Telephone wires condemned to history....

[mikealdren]

I think the thread title is slightly misleading, surely it's the PSTN phone system that is being replaced. We will still have copper wires for broadband for some time to come and the phone service will be over broadband, the change to full fibre will take years!

[gradus]

Its all copper wire hereabouts and prone to service interruptions especially when Openreach 'engineers' almost always manage to screw up other peoples lines when trying to repair a fault, moreover they are paid by the job and woe betide you if the job looks like a long one. We waited about 18 months during which five or six 'engineers' from Openreach were successively baffled by the idea that a landline in the house could have an extension in a building down the garden. Eventually they sent out a properly trained and experienced old-time BT engineer who fixed it in a morning.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

They’ve been laying carbon fibre cables along our local streets for some time now. In December, they did some of our street, and are now working on the connections, so hopefully we’ll be able to stream anything at lightening speed soon.

[cloughie]

They’ve been laying carbon fibre cables along our local streets for some time now. In December, they did some of our street, and are now working on the connections, so hopefully we’ll be able to stream anything at lightening speed soon.

HIPP Beethoven?

[Frances_iom]

They’ve been laying carbon fibre cables along our local streets ...:

I think you will find they are optical fibres - usually made of glass though for very short lengths there are plastic versions available - carbon fibres are strong relative to weight, will be conductive but would be surprised at their use in cabling highspeed signals but maybe as one problem with optical fibre can be restrictive bending radii.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I think you will find they are optical fibres - usually made of glass though for very short lengths there are plastic versions available - carbon fibres are strong relative to weight, will be conductive but would be surprised at their use in cabling highspeed signals but maybe as one problem with optical fibre can be restrictive bending radii.

Oops - yes. Silly me.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

HIPP Beethoven?

[mikealdren]

The problem with fibre at the moment is that it's a solution looking for a problem. We have about 70Mb/s and we never use anything like that capacity. Downloads would become faster but that's not been an issue for me.

[Cockney Sparrow]

We have virgin cable broadband and have had for at least 20 years. Virgin trumpet their speed increases, no doubt on the basis it justifies their constant price increases. Although I get lightning speed and landline calls are free, I have begun to feel taken advantage of - after 14 days I am somehow tied into a year or 18 month contract at the price they have imposed.

I'm currently considering switching to an openreach line from a pole in our suburban street at about 40% of the Virgin cost but am about to see what they will come down to, to keep my custom. I'm sure its fibre to the box because we had some engineers working for some days along the road dealing with connections (in control van). They worked into the evening (about 10pm) and Mrs CS offered them a hot drink - they were Portugese. I just hope a transition from Virgin to a new provider goes without interruption - such is our dependance on the internet!

[Bryn]

We have virgin cable broadband and have had for at least 20 years. Virgin trumpet their speed increases, no doubt on the basis it justifies their constant price increases. Although I get lightning speed and landline calls are free, I have begun to feel taken advantage of - after 14 days I am somehow tied into a year or 18 month contract at the price they have imposed.

I'm currently considering switching to an openreach line from a pole in our suburban street at about 40% of the Virgin cost but am about to see what they will come down to, to keep my custom. I'm sure its fibre to the box because we had some engineers working for some days along the road dealing with connections (in control van). They worked into the evening (about 10pm) and Mrs CS offered them a hot drink - they were Portugese. I just hope a transition from Virgin to a new provider goes without interruption - such is our dependance on the internet!

I am in a similar situation, though I am planning on switching to 3's 'mobile' option. I already use it on my Lenovo 5G laptop and their home modem looks attractive. It'snot as fast as Virgin's 100 but it's not too slow, either.

[Dave2002]

I had accepted their offer a year or so back of FTTP (fibre to the property) which involved drilling a hole through the front wall of the house and installing new socket and router connection. I had somehow thought that subsequently made me a suitable case for transfer to the digital service.

Have you checked the data rates? What have you actually been offered, and what do you get?

We are very close to a fibre hub- but I assume that the connection to that is by wire. We moved here a few years ago, and I can't see any telephone poles or wire coming in - maybe it's underground.
Time to go out and look - though I'm not sure that I'll see anything. Years ago - in another house we had broadband put in by another provider (Mercury?) and when they eventually got it installed I think they pulled a wire somehow under the front garden from the kerb. The amusing thing was that although it was scheduled to be done, when the guys turned up to connect us, they discovered that when they lifted the little covers in the pavement outside to connect to, there wasn't anything installed! Took another week or two to actually put the cables/fibres along the street once they had made that find, and then connect our kit to that.

[french frank]

Have you checked the data rates? What have you actually been offered, and what do you get?

I may or may not be typical of the non-techie punter. I pay a sum of money each month and I get a service which is (probably more than) adequate for my purposes. I really can't be bothered (for most services not just telephone/broadband/mobile) to spend time checking whether if I switch to this that or the other provider, package or whatever I'll save a pound a month. BT carried out the FTTP free, the router was free, I got two (rather than the one advertised) free telephone handsets. I have what I need and can get on with what I want to do.

[Dave2002]

I have what I need and can get on with what I want to do.

That sounds good, but aren't you just a little bit curious? We get around 70 Mbps on a good day - sometimes slightly less - but the limitations are mostly within our house and our local connections both wired and wireless. If you are on fibre I think you should be getting around 500 Mbps - though I haven't really kept up with what's being offered or provided.

In the past providers have often failed to deliver even close to what was promised. Also technically fibre ought to be capable of going up to Gigabit rates, but what consumers actually get may be limited by the equipment at the provider end for various reasons.

Glad you're happy with what you have so far.

[french frank]

That sounds good, but aren't you just a little bit curious? We get around 70 Mbps on a good day - sometimes slightly less - but the limitations are mostly within our house and our local connections both wired and wireless. If you are on fibre I think you should be getting around 500 Mbps - though I haven't really kept up with what's being offered or provided.

I probably use the internet for completely different reasons from you - or most people. I may be curious, but not in the way you mean! Mbps's don't enter my world.

[oddoneout]

I'm with ff on this - so long as what I've got does what I want to my satisfaction then I'm happy. I email, read a couple of digital papers, watch a few minutes of you tube on occasion and join in on here. It all seems to be fast enough (especially as my brain gets slower...) and my only technical concern is that it doesn't fall over. The few times when I've had problems enough on that front to annoy it's more often than not been an area issue rather than at my end so not much to be done about it. The last episode of sustained difficulty was resolved by replacing (yet again, talk about built in obsolescence) the filter at the wall end.
When I first read about the demise of landlines and what the replacement would be I got rather het-up, knowing that for me it would represent another change that would be tiresome, involve hassle, more than likely wouldn't provide an improvement to my life but would almost certainly cost more. However I've now adopted the che sera approach and will worry (or not) when it arrives and I know what I'm dealing with. A far more pressing matter is to do some succession planning for my aged TV; not only are the chances of it failing increasing, a more immediate problem is that the constant updates needed on the digibox are proving more and more difficult for it to deal with and a replacement for that bit of kit will quite likely not talk to the TV now I suspect.