Fibre broadband - is it a con?

[Maclintick]

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.

Sounds like we're in the same boat, Dave. In our rural setting we've stuck to BT Fibre 2 ( i.e. fibre to the green box and then copper via an old-fangled telephone wire to our house) which gave 71 mbps download 18mbps upload and 8 ms ping when tested this morning. It's been extremely reliable over several years, during which time we've been bombarded by regular promotional blurbs from Gigaclear offering 300 mbps at lower cost. How long these attractive rates will last, of course, is another question. Our young neighbours went for the Gigaclear offer a few months ago, & at some point I'll get the lowdown from them as to how it's performed.

On another tack, one annoying feature of our ICT landscape is poor to frequently non-existent mobile signal at home. Every month or so I receive a text from O2 beginning thus "Looks like a nearby phone mast isn't working as it should, sorry. Our engineers will be on the case already"...blah,blah.. Funny thing is, despite the attentions of these telecom tech-maestros, it never improves, even temporarily. I've investigated the Ofcom website for advice on how to complain, but they won't register anything until you've gone through an exhaustive rigmarole with the company in question, who naturally have made it extremely difficult and time-consuming for customers to do any such thing. At present I've filed it under "Life's Too Short", since we invariably use WhatsApp or wi-fi calling for the vast majority of calls, but as a general observation, In our experience the UK has by far the worst mobile coverage of any country we've visited in the last 10 years or so.