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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.
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
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
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.
Er... crap.
I have a street strewn with telegraph poles. My parents live in a streeet strewn with telegraph poles. So does almost everyone I know. Most of those people live in London, for a start, and it's not limited to just there.
Fuck knows where you live but if you don't have pole at the end of your street with cables going to each house, I'm guessing it's a new build estate (which are in the minority compared to, say, 30's/40's/50's/60's houses).
However, what you might mean is that those poles will feed the cables from each house down to a green box which may have some kind of fibre/copper backbone that goes under the street. But it's still copper... FTTC hasn't arrived in many places.
But if you live in a UK town and are more a few hundred metres from a telegraph pole, I'd be surprised.
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.
I have a house on a street lined with telegraph poles in the UK too. The poles run wires to everyone's house. The same was true of the place I lived before moving there. In both cases, the wire fell off my house while I was living there. It hadn't been connected to anything inside the house for a very long time - telephone service came in on the other side of the house, underground. They just never got around to removing the poles and the above-ground wires that didn't have a signal going through them.
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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.