Since our neighbourhood has been upgraded to fibre I’ve been getting regular calls from Gigaclear, however the prices after the first few months are outrageous in my view.
Currently with Plusnet and use my own modem and router which is Draytek and also use a TP Link mesh system for WiFi. Usual speeds are 44 down and 9 up with a small fluctuation and WiFi is pretty stable throughout the house.
When I decorated I ran Cat6 cable from the loft to a socket in each bedroom and a few external cables to my study, lounge and dining room using weather shielded cable. This all connect to a 16 port switch in the loft where I also keep a couple of NAS boxes on a self made table. The HiFi which resides in a bedroom has four network sockets and cable up to the loft where it connects to an EE8 switch and my modem and router are in the main bedroom on top of the wardrobe which provides easy access, the modem can also cope with full fibre if I choose to go that route.
My BT ‘fibre’ (FTTC) has enabled ‘Digital Voice’ today.
This new service is being rolled out around UK in area stages & is planned to be completed by 2025.
All the user has to do is remove the phone cable from the wall socket & plug it into the back of the BT SmartHub-2.
It provides a few extra facilities according to the BT blurb. I haven’t looked into it too much, I leave all that to my staff, but the sound definition is, as promised, better.
My BT engineer has called. Did 5 minute tests both with and without my router.
Tests showed a steady 80Mbps without router and just 45Mbps with the router and nothing else plugged into it. (Plugging in my LAN cable appeared to drop this to 40Mbps). No faults detected on the line.
So my line is fine. Will discuss with EE this afternoon.
Yup, my engineer reported the modem is fine. On his device it gave a reading of 460 Mbps. Mine is slower but older technology. As for upstairs, the engineer says that WiFi is only guaranteed to be at least 10 Mbps. Farcical on a line promising minimum speeds of 250 Mbps IMO.
Have since phoned BT who are sending out 2 extender discs FOC to try to resolve, to some degree, the issues upstairs.
Made me laugh, the BT guy on the phone said we get this a lot with old Victorian style buildings. Don’t think that applies to a house built in 1953 …
A non standard third party firmware change is not straightforward for many/most users and presumably doing so will not be compatible with Digital Voice and invalidate warranty. This is not a fair critique of my post imho.
A kind of related story… We’re looking at a house (to maybe purchase) that can only get FTTP (Full Fibre) for the internet - this is what Openreach are doing now: If an area can’t get FTTC then they go in and install FTTP rather than waste money doing FTTC and then, a few years down the road, going back and doing FTTP. Anyway sounds great doesn’t it? So £54pm for 1gig internet… what more could you want? However this is an area where mobile phones don’t work so you need a phone line… you’re then talking perhaps £30pm for a simple phone line. In fact it’s cheaper to goto Plusnet and get a FTTC package, JUST for the phone line package, but don’t use the FTTC ('cause it’s 0.5meg!). The other option is to get a residential voip package from someone like Vonage but that’s £20pm. So you’re £54pm fantastic broadband is really closer to £80+pm!
I don’t understand your post, and it’s in no way a critique assuming that’s in the negative context.
I’m just pointing out the BT SH-2 is designed as such & it does enable users to select split 2.4 & 5GHz bands or to leave on BT default of auto select.
BT Digital Voice is an BT service upgrade to allow all fibre on both broadband & phone services by 2025.
It probably is fast enough to be fair, but so far I’m not getting any kind of speed upstairs. If the boosters push it up to 40 Mbps I’ll be happy.
However I will be downgrading the package. When I spoke to BT and agreed to Full Fibre 500 I was told a guaranteed minimum of 250 Gbps throughout the house and that a higher starting point speed wise, i.e. 500 over 100 would give a higher reading through the house. The engineer however said that speed at the hub has no influence on wifi speed or range and the quoted 250 Mbps only applies to wired connections. If thats the case I only need he 100 Mb speed.
I guess its the advantage of a modern house on a modern estate…?? And Openreach are onsite almost daily added Full Fibre…
[There are quite a lot of ‘big’ houses, on the estate - with His & Hers BMW/Range Rover/etc - you get the idea… So FF it has to be - along with trendy Grey Windows & Doors… Mine is smaller… with White Windows…]
And this in reality is correct for most of us. Download speeds aren’t limited by line speeds, the biggest factor is what’s at the other end of the pipe and whether it’s Netflix serving up a 3 hour 4K UHD film or a hobbyist website running off a spare laptop, d/l speeds will be limited by what the remote server is either able to provide or has been configured to, and what the recieving device can manage.
I watch Windows updates creep through on FTTP; iPad updates for small apps take close on a minute to d/l a few MBs of updates, BBC iPlayer taking eons longer to fetch a 30 minute comedy in HD than the sums that suggest a gig or so at 130MB / second should take a lot less time. When we upgraded from the ropey old 14MB connection to BT’s ‘Up To 150’ (in reality around 135) there was absolutely zero difference in my WFH experience, and not much on music download times. The single biggest difference was that where previously we’d been able to watch HD content on iPlayer Amazon Prime etc with no buffering, we can now opt for 4K / UHD where available. Capacity has improved, but absolute real world d/l speeeds? Not significantly and certainly not enough to make any real difference. Maybe downloading a R4 comedy via BBC Sounds to the phone when you’re halfway out of the door takes a bit less time than it did. It’s not life changing though.
The reason for the move to Full Fibre was to make the wife’s life easier working from home. We’ve always had poor internet but she was constantly getting kicked off the network and twiddling her thumbs while files downloaded and often left flailing during team meetings online.
I don’t do anything that requires superfast speeds so knowing very little about the subject I was “guided” by BT as to what would solve the wife’s woes.
Misguided may be closer to the truth. They led me to believe the faster the connection at the hub the faster the WiFi and the further that WiFi would reach. The engineer who installed said “you’ll get 450 Mbps downstairs and at least 250 Mbps upstairs”. The engineer who came out to check for a fault dismissed all of that and said faster won’t extend the range and won’t improve the speed upstairs. When the extenders arrive I’ll see if things improve and on the basis of that get my packaged tweaked.
Everyone likes their package tweaked.
There may be something in that. An acquaintance was telling me this week that wifi in the garden is now useable where it wasn’t before. The only change literally was an increase in line speed. To me that doesn’t make sense, but neither did getting into a disagreement about it.
Most, if not all mobile networks allow ‘WiFi calling’ so that your phone automatically routes voice calls via your network if it can’t find a mobile signal. If this works I can’t see why you would need a landline, other than as an additional backup for emergency use if the internet connection fails.
It is not possible to split bands with the BT Smarthub 2.
I can post a link to the BT Community site that show this but Naim forum rules do no allow the posting of links.