Broadband Advice

[Square Ball]

do you still have to pay BT for their line rental?

[offtheground]

Yeah, think its around £11 / month

[Minder]

Aye line rental is around £11, i think they are doing free evening & weekend calls at the minute & another plus i found for BT is after each year of your broadband contract they knock a few quid off it.

[offtheground]

Aye, think I'm going to go with BT. Have read too many horror stories about Tiscali. Not worth it for a couple of quid a month.
Looked at BT Total Broadband: Option 1, £7.95 for first 3 months, then £15.99 for the rest of the 18mth contract. Up to 8Mb, with a 10Gb useage limit.
Only thing that was annoying me was that most others offered a free wireless router, so rang their sales line and asked them if they'd throw it in which they duely did. Happy days

Still reckon there's slim chance of getting anywhere near the 8Mbps..

[offtheground]

another piece of advice - was on the phone to BT there sorting out the order for the Broadband. Am going for the option 1 and already had got them to throw in the 'home-hub' wireless router.
thought i'd chance my arm and ask if she'd throw in the phone handset (normally £69) as well. After a bit of persuasion i got her to include it as well.
Just goes to show you that if you've the brass neck to ask, they can throw plenty in.

[The_geezer]

Hi folks, not sure where to post this. What are users experiences with fiberus broadband? It will be available to us in the next month or so. Currently we have fibre broadband but out hosue is 2 miles away from the cabinet so we only get 5mb download speed on a good day. (no difference from the ADSL speed we used to get) does anybody know if fiberus will make much difference to us?

[clarshack]

Hi folks, not sure where to post this. What are users experiences with fiberus broadband? It will be available to us in the next month or so. Currently we have fibre broadband but out hosue is 2 miles away from the cabinet so we only get 5mb download speed on a good day. (no difference from the ADSL speed we used to get) does anybody know if fiberus will make much difference to us?

I've it ordered and should be getting it installed within the next week or so, so can let you know then what my experience of it is.
My current BT speed is 16mb down and 1mb up which is slow so I've went for the Fibrus 100mb package.

There's a Fibrus FB group which has useful posts/info:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fibrususers/

[The_geezer]

Cheers, not sure how much the speed will jump without it being fttp.

[armaghniac]

Cheers, not sure how much the speed will jump without it being fttp.

Surely though, you will get getting FTTP? In which case you'll get the speed of the package.

[The_geezer]

I am Unsure what service fiberus supplies, if it is fttp is that a whole digging up on the driveway type of job?

[general]

Regarding fibrus- just arrived in my area. Pole at bottom of driveway, wanted to take fibre from it to my house roughly 50m, and direct across my garden over my drive way.

Jokers.

Basically guided their civils guy that I required 2 poles, along a side lane and then to gable of house. Agreed and waiting poles being put in. Hope to be connected before end nov.

Was at a relatives house last weekend outside stewartstown in the middle of the sticks. He has fibre and pays for 300mb/s. He was getting 295 when I was testing so I'd be happy enough.

FYI fibrus will pay up to £450 to get you out of your current providers contract and a £10 per month discount also. I've signed up to 300mb/s for £39.99 a month inclusive of discount

[tbrick18]

My parents and brother have fibrus in as part of the rural connectivity scheme.
They ran the fibre lines on the telegraph poles and then put in 2 new poles to bring it across a field. There was no issue with the civils to be fair, they were very accommodating.
Performance is good.
Service is good.
Router within the house is fine. Though I got a meshing kit for my brother as he wanted to get internet out to his garage. That's working well too.
There has been a couple of outages though which left my elderly parents without internet or phone (they got a VOIP phone as part of their contract). I'd have preferred they'd kept the phone on copper myself as they are elderly and there is little to no mobile signal where they live. So no internet, no phone.

[johnnycool]

My parents and brother have fibrus in as part of the rural connectivity scheme.
They ran the fibre lines on the telegraph poles and then put in 2 new poles to bring it across a field. There was no issue with the civils to be fair, they were very accommodating.
Performance is good.
Service is good.
Router within the house is fine. Though I got a meshing kit for my brother as he wanted to get internet out to his garage. That's working well too.
There has been a couple of outages though which left my elderly parents without internet or phone (they got a VOIP phone as part of their contract). I'd have preferred they'd kept the phone on copper myself as they are elderly and there is little to no mobile signal where they live. So no internet, no phone.

Interested in this Fibrus thing..
They've the poles up on my road and are due to run the fibre in the Spring.
currently my BT phone line comes from a pole across the road and I'd put the BT line across the road (along with my electricity, I know, not ideal, but one road crossing was all I was prepared to pay for), I've it ducted all the way into my house and under the stairs where I've my switch and Cat5e all running back to but I genuinely don't think they could use the existing BT line to pull the fibre through.

What other options would I have?

[giveherlong]

My parents and brother have fibrus in as part of the rural connectivity scheme.
They ran the fibre lines on the telegraph poles and then put in 2 new poles to bring it across a field. There was no issue with the civils to be fair, they were very accommodating.
Performance is good.
Service is good.
Router within the house is fine. Though I got a meshing kit for my brother as he wanted to get internet out to his garage. That's working well too.
There has been a couple of outages though which left my elderly parents without internet or phone (they got a VOIP phone as part of their contract). I'd have preferred they'd kept the phone on copper myself as they are elderly and there is little to no mobile signal where they live. So no internet, no phone.

Interested in this Fibrus thing..
They've the poles up on my road and are due to run the fibre in the Spring.
currently my BT phone line comes from a pole across the road and I'd put the BT line across the road (along with my electricity, I know, not ideal, but one road crossing was all I was prepared to pay for), I've it ducted all the way into my house and under the stairs where I've my switch and Cat5e all running back to but I genuinely don't think they could use the existing BT line to pull the fibre through.

What other options would I have?

Why could they not use the existing BT duct to pull the fibre cable in?
There's plenty of space in the standard grey 50mm duct for the copper phone cable and fibre cable I would have thought
Have you left a rope in the duct?

[armaghniac]

There has been a couple of outages though which left my elderly parents without internet or phone (they got a VOIP phone as part of their contract). I'd have preferred they'd kept the phone on copper myself as they are elderly and there is little to no mobile signal where they live. So no internet, no phone.

Openreach's POTS over copper phone lines are on borrowed time. Current schedule is to close this down across the UK by the end of 2025, after that date all services on the network are to be IP based, i.e. all landline phone calls are to be done over VoIP. On some exchanges (including many urban ones in NI) there is already a "stop sell" in place where no new copper lines are to be installed, fibre optic only.

However, they have paused plans to put more exchanges into "stop sell" while they try to work out how best to serve customers that are only interested in a landline phone service and have no interest in a general internet service. The problem isn't VoIP on its own here, Openreach are planning to have such lines set up for 0.5Mb/s speeds - pretty rubbish these days for general internet browsing but perfectly fine for VoIP needs - but its more of a concern in power cuts. Current POTS phone lines have a -48V DC voltage difference across the wire pair at the main phone socket powered from the exchange which has battery backups in case mains power fails there, but with VoIP the responsibility for powering the phone circuit lies with the subscriber. One way to deal with this is to have a UPS powering the router so that it can do so for at least several hours in the event of a mains power cut, along with using a (cheap) corded phone connected to the router, and in the early days of Openreach's FTTP roll out they did supply a BBU (battery back up) when installing the ONT for FTTP internet. But they no longer do.

Why could they not use the existing BT duct to pull the fibre cable in?
There's plenty of space in the standard grey 50mm duct for the copper phone cable and fibre cable I would have thought
Have you left a rope in the duct?

It'll depend on what infrastructure is available to the installer at the time of the FTTP install.

Prior to my FTTP install, my BT Master phone socket was located on a wall in the living room well away from any electric mains socket so I did a bit of DIY with a short length of Cat5e cable** and plastic trunking above the skirting board to allow my modem/router to be placed next to an electrical socket. When the Openreach FTTP installer came to look at my setup back in the Summer, he took one look inside the master socket and determined that the copper phone line into the home was armoured cable - in other words it was a steel reinforced cable that was directly buried to the house without any ducting installed and so wasn't suitable for running any optical fibre cable at all unless the relevant civils were done, which would have included digging up my lawn, possibly the driveway and definitely the roads & footpaths in the cul-de-sac so they went for the easier option, stringing a fibre cable from a nearby telephone pole to my home(!) to enter a wall next to where my router was/is in the living room. Dunno if Fibrus do this on their installs, but before mine enters indoors via a hold drilled in the wall Openreach installed a thin grey box close to the outdoor hole opening - I haven't been tempted to open this (it's screwed shut) but I believe this holds a coiled-up section of the fibre should it need to be easily extended indoors in the future, or to easily re-splice if required.

In the North, it is noticeable on country roads that there are new poles appearing. This party reflects early projects which laid armoured cable for the POTS, so in some ways we are going backwards. Likewise 50 years ago if you lived in any outlying place then you had a magneto phone with a local battery, although then the phone people had to maintain it.