BT Unveils 1000Mbps Capable G.fast Broadband Rollout For the United Kingdom 132
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.
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> 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.
Finish the FTTC rollout first pls kthxbai (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
This seems to be a common problem. It was nearly three years from when they upgraded our exchange to when they did the cabinets. For the interim period you're in the weird position where querying the rollout information tells you that your exchange is in a state of "AO" (Accepting Orders), but if you try to order it you're told you can't have it. You can't get any projected date when it will be available, because if you go to the "When will FTTC be available?" pages you're told your exchange is already e
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BT has more precise data, but history tells us that idiots ruin it for everyone.
If you say "Your cabinet will probably be completed in May 2014" the idiots think that means "BT 100% guarantees that you personally will have service in May 2014, no matter what" and if there's a problem they immediately say BT are lying and should be punished. So you can imagine this definitely makes the people who figure out the estimates really feel valued, like a weather forecaster getting yelled at for the one day in six w
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BT has more precise data, but history tells us that idiots ruin it for everyone.
[snip rant]
You're using an argument technique known as "putting up a straw man". We're discussing the tendency of BT to upgrade exchanges long before they do the corresponding cabinets (which they do), so you raise an imagined case of one person behaving unreasonably because, although his local cabinets have been upgraded, he can't get service.
No wonder you posted as an AC.
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I can't even physically find the damn thing, no idea where they've hidden it. Maybe BT doesn't either.
Sadly this is a distinct possibility.
A friend of mine used to work for the german telecom and mentioned the increasing outsourcing of work to contractors on the cheap does indeed lead to a loss of local insider knowledge, like where the hell was that cabinet hidden?
He once lost precious time looking all over for one specific cabinet in a high street. Turned out he had to ask a front desk person of a bank for a key to open a hidden compartment in the banks marble facade lining to access it.
I'm sure BT with p
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Yep, this is all part of the great FTTC rollout scam.
All claims to date about hitting x% of the UK have been misleadingly based on number of exchanges upgraded. There are still thousands of cabinets that haven't been upgraded, and even where they have there are hundreds without sufficient capacity to all users.
There's no doubt that BT have broadened the rollout and UK broadband has therefore on average improved drastically, but there's been gross mismanagement of funds in that BDUK funding intended to subsi
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At least your exchange has FTTC. My exchange is one of the 1% that won't get FTTC until well after 2020, if at all, even though I live only a mile outside the edge of Bristol. At the moment, I only get 1 Mbit/sec on a good day and this won't increase until FTTC arrives.
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I get 3Mb, what is the problem is the last mile being made from aluminium wires.
500Mb/s or approx 50MB/s (Score:2)
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)
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If you're not on Gigabit already, I'll be surprised.
Even basic cheap laptop wireless, smartphone wireless and wireless routers are in the, what? 300Mbps or so range? Two or three of those and you can flood a Gigabit connection.
You would need a new router with BT anyway, because it's a new protocol. And then you'd need to throw away the BT router and buy a real one after the first week when you read how crap and insecure they are.
But there are £200 routers on the market that have triple WAN fa
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I was not talking about routers & servers at home - but the Internet backbones and the servers that people will be downloading stuff from and wanting to do so at higher speeds.
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And if Gigabit is already commodity hardware at home, and bog-standard small business switches are built with 48 ports of Gigabit plus whatever backbone for a few hundred quid for the last ten years, what do you think serious ISPs and datacentres have been using all that time for, say, leased line and stuff.
Of course it requires upgrades but they would need to have been a generation ahead since the start and kept replacing or they would not be able to handle anything.
BT are a telecoms company. They handle
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Newer Home Hub is combined. It's actually a good all in one box with AC wifi, gigabit networking etc.
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Even basic cheap laptop wireless, smartphone wireless and wireless routers are in the, what? 300Mbps or so range? Two or three of those and you can flood a Gigabit connection.
Sadly, not even close. While the manufacturers may claim 300Mbps or 600Mbps on the box, the likelihood of actually achieving that speed over wireless is pretty close to zero, and most smartphones and cheap laptops seem to be fitted with 802.11n "lite" (the 150mbit/s version) or the first iteration (the 300mbit/s version).
My rule of thumb for 802.11n (what most people have) is to divide by 5 and that is the throughput you're likely to receive. 802.11ac is a different story but still not anywhere close to the
What good is it? (Score:3)
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If that's what you want, check out Andrews & Arnold: http://aa.net.uk/
Not the cheapest around, but an *excellent* service run by very knowledgable techies, and they refuse to implement any sort of filtering (and regularly campaign and speak out against doing so).
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Multiple Netflix HD streams + iTunes apps downloads + Steam and Battle.net downloads and updates. The average Joe can use a lot of bandwidth these days, even legally.
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40K sessions isn't typical for the average Joe.
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Re: What good is it? (Score:2)
It's not 2001 bub. We use the Internet for a lot more than checking our email now.
Re: What good is it? (Score:3)
I'm sure your experience of living in your mum's basement has taught you exactly what UK broadband consumers' habits are.
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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.
Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
That's bullshit for a start, the rest likely is too
Telegraph poles mostly gone in UK (Score:1)
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.
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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 fe
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Complete nonsense!
Try this - go to Google Maps, pick a residential location at random and then drop in to Streetview. Unless you've picked a very recent housing estate, you will find you can see lots and lots of telegraph poles.
It might be true to say that new developments don't now have telegraph poles, but the vast majority of the UK still does.
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Imagine the work which would have been involved if what you are saying was true. They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?
You are right in saying that the bulk wiring - the connections which feed the telegraph poles - are now pretty much all underground. There aren't the masses of overhead wires which there were when I was a boy. The final connection to the houses though for the most part remain unchanged. Yes, new builds are all done u
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They'd have had to dig underground ducting in to everybody's garden. How did they do it without us noticing?
Presumably people did notice. The telephone connection to both of my last two houses comes in at the front, but there was a telegraph pole in the back of both with a wire going into the back (and then terminating). In both houses, the wire eventually fell off the back. I presume that the previous owners did notice when they re-did their telephone wiring...
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TechDirt [techdirt.com] refers to these announcements as "Fiber to the Press" technology.
Fantastic! (Score:1)
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
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Well, I've got 300mbps down and 30mbps up with FTTH on BT and no caps and I can always reach full speed if the remote server supports it
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My biggest issue tends to be server related
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Based on current deployments, probably 3 in posh areas, and 2 for everyone else.
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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?
I have BT infinity option 2 (Fibre to Cabinet):
- Unlimited bandwidth
- No throttling
- 80mbit download / 40mbit up, 24/7
The only "throttling" you get is at peak times due to network congestion, but even then i'am still unable to see any service impact or major delay.
As always with BT, it depends where you live.
If your lucky enough to be on a cabinet with only 20 connections and your exchange is running at less than 50% capacity, and, you live less than 100m away from the cabinet that doesnt rely on vintage 19
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Yeah, but this is how it was with ADSL too.
Back when ADSL rolled out, and people only got 512kbps, there were no limits. You could literally download constantly at maximum speed for the entire month.
Then along came ADSL Max and people got bumped to 1 - 2mbps. Suddenly caps started getting introduced, so low that your speed had gone up but the amount you could download had literally declined by several orders of magnitude.
So whilst with the advent of basic FTTC unlimited has once again become the norm, don't
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Yeah, but this is how it was with ADSL too.
Back when ADSL rolled out, and people only got 512kbps, there were no limits. You could literally download constantly at maximum speed for the entire month.
Then along came ADSL Max and people got bumped to 1 - 2mbps. Suddenly caps started getting introduced, so low that your speed had gone up but the amount you could download had literally declined by several orders of magnitude.
So whilst with the advent of basic FTTC unlimited has once again become the norm, don't count on currently unlimited bandwidth meaning perpetually unlimited bandwidth. It wouldn't be the first time in the UK that increases in speed have seemingly paradoxically meant decreases in the amount of data you're actually allowed to download. That's exactly what happened last time.
ummmmmm... nah , speeds went up to 1024 down ... ADSL MAX went up to 8mb down .
I have NEVER had anything other than unlimited with DSL.. EVER.. there have always been options for unmetered bandwidth.
so it's not what happened "last time" at all
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What ISPs have you been with over the last 15 years?
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Pipex 1014 down 256 up unmetered vanilla dsl
Pipex 2048 down 256 up unmetered vanilla dsl
Bulldog 8mb down 1mb up unmetered ADSL MAX
Bethere 24mb down and 2.5 up unmetered ADSL2+ with Annex M
BT 76mb down and 20up unmetered FTTC
AND when I move soon to my new place FTTH available at 330 down and 30 up unmetered
so i correct myself
NEVER EVER have i had a metered connection with a
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Pipex most definitely did cap, so I'm guessing the real issue is that you never hit them, or never used the protocols that got throttled down to modem speeds when you hit them. A quick internet search will confirm this as there are a number of posts on the topic from about 10 years ago.
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The only "throttling" you get is at peak times due to network congestion, but even then i'am still unable to see any service impact or major delay.
There is no excuse for having congestion in your network on a daily or weekly. It can happen once in a blue moon when a line becomes unexpectedly busy, but it should never be the normal mode of operations.
At least not in a pretend-first-world-country where it is easy to lay backbone fiber.
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In reality they lease equipment from BT and it's maintained by BT Openreach engineers
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I have BT infinity option 2 (Fibre to Cabinet):
- Unlimited bandwidth
- No throttling
- 80mbit download / 40mbit up, 24/7
Even BT at their most optimistic don't pretend to offer that. BT Infinity 2 offers up to 76 Mb/s downstream and up to 20 Mb/s upstream. I think you're confusing your upload speed with the download speed of BT Infinity 1.
Telegraph poles (Score:2)
G.fast? (Score:1)
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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No, I may have mistyped because I'm lazy, but I only work in "Mbps" being bits. When you want to talk bytes, I use "MB/s" like everyone else has does for years. Pedantry over the captialisation only came later. Generally, nobody states in "MBps" and means bytes or "Mb/s" and means bits.
ALL numbers in my post? Mbits. Fuck multiply by 8 if you want and it's still - on average - worse than the 4G on my phone in the same area, but that's NOT the number I'm getting.
While you're promising me shit... (Score:3)
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.
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BT street distribution cabinets "only" support VDSL. There is a copper pair back to the exchange for voice and ADSL.
Unlike most of the USA, the UK does not operate street concentrators for voice/data. There's no technical reason for this. It's all down to "traditional" operation methods.
Nor can residential lines get a "dry" data-only pair (no dialtone).
The result is that even VDSL users have several thousand feet of copper back to the "exchange" (actually a concentrator in 99% of installations) - for no goo
I'm remembering... (Score:2)
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.
Great!! Now what are we gonna use it for? (Score:2)
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 t
Sound similar to what AT&T tried to do (Score:2)
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
Just put fibre to the user (Score:2)
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
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Same old "up to" rubbish (Score:2)
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.
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Change ISP. Seriously.
The "big 6" will shag you about. If you move to AAISP or Zen or phone.coop (there are a lot more), they have a vested interested in keeping you happy and will keep tickets open until openbletch fix it.
uses more radio spectrum (Score:2)
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DSL services use a series of narrow bandwidth carriers across the spectrum. VDSL2 ranges from 100kHz 33MHz down the wire. G.fast adds more high frequencies.
The reality is that higher frequencies are more susceptable to crosstalk, have higher attentuation and are extremely touchy about bridge taps, bad joints, etc.
Whilst it's entirely _possible_ to run G.Fast on existing copper the question is whether it's _practical_ and the smart money is on it being a failure in service.
Then again, having announced it, BT
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Radio frequencies, sent down the wire.
Just like tv signals sent down coax, except in this case the feeder is loosely twisted pair with variable transmission characteristics and losses.
Yeah right (Score:2)
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 wi
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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.
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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.
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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
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Thatcher was Thunderscunt number 1 on every front.
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Yes, she was so universally bad that she was elected 3 times!
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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.
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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.
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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 starte
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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