We have very good broadband on copper to the cabinet (72mbps). Channel 4 streaming IS TERRIBLE..., all the rest (BBC, ITV, C5) are fine. C4 buffers continuously, so my diagnostic skills tell me it's their problem not mine...
If they bring FTTP they will put a fibre termination on the outside of your house so that they can access and test the fibre without disturbing you, then run a thin CAT5e through the wall to their router inside the house.
In terms of the under stairs presentation, you can run thin CAT5e - 6mm wide and <1mm thick - round the edge of your carpet and across doors under the brass carpet strip to get to the under stairs, then put a gigabit switch on the end of the cable and plug all of your other cables into it. A 16 port switch - new- will cost about £50 or less. If you need more than 16 ports you can get a 24 port or 32port off eBay for simple money. Two things: do NOT get a managed switch as it will take a lot of time and effort to get the config right, and make sure whatever you get does NOT have a fan, they are simply too noisy.
Finally, make sure you have the fibre installed and tested BEFORE you cease your existing line else you will loose your existing number. Get that moved onto the FTTP circuit then cease the line. The fibre router should have a PSTN socket for your phone(s).
Per anyone on VM, up to 300Mb supplied a few years ago is fibre to the cabinet and coax to the house. VM have now upgraded many areas to be able to supply gigabit but at what a price! Any supplier that has different speeds down and up (often 10:1 or 5:1) are using FTTC: FTTP (despite what many web sites say) should be reciprocal, same up as down.
I don't think that's correct at least not what BT do.
The fibre runs up to the house and through the wall. Inside there is a small box known as an ONT.....optical network terminator. This is where the fibre is terminated and the optical signal converted to an electrical signal. A Cat6 cable goes from the ONT to the router.
You need mains power for both the ONT and router
Speeds do confuse me, I previously had 200/20, when my new installation it completed I should get 900/900. Bit I am temporally on a dongle with sim card. Some days it works fine and supports the TV with no buffering. Other days are bad. I did some checking on what actual speed I was getting, 3.8mbps at worst, when it went up to 11 it actually worked OK, just. So if I can stream at 11, at 900 it may go into orbit.
City Fibre install as Sam describes.
I am a little worried about my land line number. When I agreed with Vofafone they said they has secured my number. But now, due to the delay in getting my fibre up and running, I will be in limbo, between providers, until my contract starts with Vodafone.
John
City Fibre install as Sam describes.
I am a little worried about my land line number. When I agreed with Vofafone they said they has secured my number. But now, due to the delay in getting my fibre up and running, I will be in limbo, between providers, until my contract starts with Vodafone.
John
I may well be out of touch with what "Joe public" is up to and requires in respect to internet data speeds, but what are the real-life benefits to this particular audience, ie the normal house holder, of these super speeds?
We bumble along at achieved 70/75 mbps down and 20 up, and have no perceived issues with bottle necks of our own making, many websites we visit can be themselves slow to react; investing in a faster home connection I can't see helping there.
I can see a value within a household of many users who simultaneously are into very high bandwidth requiring pursuits.
Certainly, since they went to fibre to the cabinet a few metres up the lane and replaced my aluminium wire with a cable, reliability stepped up a league, so I can see reliability could be a driver for optical transmission.
Presently I have resisted the seduction coming from my provider to pay for something faster, as I can't yet see the benefit to us.
We bumble along at achieved 70/75 mbps down and 20 up, and have no perceived issues with bottle necks of our own making, many websites we visit can be themselves slow to react; investing in a faster home connection I can't see helping there.
I can see a value within a household of many users who simultaneously are into very high bandwidth requiring pursuits.
Certainly, since they went to fibre to the cabinet a few metres up the lane and replaced my aluminium wire with a cable, reliability stepped up a league, so I can see reliability could be a driver for optical transmission.
Presently I have resisted the seduction coming from my provider to pay for something faster, as I can't yet see the benefit to us.
I can understand your anxiety and judging by experiences of our friends and neighbours rightly so. I'm sure in towns and cities installation and change overs may be a little easier to do but here on Skye there have been many problems with BT.
We have two friends close by that lost their number, one also lost his service and had to go onto a mobile network solution that was very poor. The first one got their number back fairly quickly. The second one had to haggle with BT for 7 months to get back their original service and number. They received compensation.
In comparison ours was fairly straight forward in switching from John Lewis(Plusnet) to BT FTTP. We had many delays and canceled appointments and this affected the wired John Lewis service as BT repeatedly told them we were moving and JL were going to cancel our contact. Fortunately we kept on top of it and managed to keep JL up and running.
When the BT FTTP did go live we had both fibre and the old wired connection running in parallel and just as well. When BT turned on our Digital Voice we could make outgoing calls but incoming calls would only come in on the old wired JL service. It took weeks to resolve but we got there and at no point did we lose our number.
So good luck.
This is what I believed. I think if I go this route I can have the ONT in the front room (which has an outside wall to the front of the house with easy routing across the lawn), then plug it into an Ethernet port in that room which will go to my ‘network cupboard’ where I can house the router. From there I can then use the Ethernet ports on the router plus a network switch (which I already have) for Ethernet distribution around the house.
I can’t run any cables, thin or otherwise, under carpets etc as most of the floor area downstairs is uncarpeted. The whole reason I had Ethernet run throughout the house when we renovated it several years ago was to avoid having cabling run around the place. Same goes for the exterior - no visible aerial, satellite or EV charger cables; all run directly into the house and are run in walls or through roof voids. I can’t stand visible cabling!
Since we moved into this house just over three years ago I have removed so much interior and exterior cabling it is hard to know what the previous owners did with it. Some bedrooms would have three power sockets all together and then a couple more elsewhere in the room for good measure. two telephone lines with extension running havens knows where, sat and terrestrial cables. All now removed and holes in walls filled, and skirtings made good. I use wifi around the house with TP-Link extenders, plus two mobile land lane phones. Tv is on satellite so just the two cables into the lounge and straight into the back of the TV.
Your right to question what you actually need. More and more we are seduced into having bigger better technology that we don't actually need.
So it all depends on what you want to do. Large households with kids that are always on line may benefit from having a faster broadband connection so that simultaneous use is reasonably good for everyone. Businesses run from home where lots of data has to be exchanged may also benefit.
However, most of us old codgers in our community are just two folks wanting to stream videos and share a few files occasssionally and most of us did this quite well on the old ADSL 6/0.3 Mbps lines. They just weren't reliable so lots of us switched. Some wanted to be better than their neighbour and went for as fast as possible but in reality it doesn't improve their life.
The base offering at the time from BT was 36/10Mbps but for a pound more you could get 50/10 and I chose that.
To me the benefits over the wired system - apart from reliability - is that the annoying updates from Microsoft or Adobe for instance are over quicker and allow me to get on with what I want to really do on my PC. One of the biggest benefits was the much faster upload speed because I do share large files with family, friends and neighbours.
One thing to keep in mind which I think a lot of people overlook is that if you chose a very fast service like 900Mbps can your internal links - cable or wifi keep up with this. Typical wired ethernet systems may be 10/100Mbps so pusing 900Mbps into this wire isn't going to acheive anything. Wifi links can be typically from 72Mbps upwards so the same may apply.
Its like buying car that can run at 200mph and then using it on country roads where the speed limit is 40mph.
Pays your money and takes your choice
One additional point that I've made before.
Wired connections are going to be phased out in about 3 years (but knowing how BT works could be 30 years
)
This means we'll all have to switch over to Digital Voice or Voice over IP. The one problem you have to consider with this is if there's a power cut or your broadband goes down you wont be able to make a phone call - even and emergency call.
If you have a good mobile signal this may not worry you but we don't and often when there's a power cut the poor mobile signal disappears completely.
Ofcom recommend the Communication Providers supply battery back up units to those in vunerable areas. Good luck with that. We had to argue with BT for many months before we got ours. And such is BTs wonderful organisation we got 5 when we only need 2. One for the ONT and one for the router.
Wired connections are going to be phased out in about 3 years (but knowing how BT works could be 30 years
)This means we'll all have to switch over to Digital Voice or Voice over IP. The one problem you have to consider with this is if there's a power cut or your broadband goes down you wont be able to make a phone call - even and emergency call.
If you have a good mobile signal this may not worry you but we don't and often when there's a power cut the poor mobile signal disappears completely.
Ofcom recommend the Communication Providers supply battery back up units to those in vunerable areas. Good luck with that. We had to argue with BT for many months before we got ours. And such is BTs wonderful organisation we got 5 when we only need 2. One for the ONT and one for the router.
One reason we keep the landlines is emergency calls as our mobile signal is dire. We can use mobiles with WiFi calling but if power is out we then have an old style plug in telephone to fall back on. Just have to see what tge change over to VOIP brings. But being old and vulnerable may get us battery back up, but I might look out to some old ex MOD signal lamps or semaphore flags.One additional point that I've made before.
Wired connections are going to be phased out in about 3 years (but knowing how BT works could be 30 years
This means we'll all have to switch over to Digital Voice or Voice over IP. The one problem you have to consider with this is if there's a power cut or your broadband goes down you wont be able to make a phone call - even and emergency call.
If you have a good mobile signal this may not worry you but we don't and often when there's a power cut the poor mobile signal disappears completely.
Ofcom recommend the Communication Providers supply battery back up units to those in vunerable areas. Good luck with that. We had to argue with BT for many months before we got ours. And such is BTs wonderful organisation we got 5 when we only need 2. One for the ONT and one for the router.
We bought this house as a total wreck - the whole house was renovated from floor to roof, along with a couple of extensions and internal restructuring. I designed it all, including what utilities to have and where. As a consequence I know where all the wires go and there's always a plug near where I want one. Every habitable room has at least 2 Ethernet and 2 coax sockets, with heavy use areas like the lounge, living room and office having 4 Ethernet points each. The satellite dish cabling runs straight through the wall behind the dish into the roof void and ultimately to the network cupboard. We have no aerial. The only external cable at all that is tacked to the wall is a short section of the current phone/broadband copper wire that runs along the front of the house at low level for a couple of metres before heading inside.
Inside I can patch any room to any other and to any device via coax or Ethernet. We have a quad LNB on the satellite dish, although only currently use two feeds for Sky Q - the other two could theoretically run a single feed service to two other rooms (eg Freesat). The internal network is all Cat6 connected via a gigabit switch so can support gigabit speeds. I also have a Wifi router and additional Wifi repeater and use Wifi where necessary.
In truth most of it doesn't get used. None of the bedroom have any Ethernet devices in them nor use the coax. The office and both living rooms use Ethernet extensively (games consoles, Sky Q, smart TV, printer, laptops etc). However I decided to run it all when I had the chance, since all the walls were being plastered so could be channelled for cabling.
Our current FTTC broadband works OK for us - in the depths of lockdown we had four of us on Teams/Zoom calls concurrently with only minor issues and we often stream 4K content easily. The main place where a faster download speed would help is large game updates or downloads for the X-Box, which my son does every so often. If I can get significantly faster speeds for the same or similar cost, without a huge disruption to the house, I'm up for it.
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