On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 12:55:11 +0100, mark wrote:

Latest was yesterday. He told me it would be faster and more reliable
with BT. I suggested that the cables are the same so how would it be
faster. He told me that their fibre cables run parallel to the old
wire cables. how can I confirm this?

Are you on ADSL (up to 8 Mbps) or VDSL (Up to 38 or 76 Mbps)?

What that sales droid said might be half correct, you could get a
considerable speed increase by switching from ADSL to VDSL. The
village has recently become "fibre enabled", people down there were
lucky to get 1 Mbps on ADSL. VDSL from the new cabinet just outside
the village provides those same people with 30 to 40 Mbps. However
the fibre only runs to the cabinet (in the same ducting as the phone
lines from the exchange), but the last hop from the cabinet to
premesis is on the existing copper.

If he insists that the fibre runs all the way to the premises and
only wants a £100 or so install fee make it a term of the contract,
record the phone call, get emails, anything. Then don't be
disappointed when they don't deliver/cancel the order or be prepared
for a BIG argument if they do.

Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) is available but install costs have four
or five figures before the decimal point. BT are also playing with
FTTP on Demand but last time I looked they hadn't really thought
about
costings. FTTPoD ought to be vastly cheaper as any "excess
construction" is only charged from the nearest fibre node (joint box
in the installed fibre network) which may well be very close rather
than a "point of precense" that could be tens of miles away. But for
anything over 200 m from the fibre node you are still looking at four
figures...

BT Openreach now have huge amounts of spare capacity to all but the
smallest places. The afforementioned village cabinet serves about 100
customers and required 40 km of new fibre to be installed, admitedly
that 40 km of fibre also serves another half dozen or so cabinets in
this exchange area (and possibly enroute as well) but there are only
1200 customers in this area total, of which a number are too far from
a cabinet
to benefit from FTTC.

Once the dust has settled from BDUK Phase 1 and proper work starts on
Phase 2, BT Openreach will be looking at how to get this spare
capacity earning money.

--
Cheers
Dave.