General > General Technical Chat
Australian NBN out of DOCSIS NTDs: restock guessing game
coppice:
--- Quote from: Monkeh on February 20, 2021, 04:52:11 pm ---I'm not hugely pleased that the country-wide monopoly has been promising they're going to deploy fibre here for over a year while their copper slowly but surely degrades, but they are actually working on it.
--- End quote ---
With fibre you get multiple monopolies. You are either in the BT zone, or the Virgin zone, or the TalkTalk zone, and have only one option.
I think TalkTalk get a bad rap. When we had 1Mbps ADSL we had considerable trouble with flaky performance, but it was all OpenReach's fault. TalkTalk did their part as promptly as they could.
Monkeh:
--- Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2021, 05:06:02 pm ---I think TalkTalk get a bad rap. When we had 1Mbps ADSL we had considerable trouble with flaky performance, but it was all OpenReach's fault. TalkTalk did their part as promptly as they could.
--- End quote ---
It took us months to get TalkTalk to let us use the Openreach line in this house when we moved in, during which they disclosed confidential billing information of the previous owners. I do not deal with them.
madires:
--- Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2021, 01:47:34 pm ---
--- Quote from: Halcyon on February 20, 2021, 04:17:19 am ---Internet is also priced fairly competitively. I pay just over $100/month for a 100/40 Mbit connection (the fastest I can get on my technology) with unlimited data and a static public IPv4 address.
--- End quote ---
I assume you mean Australian dollars, which I think is about US$80. For 100Mbps that's a price you can only get in 2021 when there is no competition at all.
--- End quote ---
Over here VDSL 100/50 is EUR 45 (dynamic IPv4 and IPv6).
nfmax:
--- Quote from: coppice on February 20, 2021, 04:42:57 pm ---
--- Quote from: Monkeh on February 20, 2021, 03:47:15 pm ---Well, the map I linked shows you actual fibre availability. You can also see G.9701 (G.fast, to use the stupid name BT pushed), which is the '300Mbps' copper service, which barely exists because they've completely stopped deployment in favour of fibre. It's no longer a trial.
About 80% of my town can have fibre installed now. I'm in the 20% which cannot - but they just completed some new ductwork last week at one end of my estate, so it should be arriving soon..
--- End quote ---
As I said, our home has shown "actual fibre availability" for about two and a half years. When that started all we could get was about 1Mbps ADSL. A few months later they installed a VDSL cabinet, and we upgraded. Nobody is even suggesting a possible date when we might have a faster service. Having only installed VDSL after some estates in York were getting FTTH we are not expecting FTTH for several years.
--- End quote ---
Nobody will ever suggest a possible date until it's actually available - officially. The timetable here (a rural area with VDSL, but only at very low speeds, <5Mb/s) was:
* March 2020 - I spotted a man in a van (not Openreach) wandering around looking at poles. Asked him if he was lost and he said, no he was surveying poles for fibre, but told me not to hold my breath
* October 2020 - hordes of Openreach vans appeared and spent a couple of weeks stringing up overhead fibre cable and putting up oddly-shaped black boxes on the poles. One of the the installers told me they had a problem with a blocked duct, and were waiting for an underground team. A few days later, another chap told me there was in fact no duct at all
* January 2021 - a team with a ditching machine turned up and started putting duct into the road, in an oddly-arranged patchwork. Clearly there was some ducting, in weird places...
* Early February 2021 - another team turned up in the pouring rain and started digging holes in the roadside verges, and installing new boxes in the brown soup of liquid mud that instantly filled them. Water was pouring out of the ends of the ducts
* Mid February 2021 - the rain stopped, cable was pulled into the duct, and the next week I spotted a chap sat in a hole in the ground with a fusion splicer. He said the fibre would be lit up in a couple of days
* Late February 2021 - I had one of those nuisance phone calls, "Hello mr nfmax, this is BT calling about your Internet..." As is my wont, I put the phone down on the lady, then reflected that it might, conceivably actually have been BT calling about my Internet. Went to the BT website broadband availability checker, and yes, FTTP was available! Up to 990Mb/s! I immediately ordered an install (from Andrews & Arnold, not BT) and I have a provisional install date of March 16th, the earliest I can manage. I've passed the good news on to those among the neighbours in the 16 or so houses & farms that appear to be served by this installation. None of them had been informed about the availability: at least two have already placed orders
I have noticed over the past couple of years that phone poles in the villages round here are starting to sprout fibre hardware: odd shaped black boxes, with the giveaway of little square yellow signs on the poles saying "Caution overhead fibre". There doesn't seem any particular rhyme or reason to the deployment locations, though. And of course where the cabling is underground you wont see the hardware. Your best bet may be to start chatting with Openreach technicians if/when you see them
coppice:
--- Quote from: nfmax on February 20, 2021, 06:38:01 pm ---Nobody will ever suggest a possible date until it's actually available - officially. The timetable here (a rural area with VDSL, but only at very low speeds, <5Mb/s) was:
--- End quote ---
That's not entirely true. Our local MP got Openreach to come to local meetings in various villages, and present a timescale for VDSL installation. They never kept to any of the dates they gave, but they gave some. :)
I think some of the areas around York are still waiting for their VDSL cabinet to be installed.
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