I also have received this offer - albeit a few weeks ago.
I was a tester on the original FTTP rollout.
I get the full 76mbs delivery with an occasional; wobble. and the new offer at guaranteed 100mbps makes insufficient difference to me. Particularly at £55pm.
After my trial I was offered 300mbps for less than a tenner a month extra - thought about that at the time - but once more it delivered no measurable benefits so I declined.
Do not understand why BT has reduced the maximum offer speed to 100mbps.and has inflated the differential price.
One might guess that wait a year and BT will make the 100mbps offer part of the core Infinity deal.
Note this is only relevant to residents in Ebsworth Street, Bovill Road, Herschell Road, Garthorne Road Whatman Road and Brockley Rise. But I wanted to flag it here as there’s some overlap.
The BT website gives the impression that FTTP is in our area. However, the coverage checker looks at the exchange (which is enabled for FTTP) not the cabinet (which is not enabled). When you go to actually buy a fibre package, you get denied. I’d love FTTP, but right now I’d settle for FTTC!
Get that, and until recently was in the same position. Thing is, I believe that @anon5422159 is in your area and he has posted a letter which seems to indicate FTTP (see up-thread). That could be a false lead also but at least you could claim £20 off each if so!
I live in a small block of flats on Dacres Road, just off Perry Vale. Will I ever get fibre or would it be quicker to build my own exchange and lay my own cables?
For those who live on the Southwark side of SE23, Southwark Council have signed a deal with Hyperoptic to install their 1GB connections on residential estates, which include the Sydenham Hill Estate.
And this is after several years now since the rollout and commissioning of FTTP in Forest Hill.
There are still reports of Openreach stating that FTTP is available in an area and then declining to connect people in multi-flatted properties - and without explanation.
If it is a technical issue - they have had long enough to work it out.
Does anyone have views on the differences between Zen, BT Infinity and any other providers we can choose from in FH, in terms of costs, customer services etc? I see we can now get FTTP in Devonshire Road, and am thinking about upgrading so that we can actually upload photo albums to the cloud etc. Doesn’t work very swiftly with our current 1Mbps upload from EE…
We are on Devonshire and have stuck with Zen for reliability and customer service. Used to have ADSL, now FTTP. Conversion cost included Fritz router which is actually a decent bit of kit. Download/upload speeds are as per the line rating but there is a marginal slow down during peak times. PM me if you want a demo.
Have used BT in the past but would never do so again.
BT Iinfinity with FTTP is usually very reliable on our side of the railway (Perry Hill). Devonshire is v close to FOH exchange and the performance degradation should be minimal.
However if you live in a flatted building Openreach may tell you it can’t be done - even though they do say it’s available.
With FTTP there is no performance degradation based on distance. Because fibre is digital, it either works or it doesn’t (i.e. it doesn’t get slower). VDSL/FTTC is analogue from the cabinet to the house, where greater distance significantly diminishes the quality of the signal and the protocol is designed to handle this diminished quality by slowing down the data rate. With FTTP you have pulses of light representing 1s and 0s, and while there is an element of error correction in the protocols, the 1s and 0s either get to the other end, or they don’t.
Same reason why expensive HDMI cables are a waste of money. Either the 1s and 0s get to the other side, or they don’t, there’s no grey area.
However you do get more noise on the line with greater distance (we have to measure this on all our installs) - so technically this could mean more lost packets which are therefore sent again which does slow down transmission. However you do need a lot of distance to make much difference…
But as I have said before I was a member a testing team for the FOH rollout when the architecture changed from FTTC to FTTP mid-way through the pilot scheme.
BT installed monitoring kit in my home and connected two of the five fibres that are available for data use. (the norm for a retail customer is to have one data link). Throughput, noise levels and many other things were logged and reported on about which I have little expertise.
Monitoring and testing would be done across both lines and there could be significant variation on the throughput. The supervision team spoke of “degradation” and inferred that on occasion there were issues about noise measurement and tuning of the settings on what they called their retail servers and the insitu huawei box located at my end of the fibre. Whilst in the main I now get a fairly consistent 76 mbps - there still is an occasional wobble and even more rarely a drop out.
From time to time I would be instructed to change data ports as (I assume) different configurations were tested.
In your model, is it the case then that a constant 76mbps would be maintained over a finite distance or and until it could reach a maximum distance and drop off entirely with no ramp-down in throughput.?
Although orders of magnitude better than copper, the fact that the light propagates though an optical cable means that attenuation (absorption/scattering) and dispersion (pulse broadening) cause the max data transfer rates to slow down over distance.
Mind you, you would need to be pushing a few Gigs over 50km or so to notice the difference for normal home use - but soon becomes a limiting factor on major backbones.
Yeah. Fibre is also immune to a lot of common sources of interference like cross-talk from nearby lines, ground loops, water, etc. Basically a copper phone line is like a radio antenna, and picks up any/all radio interference which comes from many sources. Another benefit of fiber is that because of its “all or nothing” nature, when you get connected there is a much better chance you will get a “good” reliable connection, whereas VDSL is a lot more forgiving and will tolerate poor quality connections (albeit giving you lower speeds). My VDSL was having some issues a while back and the OpenReach tech discovered another unused phone line he could give me instead, and I instantly gained around 20% both up and down.
Any speed wobbles you see are almost certainly coming from upstream (i.e. from the cabinet upwards).