Milton Keynes FTTP Trial Comes To an End

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek  No Responses »
Nov 242011
 

*Wordpress lost the first version of this post so this is the hastily rewritten version*

Last November I got involved with Openreach’s FTTP (Fibre to the premises) trial in Milton Keynes. It’s been a great year testing a ridiculously fast internet connection but it’s now sadly come to an end. BT have started offering a commercial product based on the technology so I assume the trial was a success.

The trial wasn’t handled directly by BT or Openreach. Instead I had to get connected by one of the smaller ISPs involved in the trial. It was through them that I learnt the trial was ending. They supplied me with prices for if I wished to keep the connection and stay with them.

I’ll focus on the lower scale of the pricing. The products based on the product I was trialling (100Mb down and 30Mb up) are going to be too high for most people (it starts at 78 + VAT a month). The consumer focussed product is 115 down and 14 up and comes in at £60 (it’s unknown whether this will require a phone line as yet so you might need to add £10 on to it). The same product from BT costs £35 but does require a phone line so its basically £45.

This is too much to pay. We’re looking at possibly £70 a month from a smaller ISP and £45 a month if you sell your soul to BT. Most people aren’t going to be able to afford paying that much for broadband. What’s the point in spending billions of pounds hooking everyone up to a fibre network and then pricing the majority of people out? This is why we shouldn’t leave developing the country’s infrastructure to private companies. Incidentally it would be interesting to find out why the discrepancy between BTs price and the price from the small ISP is so large. Are small ISPs being screwed by wholesale prices or are BT using their clout to sell the product at a loss?

I’m actually moving out of the area next year so this speed won’t be available to be me but the same problem is there for the slower FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) technology that covers most of the country. BT offer it for £28 a month which isn’t too bad but if you want to avoid BT you pay more than double for a limited service.

And who doesn’t want to avoid BT?

Fibre Optic Broadband – Installation

 Fibre Optic Broadband  2 Responses »
Oct 042010
 

I was fairly sure that installing fibre to the home wasn’t going to be very straight forward. Vivaciti (the ISP I’m trialling with) advised the appointment would be around four and a half hours but said it would be better if someone could be in all day as it might overrun. And overrun it did. The engineers were here from 9am until gone 7 in the evening! Something tells me this might not be considered financially viable until they can think of some more efficient ways of pushing the fibre to the house.

It seems to me that the engineers BT have doing these installs are pretty new to the whole situation. It became clear whilst trying to discuss with them the placement of the termination box, use of wireless and the type of cable needed to connect the router to the fibre box that they had a fairly limited knowledge of these subjects. For instance they tried to convince me that 802.11N wireless is not affected by walls. This is, of course, completely incorrect. Yes, it is much faster and has better range than 802.11G but a thick wall will still cause signal loss.

The main issue they had was with blowing the fibre cable down the tube from the cabinet to the house. The weather was very wet and apparently this was causing the cable to snag; a situation that required them to disconnect the equipment from that end of the duct, reassemble it at the house and blow the cable back. Apparently it took them six attempts to finally get it through. Once connected we were left with this…

The cable comes from the duct into the box on the right. A cable is then fed into the box on the left which I am sure is meant to be on the inside of the house seeing as it has ethernet and telephone ports as well as a bog standard power supply. Luckily this is all inside the garage but the engineers tried to tell us it was water proof and they had already installed some outside! I can’t see how that is safe or secure.

Since installation we’ve had to run a 20 metre length of ethernet from the garage to the study where the router is kept. This wasn’t too much of a hassle for us but I can imagine people less technical would have trouble if an engineer just plonked the box in some hard to reach corner of the house.

So overall installation could be seen as barrier for both the customer and BT. If every house takes this long it just won’t be economical to do every house on the exchange, or even in the estate. The engineers seem slightly apprehensive to place the termination box too far away from where the duct comes through so there may end up being a bit of installing left for the customer as well. In my opinion this is a small price to pay for the increased performance over your average Milton Keynes internet connection.

Next post – speed tests!

Fibre Optic Broadband in Milton Keynes Very Much a Reality

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek  5 Responses »
Oct 022010
 

Back in March I mentioned that BT were planning on running fibre optic trials in my area (Walnut Tree, Milton Keynes). Details were fairly thin on the ground but I tried to post here whenever I heard anything new. Since May there hadn’t been much news until I stumbled across this broadband availability checker. It’s not one that I’ve seen on any other website and the only links I’ve seen to it are on forums. I entered my phone number and to my surprise I was informed that my number was enabled for fibre to the premises (FTTP).

Now that I was enabled, I just had to find an ISP that was involved in the trial. Easy! Well, not really. It seems like none of the major ISPs even know about it. Two names that kept coming up on forums were Plusnet and Zen. I e-mailed both but only Plusnet replied. They told me I had to swap my ADSL to them before I could be put on the trial. However, they couldn’t promise me that if I did switch I would definitely be put on the trial. After speaking with a rather rude representative on the phone I decided they didn’t seem like a company I’d like to deal with.

A few weeks passed by with not much more information until I saw this post on the Thinkbroadband forum by the company Vivaciti saying they were on the trial and to e-mail them if you were interested and in the enabled area. So I did and I got a very helpful reply with this information…

If and when you are accepted by BT for the FTTP trial, they will do a site survey to see if the house is suitable (you are not on the 12th floor of a tower block) then they will arrange for an installation date. We will supply you with a suitable router to use but the router remain our property at this stage.
We have no control over the service that is put in as part of the trial, so can not specify the 100/15 40/10 etc (although my understanding is they want the 100MB (sic) rolled out first)

During this time there is no cost to you for installation or rental/usage of the service.
The trial is due to finish at the end of December although we think this will be extended, but either way at the end of the trial you have a couple of choices, you can either cease the service at no cost or liability or once prices are released you can agree to stay on the service although at that point there would be a 12 month contract imposed on the service.

So as you can see, it was a bit of a no brainer. No cost, no commitment and no contract! I let them know I was more than happy to join the trial and after a few more e-mails I had a installation date for when BT would come and physically connect us to the fibre network.

I’ll save the installation details for the next post.

More on the Milton Keynes Fibre Optic Internet Trial

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  No Responses »
May 102010
 

It’s not much but I’ve got a little more  information on the fibre optic internet trial that is supposed to be happening in Milton Keynes (Walnut Tree specifically) over this year. I thought I’d post the leaflet that can be obtained from the Openreach vans that are dotted around the area.

I went to the web address on the leaflet which doesn’t really give any hard facts. However if you look at the table detailing deployment dates it lists Milton Keynes as being fibre enabled in December 2010. This is a fair bit later than the June date that was being tossed around a few months ago. I’m hoping this is referring to the rest of Milton Keynes and not Walnut Tree as we are supposed to be getting it first. If we have to wait until December then I feel sorry for the rest of the city.

There is still no word on which ISPs are going to be in the trial which is annoying.

I suppose at least the fact that there are vans around and this leaflet is being handed out mean that something is being done. I just hope it doesn’t take too long.

BT’s Fibre Rollout

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  No Responses »
Mar 302010
 

Today BT announced a load of extra exchanges that are being fibre enabled over the next year and a bit. This is slightly different to the Fibre to the Premises that I wrote about a couple of weeks a go. Rather than piping the fibre directly into the home they will connect the street’s cabinet to the excange via fibre optics and then leave the final run to the same old copper we are using now. This leads to much improved speeds (Up to 40Mb) due to the hugely decreased distance the signal has to travel on low quality copper cabling. The released pricing doesn’t even look too bad.

Now the good news today is that two exchanges in Milton Keynes (Shenly Church End and Wolverton) will be fibre enabled. This is very good news to me as these exchanges cover the two areas in which I would happily live if I were to move within Milton Keynes. This means I won’t be too sad to see my (future… figures crossed) 100Mb connection go.

On the subject of the FTTP plans for my area I have seen a fair few Openreach vans around Walnut Tree. I have spotted a few parks on the H9 Groveway road between Walnut Tree and Kents Hill. They have also been spotted by Jordan on Dunchurch Dale which is only about 30 metres from the back of my house. I still haven’t heard anything concrete from BT about it all but from the activity that I’ve seen and from what people on the Think Broadband forums have reported it looks like it’s all going ahead. Lets just hope it lives up to expectations.

Openreach Fibre Optic Broadband Trials

 Fibre Optic Broadband, Geek, Internet  4 Responses »
Mar 162010
 

I’m not sure how I missed this when it was announced last year. Maybe because I was living in London… Anyway, it seems that my BT exchange has been chosen for a FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) trial. This will hopefully mean speeds of up to 100Mb/s.

To put this into perspective it is important to look at the history of broadband in Milton Keynes. Due to the price of copper when the city was being built, aluminium was used for telephony which is fine for telephone but awful for internet. The city is also fairly spread out with the cables running along the city’s grid road system which increases the distance yet further. This means that many people get awful internet connection (mine is 2Mb/s but was 512Kb/s up until around a year a go) or no broadband connection at all. There is even a group set up to raise awareness of this issue – BB4MK.org.

I am hoping that Openreach use this opportunity to provide a super fast fibre connection to people, like myself, on the outside of the exchange’s frontier rather than the closer people already receiving a decent connection.

The advantage of this system over say Virgin Media’s fibre network is two fold. Firstly the connection is to the home as opposed to the cabinet road which provides faster connections – up to 100Mb at the moment but Korea, who use the same system, are trialling 1Gb connections this year. Secondly the service will be provided not just by BT, but by several ISP just like the current ADSL system. This means competition with price and fair usage policies. If left up to B.T. I could imagine them charging over the odds for a package with a 10GB usage limit. I just hope Be (the best ISP I have ever used) decide to get involved.

I have added Thinkbroadband to my RSS feeds so I’ll hopefully get an update when more information is available. The trial is scheduled to start this summer but I can’t find much information at the moment.