I need some fibre

As you may know if you read this blog post, I recently moved house and in doing so lost my FTTC connection and had to go back to a rather slow ADSL connection, slow as in less than 1Mb. I usually had 37Mb down with FTTC so you can imagine my annoyance.

One of the reasons I am more annoyed is that I am still on the same (enabled) exchange and we only moved less than half a mile down the road.

I am in the process of asking BT when I can expect the cabinet I am connected to, will be upgraded to FTTC, or even if it is possible to upgrade it to FTTC.

It seems surprisingly difficult to find out which specific cabinet I am connected to. From a postcode search of 2011 data it would appear that there is an 85% chance I am connected to a cabinet that isn’t part of the FTTC upgrade plan and may not even be able to be upgraded.

FTTC Check

Using the BT checker (retail and wholesale) the answer is categorically that I can only have really slow ADSL.

BT Line Checker

Using SamKnows seems to indicate a yes to FTTC!

SamKnows Line Checker

However as we took our phone number with us when we removed, I have a suspicion that they may be using old data.

I have put a support request into BT and am hoping for an answer on Monday. You never know I might be on fibre faster than I could hope, or (more likely) find out that I can never have fibre.

ADSL isn’t cutting it, I need more bandwidth. So if I can’t get fibre what options do I have for fast broadband then?

One Reply to “I need some fibre”

  1. Hi James,

    We can have fibre here in September (apparently), which will be a great boon to modern life. I sympathise with your predicament as I know how much we all need fast, efficient Internet these days.

    Mine died completely last week and it was the Openreach man that told me about the upcoming fibre .. I could have kissed him (I didn’t).

    I recently wrote about my experiences without connectivity in Spain and how it would seem that Maslow’s theory of human needs is ready for an update. link here I hope

    🙂
    David

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