High speed broadband a legal requirement by 2020

[Guest Alphonsox]

The Government has decided that "high speed" (10Mbs) broadband will become a legal requirement by 2020. Could be good news for those of us with broadband speeds in the Kbs region at the moment but I won't hold my breath.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/20/high-speed-broadband-to-be-legal-right-for-uk-homes-and-businesses

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/20/government-introduce-legal-right-access-high-speed-broadband/

[Jeremy Harris]

I read this, then rang my ISP to find out what was likely to happen (we don't get 10 Mbs even with VDSL and FTTC).  They were quite helpful and said that as they understood it, the chances were that OpenReach would be forced to offer FTTP for those who requested it, but they had no idea as to the cost.  They did say that the chances were that we would pass the initial installation feasibility test, as access from the existing roadside cabinet to inside our house was straightforward; a short length of overhead fibre and then down through the ducts we already have.

 

Be interesting to see how it pans out, as we could desperately do with better download speeds.

[Declan52]

55 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

The Government has decided that "high speed" (10Mbs) broadband will become a legal requirement by 2020. Could be good news for those of us with broadband speeds in the Kbs region at the moment but I won't hold my breath.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/20/high-speed-broadband-to-be-legal-right-for-uk-homes-and-businesses

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/20/government-introduce-legal-right-access-high-speed-broadband/

My brother in-law is laying fibre cable all along to Bangor and beyond at the minute. Not sure how far they will go down the peninsula though. 

Knowing here it will be in the small print that only areas with a certain population density will be covered and the rest of us it's tough.

[billt]

Apparently our exchange can offer FTTP on demand, which sounds a good idea, the catch is that you have to pay the infrastructure costs, which for 2.2km would be considerable.

 

I'd guess that's how it would work, in the highly unlikely event that such legislation came into being. "You can have FTTP as long as you pay £10,000 for the installation."

[Jeremy Harris]

41 minutes ago, billt said:

Apparently our exchange can offer FTTP on demand, which sounds a good idea, the catch is that you have to pay the infrastructure costs, which for 2.2km would be considerable.

 

I'd guess that's how it would work, in the highly unlikely event that such legislation came into being. "You can have FTTP as long as you pay £10,000 for the installation."

 

 

From the chat I had this morning with my ISP, they said much the same, but added that they believed that, under the new legislation, if you get less than 10 Mbs, then the charge from Openreach to run FTTP would be capped.  It remains to be seen what that cap would be, but if it's of the order of a couple of hundred pounds then I'd pay it, as the current 4 to 6 MBs is pretty dire, and that's on VDSL and FTTC.  On ADSL we were struggling to get half that.

[ProDave]

The way it was stated on the news is you can "demand" it. That is not quite the same as them responding to the demand?

 

The Scottish Government did a similar thing to make high speed broadband "available" to all homes by about 2021 (I forget the exact date)  My guess is remote properties who currently can only get BB by satellite will be "offered" it but at an astronomical price.

 

The community Council here tried to get a faster rural broadband network installed, but that has stalled because none of the suppliers approached bothered to tender for the job.

[Jeremy Harris]

We were blocked from having a grant towards setting up a rural broadband network here.  We had lots of interest, and passed the threshold for the number of committed users, but when the local council supported fitting a fibre cabinet (that realistically only gives over 10 Mbs to around ten houses, because of it's location) we were told that we already had "super fast broadband" so were no longer eligible for any grants etc.

 

What's happened here is that Openreach installed the fibre cabinet right at the very end of the wire network, so the vast majority of those who want to use it still have a copper loop that is a km or two long, which kills the speed.  The length of copper from the cabinet to our house is around 1.5 km, yet the cabinet is physically only about 300m away.

[ProDave]

The existing network is decrepit.

 

When we had our new connection it took them about 2 weeks to actually get a connection from our house to the exchange. they were grubbing around to try and find a spare working pair on each of the several legs of cable between us and the exchange.

 

Speaking to one of the engineers doing it, I got a pretty good idea of the route it took, and from our village it goes down to completely the wrong end of the town, then runs the length of the town to get to the exchange.

[Jeremy Harris]

Sounds like our cabling, which runs around in a big loop, with us on the end.  It sort of evolved as the village expanded, so they decided to run the main run from the local exchange up one road, that forks not far from the exchange.  Unfortunately, most of the housing development went up the other fork, so instead of running another cable from the exchange they doubled the existing one back on itself then up the other fork...................

[Stones]

Sounds a lot like our connection.  We are 300 or so yards from the new Fibre Cabinet but our distribution pole is connected to a different cabinet 3.5km away. It is a simple engineering fix, i.e. new cable from cabinet to our distribution pole would cover those houses currently excluded.

 

Interestingly, was having a chat to a friend of mine whose daughter works for OR. She is specifically employed to deal with elected members trying to push for connectivity for their constituents.  Guess what, the most persistent ones get what they ask for...

 

It'll be interesting to see what the legislation proposes and the get outs for OR.  

 

The Scottish dimension as proposed in the draft 2018/19 budget

 

"We are committed to building on the success of our existing broadband investment programme, which will deliver fibre access to at least 95 per cent of premises by the end of 2017. We have set a new commitment to extend coverage even further to ensure that all premises in Scotland are able to access superfast broadband by 2021."

 

Good news for me if that is the case, Superfast being defined as 24 Mbps.

[ProDave]

I suspect the "are able to access" clause will translate to "if you are prepared to pay the high connection fee"

 

Time will tell.

[MikeSharp01]

9 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

Be interesting to see how it pans out, as we could desperately do with better download speeds

All the better to receive notifications from buildhub. (Sent from my gigabit connection - 512Kbps is gigabit/annum isn't it, inside the M25 - if they can't deliver it here - where I believe the retired MD of a BT company lives in the village, I am not sure what message it sends to the rest of the country. We have been offered it - £8k per household. I will stick with my wet string connection.)

[Guest Alphonsox]

14 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

 I will stick with my wet string connection

 

According to an engineering test reported last week a wet string provides broadband at 3.5Mbs - which is around 7x my speed albeit over a shorter distance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42338067

[Temp]

Placing of the fibre cabinets seems strange at times. We saw openreach installing fibre along the rural road to our village. Then suddenly they stop an put in the cabinet just under 1km away from the village boundary. To get power to the cabinet they had to continue trenching the remaining 1km anyway and put a transformer in the village. 

[SteamyTea]

If the ISP/OR fail to connect a property at 10 MBs, will they get fined?  If the fine is cheaper than the connection costs, they will just pay it.

 

I still fail to see why we are using fixed lines, surely we can create a wireless mesh network that only has the hardware set up and very small electrical running costs.  Why aren't the open source community working on this.

[Jeremy Harris]

I believe there are already a few rural wireless mesh networks that are up and running.  It was the option our village was exploring before the fibre cabinet was installed (with funding from the Local Authority).  The idea was to put up a main link exactly where the fibre cabinet  is (it's next to an exchange cabinet and the village youth club) and fit the master transceiver to the roof of the youth club (which is owned by the village).  This would then allow what amounted to a boosted wifi network to connect all of the village that was within range, with repeater nodes set up on people's houses to allow the network to have wider coverage (I'd offered to be one of those nodes). 

 

The capital cost is fairly high, but the running costs are low, as the transceivers are all operating at low power - the key to them working well is having good antenna systems.  Our estimate was that we would have been able to cover around 180 properties, with broadband speeds of around 25 Mbs.  The FTTC system we have gives around 50 Mbs to about 10 properties, with the rest being down below 10 Mbs, and is barely better than ADSL, because of the long loop of copper than both have to use.

 

The easiest fix for  bit over half the village would be to re-route the main copper trunk line, so it doesn't double back on itself.  That would reduce the copper distance by between one third and a half of the present distance and substantially increase both ADSL and VDSL speeds. 

 

I'm about to try an experiment with a roof mounted  mast and high gain Yagi antenna pointed at the nearest 3G/4G mast, with that coupled directly to a modem that has an external antenna connection, to see if I can get better speeds.  I can just about get a signal at roof top level using one of the cheap Chinese repeaters, it's really a question as to whether a proper modem will have better performance, which I suspect it may well do.

Edited December 21, 2017 by JSHarris

[ProDave]

As I have said our community council looked at such a system. It would have covered about 100 homes some spread quite far apart. Some of the target homes were like us, almost at the edge of wired broadband availability, and many others who can't get any wired broadband.  But nobody tendered for the work.  To me that suggests they know some other form of upgrade is in the pipeline.

 

There was a planning app for an EE 4G mast that would I am sure cover most of the target houses. When that becomes live I will look at what 4G packages are available for data.

 

I have recently just given up using the landline for telephone calls (incoming calls only now)  BT's call charges are simply too high and keep going up. Instead I now pay £6 per month for all the mobile calls I need.  It is beginning to look line a wired landline is becoming redundant.

[Stones]

7 minutes ago, ProDave said:

I have recently just given up using the landline for telephone calls (incoming calls only now)  BT's call charges are simply too high and keep going up. Instead I now pay £6 per month for all the mobile calls I need.  It is beginning to look line a wired landline is becoming redundant.

 

In many places, yes and mobile packages (sim only) keep dropping.  Not sure why the same isn't true of fixed line charges dropping.  The issue of course is the patchy mobile reception some people (like me) have.  It's a bit of a balancing act here, I can get reasonable reception at home/on the road/at work with one network, no reception at home be great reception on the road and at work with another and so on. 

[SteamyTea]

Down here, a lot of shops are using the O² wireless hotspot for free customer internet.

I have no idea ho much it costs the shops, but it is a pretty reliable service and covers a lot of Penzance.

Now I know this is a town, but the concept is the same for a rural area, just stick some repeaters in cars (you can get a RPi Zero W and an extra USB WiFi adapter for 15 quid).

How hard can it be.

 

[richi]

On 12/20/2017 at 14:07, billt said:

Apparently our exchange can offer FTTP on demand, which sounds a good idea, the catch is that you have to pay the infrastructure costs, which for 2.2km would be considerable. I'd guess that's how it would work, in the highly unlikely event that such legislation came into being. "You can have FTTP as long as you pay £10,000 for the installation."

 

I'm in a similar boat (albeit with a reasonable ADSL2+ speed). Be aware of the new Openreach pricing for FTTPoD from February 2018. Basically, the build cost should be much less, assuming the fibre route passes a bunch of other houses that could also use it.

 

Also, don't forget the Openreach Community Fibre Partnerships scheme.