Well if you have been following my sorry saga of Cabinet 25 in Weston Village and it’s journey to fibre, you will be pleased, sorry relieved, that I finally have fibre. Five years after moving house my broadband is now FTTC and much faster than the 1.4Mb/s ADSL speeds I have had over that time. It’s being seven years since the Worle Exchange was upgraded for FTTC, but as with any FTTC enabled Exchange, you can only upgrade to fibre (FTTC) once the cabinet has been enabled.
I had been given an activation date of the 19th September. I had seen BT Openreach vans there that morning (they had been there the day before) so had reasonable expectations that the activation date wouldn’t be missed.
The only timing I had been given was that it would be completed by midnight, but I did wonder if it would be finished earlier, I just couldn’t see BT Openreach being there in the dark.
Mid afternoon my ADSL connection stopped. I did restart the router/modem but no connection. An hour later the modem went blue, I had a fibre connection.
It takes time for the connection to settle down, but I am pleased with a 25Mb/s download speed and it was nice to see how a 1GB software update which would have taken up to eight hours, take just eight minutes! The upload speed is slower than I would like at 2Mb/s but that’s still five times faster than what I had before.
Later it was nice to be able to be downloading an iOS update whilst streaming BBC iPlayer at the same time and browsing the web.
So I now have fibre.
I was meant to be activated yesterday and I’m still waiting. The Mrs is on the phone to plusnet this morning to find out why they missed the activation date. Unfortunately because we switched from Sky to Plusnet we are currently without any Broadband at all as we should have switched already. I will be so glad when this whole sorry saga is over with. The whole Openreach experience is absolutely shocking sadly.
How far away are you to the cabinet? I just noticed on the Twitter sidebar that you’re now basically getting the full download speed on the 38 Mbps package, despite the BT checker showing an estimate of between 13 – 27 Mbps.