that most ISPs also include your upload in it too.
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.
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!
With speeds this fast, now Grandma can easily download all the user-friendly bits to make this the Year of the Linux Desktop!