Fibre broadband - is it a con?

[Dave2002]

I believe that optical fibre has been installed in the road outside our house, and now we get "offers" to switch to another provider. I would if it made sense, though others are saying - "but it'll work faster".

However we are only a hundred metres or so from the green box which brings Open Reach fibre to our neighbourhood, with a copper link the last few metres to our house.

I periodically check the performance of the networks using various speed tests, and typically it goes something like this:

Ping 40 ms [probably less than an eye blink]
Download 67-72 Mbps
Upload 16-18 Mbps.

Quite often the response times for web queries and other activities are quite long.

However, I believe that is because the remote servers are not coping with queries fast enough, and has nothing to do with the network data rates.

Am I wrong?

There are several "packages" being offered to connect direct to the new fibre system, offering high data rates, but clearly at a range of increasing prices.

Surely we could listen to several radio stations, and view several HD TV channels simultaneously with the data rates we are currently getting, and delivery of radio and TV via internet is not normally a major problem anyway.

It would be good to have faster response times, but that seems to me to have very little to do with network data rates - unless the network providers are deliberately slowing down some traffic to force us to "upgrade" to a different package. That wouldn't surprise me.

An added complication is "what companies or organisations are we dealing with?". Currently we are on EE, which I have been told is just a BT subsidiary anyway, so the services have been provided by BT OpenReach. The "new" fibre is maybe Highland Broadband, but is that a different organisation, or simply another repackaging of BT?

[Petrushka]

Don't know about being a con but in the summer of 2021 a firm called Lila Connect dug up nearly every pavement in town creating a lot of mess, disruption and traffic chaos. The parent company later went bust and although I still see them advertising on Facebook, only a small number of residents took it up.

Then in the following summer, 2022, Virgin Media dug up the whole lot again, but didn't use the part previously dug up by Lila. It was another summer of chaos, mess, traffic disruption and my front wall got damaged (again). The pavements were left in such a bad state that our local MP got involved.

I'm not sure what the take up for Virgin was but we keep on getting junk mail from them which suggests that it wasn't great.

[HighlandDougie]

Definitely not a con. With nine neighbouring households in 2020, we got a grant from the UK Government (stealing a march on the Scottish Government) which (almost) wholly paid for Openreach to install FTTP (fibre to the premises) to each of us. It was then open to each house to decide on which provider to supply the service, with OpenReach remaining in charge of the fibre network and installing the necessary fibre "wiring" in each house. As a very, very small and very rural scheme, not many providers were going to be interested in us. I chose BT, although I understand that Highland Broadband (and a couple of others) will now supply a service. Unlike Petrushka's experience of Virgin Media, OpenReach - or, rather, their subcontractors - were fastidious in not creating mess and keeping disruption to a minimum.

Apart from the speed - you get what you pay for - the best thing has been the resilience of it. I will probably live to regret saying this but I can't recall a single loss of the fibre service in almost four years, apart from during power outages. Here in France - and we still have copper pushed to its maximum in our village in the sticks - breaks in service are just a bit too frequent . One reason why I would never rely wholly on streaming. Virtual meetings/presentations using MS Teams or Zoom can be slightly more stressful as one never knows when, "No Internet", messages might suddenly appear.

[gurnemanz]

Not a con hereabouts either (small town in Wilts). We're with BT and they offered us full fibre two years ago. They came and strung a wire from our house to the nearest telegraph pole. We got a new hub and two replacement digital landline phones. Previously we were getting a download speed of 30-40 Mbps. Now get 250-300. All works well and we had nothing extra to pay.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It’s only a con when they tell you it’s fibre broadband, when it isn’t. It needs to be fed from a fibre broadband cable in the street to your home using an optical fibre cable. I had that at my previous house and the result was superb.

[Dave2002]

It’s only a con when they tell you it’s fibre broadband, when it isn’t. It needs to be fed from a fibre broadband cable in the street to your home using an optical fibre cable. I had that at my previous house and the result was superb.

An added complication is that it seems that phone services are going to be switched to broadband next year - though whether that means that BT/EE will still supply a service if they aren't going to do the last relatively few yards of copper cable, I don't know - or replace that with fibre.

One possibility - and don't call me suspicious - is that they are trying to persuade us to change and pay somehow for the cost of digging up and installing a fibre cable, rather than having to do it themselves in order to provide service continuity.

My main concern is actually that higher network speed does not necessarily correlate with more responsive performance. It seems very clear to me that our current connection is more than fast enough to cope with current loads, but it is not responsive. As mentioned earlier, I believe this is because of bottlenecks elsewhere - but our local network into our house is able to work at high enough data rates. So the con is trying to persuade us to upgrade or maybe change providers on a false premise.

[smittims]

I know nothing about speed or quality, but I echo Petrushka''s experience. The zzoomm company have spent the last three or four years going round our estate repeatedly digging up the same pavements (on a sort of 'painting the Forth Bridge' rotation) with apalling noise and mess. I've complained to them and to the council but of course one just gets fobbed off with 'weasel words'. The waste of energy and resources must be colossal. Unless the workmen are simply incompetent, no-one seems to explain why they come back again and again to the same places.

Zzoomm send me a 'special offer' leaflet once a month but I've vowed never to have anything to do with them .

[Ein Heldenleben]

If our are getting 69 mbps then fibre over the last few meters is pretty pointless unless you have a family all gaming. Or want to download large files quickly. There are so many other factors driving the quality of the streaming pictures you get and indeed average broadband speeds ( like the choke points mentioned above ) that it’s almost certainly not worth a lot of extra money. Thing is though these, days the extra cost of going from 65 to say 100 + mbps is so small most people do it . Then it’s just a question of whether you go for underground cable or slung cable. One thing watch where they put a new router with slung cable - it often goes in a first floor room and any speed gains will be quickly wiped out by thick walls and floors.

[HighlandDougie]

It’s only a con when they tell you it’s fibre broadband, when it isn’t. It needs to be fed from a fibre broadband cable in the street to your home using an optical fibre cable. I had that at my previous house and the result was superb.

And that's what you get with 'Fibre to the Premises', FTTP. Optical cable all the way. In my case from the main exchange in Pitlochry via the local exchange just across the river and then strung to my house. The others get it via ducts. No copper involved, only glass (or something like it). The key figure is the 'ping' - the lower the better. A ping of 40ms is OK but not that great. Satellite may promise fast download speeds but is often accompanied by a very high 'ping' so it can seem to take forever for a website to load. So, if the 'offer' referred to by Dave is for FTTP fibre internet to the house I can't see how that constitutes a false premise as the end result represents a significant improvement to what copper cable can provide.

As I said earlier, the copper-based service I have here in France from Orange - VDSL 2 - is copper taken to its limits, speed- and capacity-wise. It's satisfactory in terms of speed for most needs but its capacity to stutter along - or, simply, not to work, sometimes for days - is rather more than an inconvenience when trying to make a presentation to countries all over the globe and you are suddenly cut off. Fibre is everywhere else in our valley and our Mayor assures me that it will arrive here "soon". It can't come a moment too soon.

[LMcD]

An added complication is that it seems that phone services are going to be switched to broadband next year - though whether that means that BT/EE will still supply a service if they aren't going to do the last relatively few yards of copper cable, I don't know - or replace that with fibre.

One possibility - and don't call me suspicious - is that they are trying to persuade us to change and pay somehow for the cost of digging up and installing a fibre cable, rather than having to do it themselves in order to provide service continuity.

My main concern is actually that higher network speed does not necessarily correlate with more responsive performance. It seems very clear to me that our current connection is more than fast enough to cope with current loads, but it is not responsive. As mentioned earlier, I believe this is because of bottlenecks elsewhere - but our local network into our house is able to work at high enough data rates. So the con is trying to persuade us to upgrade or maybe change providers on a false premise.

I'm perfectly happy with my present download speed, which is a guaranteed 32-36 mbps (I've just checked and it's currently 43), although I expect to be bombarded with offers to 'upgrade' or 'improve' once City Fibre have installed their full fibre in our road - an operation which I believe is imminent.

[Dave2002]

If our are getting 69 mbps then fibre over the last few meters is pretty pointless unless you have a family all gaming. Or want to download large files quickly. There are so many other factors driving the quality of the streaming pictures you get and indeed average broadband speeds ( like the choke points mentioned above ) that it’s almost certainly not worth a lot of extra money. Thing is though these, days the extra cost of going from 65 to say 100 + mbps is so small most people do it . Then it’s just a question of whether you go for underground cable or slung cable. One thing watch where they put a new router with slung cable - it often goes in a first floor room and any speed gains will be quickly wiped out by thick walls and floors.

We don't have an upstairs, so not an issue. Not sure if "they" would put the router connection where it is now - in a small office, or do they decide something different? I think connections would probably be underground - which is an untested issue. I don't particularly want overhead cables now - most of the overhead stuff - including power lines - have gone in our road now - no telegraph poles here nearby.

We had notification that one company wanted to dig up our drive to make a connection, and I couldn't get any sense out of that. I asked for a call back to discuss, but it never happened. The route shown on one map went up a shared drive, and I doubt that our neighbour would be happy with that. In any case seems unnecessary, there are ways of getting cables under and across the lawns in both gardens to minimise the disturbance to the drives. I asked other neightbours whether they had agreed to have their drives cut into for this, and most so far are happy enough with what they have at the moment, so have not gone that way.

Yes - I would pay slightly more for something better, but we are not regularly transferring huge files which require rapid downloads or uploads. TV and audio feeds are OK with what we have already. We don't do online "real time" games, so ping is not an issue, though 40 ms would not be good enough for gamers.

Some web sites take forever to respond, but it's not even the data rate due to internal WiFi which is the problem in most of the house. There are some dark spots - but the data rates I posted recently were taken in one of the more distant rooms, and included the WiFi links. I can do PowerLIne links if it'll make a difference, but for me surely anything above 50 Mbps is good enough.

The problem with slow response from web sites lies elsewhere, I think. The fibre companies are not conning us in the sense that they will install fibre, but the "con" IMO is that that in itself won't solve every problem. Most of our concerns are about very occasional drop outs, and slow response. In a more urban environment - which we were in before - we did notice problems due to the shared links along our street - probably as all the kids arrived home at 4pm and started watching videos and playing video games - but that's not the case here. QoS factors possibly prioritised their traffic over ours.

[mikealdren]

I think the con is the service sold as 'fibre broadband' as opposed to what they call 'full fibre' or something similar. The former is simply fibre to your local provider's cabinet and the copper from there. Performance depends on the distance from the cabinet, it's what we have and we get a barely adequate 13mbps. The latter is fibre all the way and is usually very fast indeed, far faster than people currently require.

[Ein Heldenleben]

A good example of how full fibre is only part of the broadband speed conundrum will occur this week when the latest release of Fortnite co-includes with the Arsenal Paris St Germain match on Amazon Prime video - the one streaming service every one seems to have. Amazon have a clever piece of sofware (for which they paid Netflix a fortune ) that degrades HD pics to the equivalent of worse than 405 lines rather than let the stream be disrupted. When the blocks in the image are the size of the football you’ll realise what’s happening.

[gradus]

We have a fibre connection to a green cabinet 200 yards away with copper thereafter. The only reason I switched to fibre was because my ISP told me that BT assigned a low priority to fixing copper cable connections from the local exchange, perfectly true as we had no internet service for several weeks whilst the ISP and Openreach played pass the parcel with our connection problem. I should have been able to claim compensation but my ISP told me that they were/are not part of the voluntary scheme that provides it. Not a bad idea to check if your ISP is a member of the scheme, from memory I think compensation payments are made after a couple of days of no service.

[Dave2002]

Actually I came across an example yesterday where full fibre would [or at least could] have been helpful, but it doesn't happen often. I sometimes download collections of music-such as downloads from Classic Select World, and I noticed one large file downloading yesterday, which took some time. Hopefully if our approx 70 Mbps were bumped up to 1 Gbps that would have taken less time - though in fact that's not guaranteed. Fibre nextworks can certainly run at very high data rates, so something like that download could be done in under a second over a link with a high enough data rate. It's by no means a given that such downloads will be a lot quicker if one pays for a "better" service, as a lot may still depend on other parts of the network, and how fast servers can push data on to the wide area networks. Some organisations may be storing data on fast service centres [at a cost], but others may be using a home grown approach or an in-house server which is not capable of supplying large amounts of data to many diverse end points.

The example here is not one we particularly care about - mostly it makes no significant difference to us whether such large files take a few seconds or a few minutes to download.