The Wonders of Fibre Broadband

I have a customer who was on ADSL but needed faster upload speeds due to their need to support some services directly on the web. Currently with Eclipse but I investigated fibre optic broadband providers in the area but the best deal was with Eclipse and it gave them the least amount of hassel or so I thought. Virgin was a contender but curiously enough BT said it was not available in their area.

I was curious about how this fibre broadband was going to work so I contacted Eclipse and they assured me that it a simple procedure. Apparently its done by BT and yet they could not offer this service in that area? The engineer would just need to change the face plate on the phone line and install a modem and away we go. I suspected that the fibre optic cable was not actually in their street but wanted to know how much copper wire there was between us and the fibre connection. There is a big green telephone mini exchange by the side of the road at the end of the street but no sign that it has recently been modified with extra stuff or that the road has been dug up to lay a cable. If the fibre connection was coming from the main exchange then that would be a mile of copper at least. This is supposed to be a fibre to cabinet (FTTC) connection.

The day of installation came. The engineer was supposed to arrive between 8am and 5pm but we saw no sign of him. Ringing up about it we were told the installation had been defered due to "customer request". What a load of crap. I know someone was there early, no later than 8.07 so unless the guy turned up at 8am exactly I dont see how we could have missed him. Could not get another date until 10 days later! and this is how they treat their business customers.

Next installation date came and an engineer arrived at 11 am. He installed the face plate and showed me the uplink and downlink speeds on his test equipment. He then installed the vdsl modem. We could have had a router from Eclipse but my customer has a Draytek Vigor 2820 which is a great bit of kit allowing ADSL or ethernet connection. You would think that BT would instruct its engineers on how their equipment works as he did not know how the modem would connect to our network. I was assuming the modem was a bit like the cable modems you get with Virgin and it was just a case of plugging in the ethernet cable a bit of DHCP and away you go. No manual with the modem so instead I spoke to BT technical support and realised it was PPPoE so once I had set up the router with the same Eclipse settings as we had for ADSL we had broadband. The BT engineer was nice enough to try to help and his remit was just to show that the connection was working but he kept going on about his responsiblity being only up to the end point and I felt that he just wanted to get out of there so I said that I would deal with it and ring techincal support if I needed help.

Now for the speed test. We were supposed to get 40mbit download and 10mbit upload but a simple test in the afternoon gave a speed on 17mbit download and 6.7 mbit upload. They say they guarentee a 12bit download speed throughout the day and I still need to do some tests to get a sense of what speeds they can expect. There are usage limits but these are quite generous at 200GB per month and its unlimited 11pm to 9am.

The customer really needed to upload speed as opposed to download. The previous ADSL cost £30 per month with a 20GB download limit, 8mbit download (6mbit at most really) and 0.5mbit upload. The new fibre costs £50 per month with a 200GB download limit, 40mbit download (17mbit best sofar) and 10mbit upload (6.7 sofar), so in all I would say that this is a good cost top benefit improvement.

I can see where fibre broadband is the next step to improve speeds by doing the FTTC stuff. You get fibre optic as close as you can to your home without it coming right up to your door, but even if it arrives in my area I still have 2 miles of copper cable to get to my house from the cabinet. At least my customer was only 50m away, and of course if everyone uses it, will we see the same old problem of contension ratios slowing everyone down again?