Internet speeds

My broadband speed have been roughly 49 Mbps down and 7 Mbps up for a while. Until recently, when a neighbour had trouble with a crackly phone line and intermittend internet. Openreach fixed it for him and blamed a corroded joint. We have a neightbourhood WhatsApp group, and he posted to ask us all to check our speeds. At this point I noticed ours had gone down to 30/6.

I got an Openreach engineer to our house today. He found a corroded joint too. Now our speeds are 64.4 Mbps down and 17 Mbps up, which is substantially better than they ever have been before.

Excellent job, Openreach. They took the fault reports absolutely seriously and fixed the problems.

Our local exchange has been installing the infrastructure for FTTH since February, so I might get another speed and reliability boost soon.

They did a “study” up in the village a few days ago for what would be involved in bringing out fibre.
It would seem to involve 49 new poles. A don’t have much faith in overhead fibre, given how often the farmers break the wires, but we’ll see.
It’s projected for “maybe 2023” for the top of the lane and “maybe 2024” for me (it’s an extra half kilometre).

Still, at least something is moving, although they missed the original target (2012) by just a tad.
I suspect the problem was the politicians, city dwellers, made all sorts of grandiose promises, and the Orange line techs were like “uh, about that”.
It’s an ambitious project to have everybody in Brittany on fibre by {date that keeps moving back, something like 2026 at the moment} but it’ll be good to have something just a tad nippier than my current 3.5-4.2mbit (depends upon the weather, currently 3.6) download, and 778kbit upload. ¹

The slow upload coupled with a bug in the livebox that causes it to lose sync after periods of upload mean it’s interesting/annoying/wtf trying to upload stuff to YouTube.
Video? A gigabyte? Well we’ll say between three and six hours depending on how often the Livebox flakes out.

¹ 4.7km from the exchange. Well, about 2km as the crow flies, but the wire goes into the village, through a big green patch box, then comes out again.

Ha! My speed improves every time the idiot guns on the estate shoot (and its neighbours) fill the wires full of lead shot, which Openreach then replace. I have 4.something km of 100% overhead line to my property… Up from 1Mb/s initially to 4Mb/s (on a good day) of late.

Ah, yes, the joy of copper. Years ago, in the ADSL1 days, I would get around 4 Mb/s. ADSL2 came along and boosted that to about 12. Six months later the speed suddenly plummeted to around 3 Mb/s (possibly after some heavy rain). Cue fighting with my ISP for a week. I kept getting excuses like “we can see that historically you only got 4 Mb/s” and “the fault is probably your own wiring, which we’re not responsible for”.

Eventually I convinced them to send a Chorus (equivalent of Openreach, I believe) tech out. He opened up the little box on the street and was met with a mass of green corrosion. He replaced the cables for the whole neighbourhood and I ended up with somewhere around 15 Mb/s.

I wish you luck with a move to fibre. It’s night and day; you get the speed that you pay for and it doesn’t go flaky during bad weather!

Prompted by this, just did a speed test here:

17ms latency
73 Mb/s download
18.5 Mb/s upload

This is overhead copper (shielded twisted pair) for the last 100m or so, fibre (shared I think) to the street box.

EE – we were on Virgin before, 50% faster download, 50% slower upload, same latency, twice the price with unwanted TV thrown in. Oh, you’re leaving? We’ll halve the price for a year, if you’ll take a two-year contrick. Er, no thanks.

Before I moved I was on Virgin 200/20Mb, which usually tested at 220/18Mb and mostly rock-solid. Moved North last year to the edge of a village where the best/only option was BT FTTC at 80/20Mb which has been OK so far. Last month I saw some local cable contractors pulling fibre through the Openreach ducting around the estate, so I popped out and asked who they were doing it for, assuming Openreach, but was told it was YouFibre. Gave them a call the same day and signed up for 150/150Mb and a fixed IP address – it was installed and made live 6 days later! When my 18 month BT contract expires next month I’ll be closing it down and moving the phone number over to YouFibre too.

Prompted by this, just did a speed test here

Well now that you’ve spurred my competitive instinct…

ROFL – I was just interested. Either the old Virgin 110/12 or the new EE 73/18.5 will do me absolutely fine. I might find 3.5/0.78 a bit frustrating…

Forgot to mention above – YouFibre was a lot cheaper too, for higher bandwidth. Keeps down the business costs – win win.

I live in the rainforest on a Pacific Island (aka Rural Vancouver Island) – and have 1.5Gb fibre right to my server cupboard for I think about £50/month, roughly

Ah, not quite Tahiti then – but still nice, visited once.

Our son has visited Vancouver Island, but Grace & I have never been further west than south Greenland.

I live in a first world advanced western European nation and I have 3.5Mb through 4.7km of twisted pair copper from the sixties into my Livebox, for about €70/month (but that includes mobile as well).

They keep promising fibre. I’m not going to hold my breath.

There’s just me and it’s fast enough for the cheap tier of Netflix … which actually seems to be more than the advertised SD resolution as I can read the little text in the credits, I’m guessing it’s maybe somewhere between 720p and 1080p but more compressed than those who would show it on a big TV. After all, the compression is adaptive so it’s probably easier to just nudge it higher than to try to transcode everything to something crap like 480p.

Quick look at Google Maps … Oh my god, scenery to die for. But that location, isn’t it a bit cold in the winter?

that location, isn’t it a bit cold in the winter?

A quick search comes up with 0 – 5C. Slight more than a short-sleeved shirt and jeans required for comfort.