Why is VM Broadband different?

[Terry]

4 miles up the road from me in an ordinary outer London suburb they struggle to get 5Mb/s with neither fibre nor cable.

Funny how BT don't seem interested in lots of areas with no cable competition, isn't it?

About 3 or 4 years ago a company was set up to address that very problem. It would only be financially viable if they were the sole fibre provider in an area.

They chose an area - in the West Country, I believe - where BT had stated that they had no intention of providing fibre and sought permission from all the authorities concerned to install their network. Without warning, BT changed their minds and started installing fibre ...

I don't know if the company gave up after that but I haven't heard of any similar fibre networks elsewhere.

[Terry]

Apparently the competition does still exist, aided now by Ofcom telling BT that it must make its ducts and poles available to competitors which, it is said, would shave 40% off the cost of building a competitive network - an advantage that the company I referred to in my previous post didn't have. There is also a plan for BT to share its dark fibre with other operators.

See:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016...mpetition/

http://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/cityfi...ach-190437

... but that doesn't mean that everybody is happy ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016...it-protec/

I'm not so sure about that dark fibre policy. When a network operator installs fibre it makes sense to install much more than initially required because it is much cheaper than pulling more fibre later as the system expands.

If other operators are to have access to this dark fibre, what do BT do when all the fibre is in use and they have customers requesting FTTH or they want to provide their service to new housing developments that spring up along the way?

[pwdrive]

It's all a con if you ask me...bring back the GPO.

Lawrence.

[Raditechman]

Yesterday (Friday) was the day I changed from ADSL+ to FTTC. I took of my old router and plugged in the new. Fortunately the plugs and power requirements were the same , so a very simple swap over.
On the ADSL+ I had around 15Mbs download.
On the FTTC I have done 3 peed checks, yesterday on the first  test I had 41Mbs download, later in the day it had dropped to 38mbs and then very strangely this morning in read 75.68mbs which I did not think was possible with FTTC. I used the same PC and speed checking site for all 3 tests. The upload speed is around 2Mbs.
So I am getting faster speed and £3 cheaper per month.

Joh

[Mike Watterson]

FTTC can be 200Mbps. Or even more. It depends how far you are from the cabinet, quality of the Cat3 and crosstalk. The gear in the cabinet can be a type that automatically does VDSL or ADSL2+ (or in some places, G.fast, a pointless system compared to FTTP/FTTH). FTTC can simply result in ADSL2+, but faster as the cabinet is closer than exchange (a friend switched from ADLS2+ from exchange to ADSL2+ from a local cabinet has gone from 3Mbps to 37Mbps).
Ethernet manages 1Gbps over copper twisted pair at 100m by using four pairs in parallel and Cat5e cable (much better cable). So it's quite amazing how fast data on a single Cat3 pair can be in ideal conditions.

[Mark Hennessy]

Ethernet manages 1Gbps over copper twisted pair at 100m by using four pairs in parallel and Cat5e cable

Cat 5

[Mike Watterson]

Has anyone sold plain Cat5 in the last 10 years?

[Nick]

Ethernet manages 1Gbps over copper twisted pair at 100m by using four pairs in parallel and Cat5e cable

Cat 5

...not just CAT5 or better plus all four pairs, but also a completely different encoding scheme.

Use of all 4 pairs make PoE more interesting...

[Mike Watterson]

ADSL and VDSL is more like DVB-T and DAB, 1G Ethernet is more like DVB-C on four twisted pairs.
Ironically audio on twisted pair phone uses echo cancellation (hybrid) to send and receive on same band. ADSL and VDSL use different frequency bands for the COFDM transmission downstream and upstream. The 1G ethernet uses echo cancellation and transmits and receives on the pair at the same time in same "band".
All a simplification.
In the early days of twisted pair ethernet only two pairs used, so people sold splitters to put two connections on one cable. I bet someone still sells them to the unwary!

[Mark Hennessy]

Still very much available, and useful:

http://www.canford.co.uk/Index/Category-...ECONOMISER

They explain that they can't be used for Gb Ethernet, so can't complain at that.