OT internet speed or options

[Ken]

Move .... our house is up for sale!

 

So is ours !!

[Jeff]

We are fortunate to now have B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) super fast fibre optic broadband up to 1000mps both up and down despite the fact we are a mile from the nearest village.  VOIP is also available. BT service was crap offering 1/2mps so it was free! 

Mind you it has taken over 2 years to get the project up and running as they depend on volunteers (like me) orgnbising interest, land owners permission and funding.  B4RN bury all of their ducting so its now exposed loike overland supply.  They now have a large presence in Lancashire, Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Northumberland and as a not-for-profit organisation are well worth pursuing

[Clifford Pope]

Our Broadband comes down a fibre-optic cable to a small box on the wall, and then to a special router inside.
There are five ethernet sockets for connections to computers,and an old fashioned phone socket which I connected to our existing extension phone network in the house. The old landline phones, including my vintage phones and an old brass bell on a wooden box in the kitchen still work exactly as before, make the old ring noise, and keep the old number.

We live in an isolated house in the country, down a small lane, and had an abysmal internet connection before - 0.5Mbps on a good day. Now since they put new poles down the lane carrying the broadband cables we get 150Mbps, plus the phone connection. The old poles came cross-country, the new ones follow the roads.

It's a misnomer to call the old system a "landline". The broadband cable is just a different kind of wire but is still a "landline" hung on poles. The engineer showed me how they join it together, using a device looking very like the old splicer for joining tapes and cine film. They identify the particular "wire" at a pole or junction by shining a torch down it at the house end and seeing which strand lights up at the other end.

In many respects it's all comfortingly old-tech!
The only drawback is if the internet goes down, which is very rare now, the phone goes off too, and of course when there is a powercut everything stops working.

[andyjb]

John
I'm not sure if this helps. We was on EE back in the summer. Contract was up so went into our local EE shop and spoke to them about a new deal. They offered us BT fibre and could have a landline if wanted, and it was a cheaper deal too. So it might be worth going to the shop if you haven't already. We've had no issues with it either.

[John]

John
I'm not sure if this helps. We was on EE back in the summer. Contract was up so went into our local EE shop and spoke to them about a new deal. They offered us BT fibre and could have a landline if wanted, and it was a cheaper deal too. So it might be worth going to the shop if you haven't already. We've had no issues with it either.

Thank you, I will be off to the shop next week, might well get another option.
We need a land Line and fibre inernet, and need the land line to work when we have a power cut
I would have thought many house fires cause or have been caused by electrical problems so we need a working landline to call the fire brigade as our mobile signal is hit and miss or throgh the mains powered internet

[John]

Been to the EE shop this morning, (after a very long wait to speak to anyone ) I spoke to a nice chap who explained that if I do it now I will not have a land line but he said he would phone me at 2.00pm, 12 of April next year as on that day the system will change for my post code and I can have super fast broardband and a land line phone, and the equipment to boost the mobile signalin my house

He did say this will cost more but would offer larger discounts on my phone contacts to offset some of this

I will wait and see, and as said going to the shop gets another answer to the phone call, Thank you

[jonhutchings]

I'm pretty sure what you will get will be your phone via your fibre, not a separate land line (i.e copper cable) The issue is that it will only work when there is power for the equipment, so is frankly useless in an emergency during a power cut (e.g a fire, or you just want to phone the power company to see when the power will be back!)

All the VOIP providers put a little bit of small print saying the service can not be relied on for emergency calls, primarily for this reason (and also because with the smaller voip providers at the moment they have to bridge emergency calls out onto the "real" phone network and only have limited numbers of such connections which they have to pay for).

Lift phones are interesting ..... it's important that they work in a power failure situation - since that is when it's most likely you'll need to use them - many lifts have poor mobile signal due to being a big metal box inside a faraday cage lift shaft.  The nice thing about the old analogue network was the power often was not local, being a 50v supply over the phone line from the exchange

If anyone is interested or concerned (i.e maybe you don't want to rely on a mobile in an emergency) ofcom has some regulation about this , and you can get battery backups etc.

There is a fairly good gov web page about this (not that this is really anything to do with the government and is all around the technology)

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-digital-landlines

[richardhula]

Our future fibre provider County Broadband, due to considerable delays (we have been connected locally with router supplied since May) have offered free battery backup in case of power cut and an upgrade to 600mbps. VOIP box still to be provided with cloned present number. Advised service will be imminent although expected to be January now.

[Wittsend]

Just changed to EE
Broadband all over the place today. Man working in the green box at the end of our road and this appeared on the telegraph pole outside our house. I wonder if that's the permanent solution ...

Further more, the new EE router may technically be better than the old BT box, but the activity lights are small and not obvious when looking at an angle 

Back on now with 22 Mbps download and 12 Mbps upload which is about the same as we had with BT - but EE are BT are Openreach 

[diffwhine]

Not quite Alan...
BT/EE had to offload Openreach due to competition monopoly rules.They are ostensibly now two separate entities.

[John]

I'm watching this but I may be getting  

The EE man says all copper cables now removed in my postcode but I have copper into the house that joins to fibre in a hole in the pavement box just outside my house and I have phone and copper cable internet that EE call fibre on the bill but when you ask them they say its not and if I want fibre now then no pnone, but call in february and I can have a phone and fibre broardband.

Can we have the GPO man on his bike back please?

[Theshed]

We recently upgraded to 'Full Fibre'. I was told the previous fibre went upto the nearest junction box, whereas the Full Fibre comes into the house.
The first OpenReach engineer wired us up to a box just inside the house. Explaining to my wife that this was the best place.
The Tv, Router, and hardwired PC are on the otherside of the house. Now this is just a normal sized semi- but this would mean wires trailing around, so I complained.
Reluctantly a guy comes back out. Looks at the installation and said 'why did she put it there ... O, because it was easier !
He did not have enough cable to refit, as they cannot join, so a couple of days later he returned and fitted a new cable.