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BT Unveils 1000Mbps Capable G.fast Broadband Rollout For the United Kingdom
Mark.JUK writes The national telecoms operator for the United Kingdom, BT, has today announced that it will begin a country-wide deployment of the next generation hybrid-fibre G.fast (ITU G.9701) broadband technology from 2016/17, with most homes being told to expect speeds of up to 500Mbps (Megabits per second) and a premium service offering 1000Mbps will also be available.
At present BT already covers most of the UK with hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology, which delivers download speeds of up to 80Mbps by running a fibre optic cable to a local street cabinet and then using VDSL2 over the remaining copper line from the cabinet to homes. G.fast follows a similar principal, but it brings the fibre optic cable even closer to homes (often by installing smaller remote nodes on telegraph poles) and uses more radio spectrum (17-106MHz) over a shorter remaining run of copper cable (ideally less than 250 metres). The reliance upon copper cable means that the real-world speeds for some, such as those living furthest away from the remote nodes, will probably struggle to match up to BT's claims. Nevertheless many telecoms operators see this as being a more cost effective approach to broadband than deploying a pure fibre optic / Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.
At present BT already covers most of the UK with hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology, which delivers download speeds of up to 80Mbps by running a fibre optic cable to a local street cabinet and then using VDSL2 over the remaining copper line from the cabinet to homes. G.fast follows a similar principal, but it brings the fibre optic cable even closer to homes (often by installing smaller remote nodes on telegraph poles) and uses more radio spectrum (17-106MHz) over a shorter remaining run of copper cable (ideally less than 250 metres). The reliance upon copper cable means that the real-world speeds for some, such as those living furthest away from the remote nodes, will probably struggle to match up to BT's claims. Nevertheless many telecoms operators see this as being a more cost effective approach to broadband than deploying a pure fibre optic / Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network.
My local telephone exchange has been enabled for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) for a year and a half
The street cabinet my line connects to has not been upgraded. I can't even physically find the damn thing, no idea where they've hidden it. Maybe BT doesn't either. Nobody can tell me when or if it will be enabled.
I can get 4G LTE on my phone and get 30 Mbit/sec up or down. But ADSL2 is as fast as I can get - with the distance from my exchange to my house, I get no more than 9 Mbit/sec down (but more often than not closer to 6 Mbit/sec) and no more than 1 Mbit/sec up.
I'm all in favour of gigabit broadband rollouts - but I want them to finish the FTTC programme first.
Also - I live in the middle of a city of 230,000 people, and the area I'm in is entirely residential. They'd get more fibre subscribers if they enabled more cabinets.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
We are going to need to upgrade all of our servers and network routers!
I wonder what the latency will be ? (OK: to somewhere close in the UK)
What good is all this speed when they keep blocking interesting sites? This kind of bandwidth is only good to seed / share large things and we get blanket bans here in the UK on all kinds of torrent and other sites. I'd rather be with a smaller ISP which doesn't block things and has a lesser bandwidth allowance than with these guys, who make it harder and harder to have freedom on the net.
"At present BT already covers most of the UK with hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology"
That's bullshit for a start, the rest likely is too
Now five people in the centre of London will get the theoretical maximums when accessing a peered server until their neighbours subscribe.
Is this just part of the stupid, inefficient dream to be able to stream video on demand(+) 24/7 to(*) every family member? The one where there is a bottomless barrel of low quality media poured over your eyeballs and into your ears?
(+) Not containing female ejaculation, since the present Party Cherishing Freedom has outlawed that (male is fine, but women must NOT be seen enjoy themselves). Oh and DEFINITELY not pirated, but don't worry because torrent sites will have been blocked, as something which CAN be used for a civil offence will ONLY be used for a civil offence, and must be censored. And Tor users will have been assumed guilty until proven innocent - and there are some serious government data-retention laws in the UK so that everyone has six lines with which to prove their sins, don't you worry.
(*) And from, because if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.
How low will they set the datacaps? What good will 1000mbps be if you hit the ceiling immediately? And how many people does have to be online simultaneously before everyone gets throttled to 512kbps?
That's what I call a leapfrog technology, going straight from the telegraph to G.fast and not bothering with that silly 100 year telephone era inbetween.
I hear that. I have 1mb/s myself, although it is not shared. If I see one more nimrod here bitching about "ridiclously absurd upload speeds of 25mbs" or some such, I think I'm going to have to shoot somebody.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Dunno about the FTTC coverage claims, but the article is BS in its reference to telegraph poles since almost the entirety of telephone wiring has been underground in the UK for many decades.
It is true that some poles are still around, but it's certainly not common in cities, towns, nor in suburbia.
Does the G stand for Go? Or Google?
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Back in 2004 I visited my girlfriend in Japan. She had 100Mb symmetrical fibre and it cost her £23/month. They installed it early because they knew it would last decades and keep them competitive well into the multi-gigabit era. They don't mess about, and it allows them to offer advanced services that others can't.
BT always do them minimum required to stay semi competitive, since in many areas they have no competition anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Slashdot are posting what The Register posted two days ago, so I'll post the same comment I posted there two days ago:
I work for a UK school.
BT took nearly TWO YEARS to get a leased line to us. They were blocked from completion after we cancelled the contract because they said there was a 20th delay because "there's not enough room in the duct" followed by "there's not enough room at the exchange". You'd have thought someone might notice in two years that you had no room, eh?
We cancelled because, despite wonderful promises, prices and speeds, we never actually managed to get the line into the building.
In the meantime, I'm running a school for 400 kids on a VDSL line with ADSL backup which BT promise me can get "45Mbps" and "20Mbps" at best, respectively. Funny. Because my Smoothwall says we've never pushed more than 10Mbps for a fraction of a second and the average over the working day - with 500 users and 600 devices - is somewhere around 4MBps down and 1MBps up..
BT can make all the "maximum" speed promises they want. If you can't get it installed, or the actual download is so much less than the maximum, it's pointless. Absolutely pointless.
Ironically, I get 32Mbps download on 4G when sitting in the IT Office. If only 4G didn't have such pathetic data allowances.
I don't mean to bring up Thatcher or talk negatively of the EU because I'm extremely pro-EU and am relatively neutral on Thatcher.
But if Thatcher's government was visionary on one thing it was technology, not only did they push computers in schools which I fondly remember as a kid and is a large part of why I do what I do and like what I like today but her government also wanted to roll out fibre and replace copper way back in the 1980s but was actually blocked by the EU because BT had at that point become a private entity.
I don't want to get caught up in the politics of Thatcher, the EU and privatisation as I know these are incredibly divisive subjects and my feelings on the issue in this case run wholly counter to my feelings in general (I'm extremely pro-EU and hate euroscepticism with a passion because it's short-sighted and isolationist, and I believe public utilities should always be publicly run) but I find this to be a fascinating twist in history. A missed opportunity that I would've loved any government ever since whether Labour, Tory, or coalition to have attempted to revive.
It's one case where EU law sadly genuinely prevented the UK being first class and completely ahead of it's time in a particular area of technology and left us much worse off for it.
can I have a unicorn, please? Local exchange has been 'enabled' since June 2013, but I don't know anyone who can actually get Infinity in my town. I live a mile from the exchange, and 100 yards from the cabinet, and am still on standard broadband.
The story keeps changing, too, whenever I talk to BT. First it was that the cabinet hadn't been upgraded, then that it couldn't be upgraded, and now it's because fuck you, that's why. Their website says they cover two-thirds of the UK (which is a weird definition of 'most', but I suppose it is greater than 50%), but it also says (in paraphrase) that if you live more than 300 feet from an exchange, forget it. Lots of the UK, and especially Scotland, is still pretty rural, so I don't expect to see anything better than broadband any time this decade.
So while I'd welcome the service they claim to be offering, the fact that they haven't managed to deliver the original service to about 40% of the UK yet, does make me wonder if it'll ever actually materialise.
BT are always promising faster speeds and new rollouts, but you can bet your nelly that the only ones who are going to receive such a service are people in the big cities (with London usually being about a year before the next recipients). It really is a British disease to regularly promise faster, better and cheaper ... and then do sweet A once the easy pickings are taken from the tree.
I live in a rural area even more rural than where you do. Its an area 1.5 times the size of the inner M25 with a population of just 200,000. We have no city, the largest town has a population of just 33,000, the population of my town is 11,000. We've had 76mbit FTTC for nearly 2 years now.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I remember the BT from the 70s and 80s where every phone call seemed to be on a party line. Noisy, lots of crosstalk and now 1Gbps Internet? My how they've grown up.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
As someone who was actually there through the Thatcher years i can tell you that you are talking utter shite.
Thatcher was Thunderscunt number 1 on every front.
I've already been lucky enough to get FTTC, and my connection varies between 50/5 and 20/2, I'd say. Other than some improvement in my upload speeds, I'm pretty much happy with the bandwidth. Why would I need more? I have an uncapped connection, but if I had 500Mbps I rather doubt my ISP would be willing to offer THAT uncapped... if I could even find anything that big (legally) to download on a regular basis.
This just seems like a big PR thing BT are doing so they can tell simpletons like David Cameron that "the UK now has super-mega-ultra-uber fast broadband". I'm with the rest of ya; finish the FTTC rollout, get that too ~100% of the population.
FTTC should be enough for anyone. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
AT&Ts U-Verse runs fiber to a corner box in the neighborhood and then dual-DSL over existing copper lines to homes. It's been a dismal failure. When they initially rolled it out they thought they could situate the corner boxes relatively far away from the homes but the copper had so much noise and cross talk it just didn't work, so they've had to move the boxes closer. And even then they barely get 20 MBits downlink and a really horrid uplink. Comcast is twice as fast at a minimum.
Sounds like BT hit the same problem. The only real solution is, as they said, make the copper portion of the run as short as possible (ultimately remove it entirely but that means a lot of retrenching).
-Matt
I don't get it. They are running fibre to "ideally less than 250m" from every home knowing full well that one day, at some point, they are going to have to cover that last 250m with fibre. Just do it already. Get the governement on-board and do it. Upgrade the whole damn country and never have to worry about the state of the copper lines ever again.
Maintenance costs plummet and yes, the rollout will cost you an arm and a leg but you know what? You then become a first work country
Normal people worry me!
Up to 1000 Mbps - yeah, perhaps if you have built your house right on top of the cabinet. In fact, not even then.
I was on their FTTC product for a couple of years, the one that's "up to" 80 Mbps. I got 18 down and 0.75 up. I tried reporting the speed to them on several occasions, especially the upstream speed which was very limiting, only to be told they didn't consider that to be a problem - it's within the range of speeds considered acceptable for that product.
TFA says it "uses more radio spectrum". I am confused. Does that means they use some radio network like WiFi or WiMax?
> they already charge you TWICE for line rental once for the phone once for the net
No they don't? They charge you line rental and a separate fee for broadband. Broadband requires the line. All of the ISPs bar Virgin media do this.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
G.Fast only works at high speed for 100 metres or less.
It's highly likely that it will be around 50 metres once crosstalk and other interference is taken into account (VDSL2 operational distances are shown to be suffering badly as more VDSL is rolled out, especially along the rotting distribution infrastructure that BT operates (there has been insufficient infrastructure reinvestment to maintain services since the mid 1980s)
The only way to provide this kind of coverage to more than the 5-10% of dwellings within that distance of the existing street distribution cabinets will be to run fibre down the road and put cabinets every 1-200 metres.
It would be cheaper and easier to roll fibre to houses and provide GPON.
BT is doing things this way because it can charge 100+% of the equipment cost upfront to endusers/ISPs and continue to charge audacious fees for fibre-to-the-premises (the number of FTTP installations is virtually zero because of the extreme installation charges - which are predicated on the basis of a street dig for every metre instead of taking into account that there are ducts in place for 99% of the run)
If it starts a mass FTTP rollout then it would have to treat further installations as an infrastructure renewal and eat the upfront costs.
There is supposedly a "chinese wall" inside BT between "Openreach" the lines company and everything else, but the reality is that head office can see over/control both sides and whilst Openreach is required to provide equal access to all comers it's proven trivial to game the system unless the lines monopoly is completely divided off from the incumbent telco.
It's extremely telling that New Zealand looked closely at the UK setup before requiring that the lines unit of Telecom New Zealand be completely cleaved from the mothership (TNZ had emulated the BT model, but it was still clearly anticompetitive and NZ had suffered ~25 years of severe monopoly abuse) and turned into a separate company with its own corporate structure and shares. The result has been a transformation of access, as the lines company now actively seeks LLU customers as well as selling duct space to all comers now that it's free of rules aimed at preventing "competition" from getting access to infrastructure without jumping through extensive hoops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(Bear in mind that in both the BT and NZ cases the telcos were state owned and virtually all in-ground infrastructure was paid for in the days when taxpayers footed the bill)
Yes, she was so universally bad that she was elected 3 times!
yeah michael foot... really electable....... and the other stupid rabble of labour/liberal leaders we not exactly the most electable bunch on the planet.
Just because you are more electable than a bunch of utterly chronic pricks, does not make you the choice of the century.
The woman was a horrible,nasty, spiteful arsehole.
Agreed, she wasn't choice of the century. But pretending that not a single thing whatsoever that she did was a good idea? That's more spiteful than Thatcher herself ever was at least.
LOL... sorry son yer a wee bit of an amateur...
If she was so loved as you seem to think... why were there street parties and even club nights to party when she died????
These things do not happen to popular people.
she asset stripped the country selling off the likes of BT at cut down rates.. most of the shares being bought up by her cronies, their hedge funds and the likes while offering a tiny amount of shares to the public.. just enough for them to think they are "in".. she DECIMATED industry and started the ball rolling on many other privatisations to come.. even the creeping privatisation of the NHS was started under her watch. splitting it down into smaller units and giving them borrowing powers.... designed to fail... don't take my word for it.. listen to an expert on that
Dr Lucy Reynolds is an expert on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Luckily i live in Scotland where the NHS is run much better and we have a govt at Holyrood that seems to be very much on the ball with social justice issues unlike any of the twats from labour, the tories or the spineless lib-dems.
BTW I called you an amateur due to your piss poor attempt at a dig with your last sentence....
You seem so incredibly caught up in your bile towards her that you're imagining things that just aren't there.
I do not believe she was universally loved, and it doesn't matter that there were parties over their death, because there were also parties celebrating her life and massive support for a state funeral too. Obviously some people loved her, obviously some hated her.
Yes, she did a hell of a lot wrong, there's no question about that. But to pretend she did not a single thing right? Celebrating her death? That's just stupid, that's naive zealotry, that's hatred beyond reason, and again, yes, that makes you as nasty as she ever was.
I don't really care that you're Scottish for what it's worth, and yes, of course the NHS is better run up there, we're paying for it for you because apparently you eventually realised that you indeed can't look after yourselves without us continuing to prop you up.