What a farce it is getting fibre broadband.I ordered BT fibre mid April. After 4 visits from Open Reach I still don’t have fibre installed. We have a ducting from the pavement to the house but no further
We have ducting laid by Virgin and City Fibre along the pavement but Ofcom has said anybody can use Open Reach ducting but BT cannot use anybody else’s.
So as of today we’ve had a hole dug to locate BT ducting then filled in again because it’s too near a mains cable.
I live on a suburban estate not in the wilds of the county.
Which means that they look like having to dig a trench about 80metres to the nearest fibre access point.
No wonder prices have gone up!!!
Actually that isn’t quite right. It’s not that Ofcom has said that BT can’t use anyone else’s ducts, but rather that Ofcom doesn’t require competitors to allow BT access to their ducts. Those competitors like Virgin and City Fibre could let BT use their ducts if they chose to do so.
It all comes from the history that BT had a vast local network of ducts, poles and copper already paid for and it was very expensive for competitors to build new broadband networks in the same geography. So there was little competition to BT and broadband rollout was too slow.
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I can only say in the way of balance that in my very rural location BT installed fibre to the modem and the installation process was only delayed by the need for council planning permission to close the lane with a cherry-picker for an hour or so.
Cannot fault the process, including the helpful BT staff. 400mb now too.
Bruce
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Glad I’ve got no interest in streaming.
I play discs. 
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On an FTTC connection (via Openreach), I get about 36Mbps. Thats enough for me…!!
Hi.
I have to deal with Openreach in my work life, it is like pulling teeth.
I mentioned this on site once to an Openreach engineer, his response “tell me about it and I work for them”
What can one say?
Those are great numbers. What speed did you have before, please, does it remain stable at those 900 numbers and what practical impacts do you notice?
I’m thinking about which speed/package to go for.
Middle of very rural France, Hamlet of a dozen houses.
Fibre installed trenched along side main A roads and then fibre along telegraph poles on side roads. Once that was in I contacted provider (Orange) and two weeks later chap came, climbed up his ladder, drilled through the wall and made the connection. Why does it have to be so difficult in the UK?
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I live in Switzerland and that is just the standard speed. Every so often they simply upgrade it. Yes it is very stable. I just tried it against a server in Milan (because it is a bit more real-world) and it gave 650 down and 910 up.
Everything just seems very fast.
Thanks. I’m being offered 900 here in the UK. I can go with a lot less - 60 for example - I’m not sure if I need 900 but it’s tempting even if it costs a little more.
I was with BT with ADSL and speeds of about 2mbps dropping to zero when it rained. Occasionally I saw 3mbps.
The fibre installation was carried out by Gigaclear in early 2020 with fibre directly into our house.
Having suffered slow internet for years, I bit the bullet and decided it was worth paying for the 900mbps speed, whether we needed it or not.
I now see a speed of around 920mbps up and down. It’s wonderful, with streaming of video, downloading films, sending large files, streaming music etc. is a joy 
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Openreach have installed fibre almost everywhere in my town. It’s available throughout the entirety of our road……apart from the pole outside my home. Poles to the left have had FTTP available for months. Poles to the right have had it available since the beginning of May. For some reason, the one pole that myself and 5 neighbours are fed from is not live yet….that’s according to openreach, although according to the engineer I spoke with that was tasked with checking the status of the equipment at the pole this morning , it’s all up and running and has been for weeks. Very frustrating!
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Strangely that was the same here. When the engineer turned up he checked the pole numbers and feeds. One pole by our barn was live which he suggested might be used, another pole a little along the road the other side of our house was live but he thought it too far away, the pole directly outside our house wasn’t showing as live. A few phone calls from him to somewhere, a trip in his van to find the junction box and he came back smiling and carried on.
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It’s not always difficult. I had 500mb FTTP installed three years ago and it was a straightforward install.
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In my case it’s just… ‘computer says no’.
I’ve decided I don’t need the superfast numbers you get with FTTP.
I have BT’s so called fibre, but actually it’s FTTC with aprx 250m of copper to the house, and this gives me 74/19mb/s.
I’ve used superfast services twice recently & frankly for me/us and how we use internet I don’t see what higher numbers will give me.
I stayed at an hotel that had +300 mb/s, using my WiFi 6 enabled laptop, it did not do anything faster in any way that I could detect, if anything it had a slight hesitancy about it.
The same at my son’s house, although I did test downloading an album from Qobuz and yes it was faster, but so what, it takes less than a minute on my home 74mb/s.
My son has it for video streaming & yes it is better with his top end TV, or so he says, plus his & her work & games & audio streaming ….
So as and when we get an UHD all the bells and whistles TV, then we will have a rethink.
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Hi @Mike-B
Even when/if you get a “UHD bells and whistles TV” you may not need any more speed. Of course if you suddenly have lots of people in the house all pulling streaming services then it may change. I like you find that my 70Mb service suffices and yes we stream 4k TV quite a bit with no issues.
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Hi @Orac , I have a UHD 4K TV, but it’s not the latest and although it streams OK, I get the feeling it could do better, outside broadcasts especially.
I suspect a later gen TV is the answer, not ‘faster’ broadband.
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