Tag: bt infinity

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Lost my fibre…

fiber optic light

Back in October 2010 I upgraded my broadband to FTTC and improved my internet speeds dramatically….

Finally had my broadband upgraded to FTTC and I am impressed. With 40Mb down and 10Mb up this is significantly faster than the 1.3 down and 0.6 up I had before.

It has already changed how I use the internet, whereas before I would probably not consider downloading a film from iTunes during the day, as it would soak up my bandwidth and would take hours to download; now it takes under five minutes to download! No problems with downloading large files and updates now.

This week I lost access to FTTC and dropped back down to those old slow ADSL speeds I thought I had left behind.

The reason was simple I moved house!

Though I only (really) moved down the road and even though I am still connected to the same enabled telephone exchange, it would appear that the cabinet I am connected to hasn’t been upgraded! So as a result no FTTC for me.

The first big issue was digging out an ADSL Modem to use, and alas the one I had, had probably been in the garage or a while, and didn’t work. You can’t use the modem that is provided with FTTC, hence the need for an ADSL Modem. Spent about an hour trying to work out why the old D-Link modem wasn’t working. Doing a hard reset didn’t work. So it was a quick trip to PC World to find a cheap ADSL Modem. In the end I got the Netgear N150 Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router. I didn’t in fact need the wireless as I use Apple’s Airport Extreme for my wireless networking.

It was easy to configure via a web browser and it wasn’t long before I was connected and using the ADSL connection.

Back when I got fibre I wrote:

The other key advantage is streaming video, which was almost pointless before due to buffering, and like downloading, previous streaming would soak up my bandwidth, having 40Mb down means I can stream and do other stuff at the same time.

Now that I am back on ADSL (and slow ADSL at that) I am once again unable to stream video through my connection and do anything else. An experiment with BBC iPlayer resulted in a slow browsing experience and buffering video. Now that’s going to be annoying and frustrating. The first casualty looks like it will be my Netflix subscription… if I can’t stream video then what is the point? It will also become a hassle to download video files from iTunes too.

I also have concerns about webinars and Skype as I have a very poor upload speed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love our new house, it’s great. I just hope that BT will get around to upgrading the cabinet soon so I can get FTTC. I also hope they can upgrade the cabinet…. would be doubly annoying if I could never get back on fibre.

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Some things now working…

As I have upgraded to FTTC and one of the requirements is that your router supports PPPoE. As a result I have replaced my old aging Netgear ADSL modem router with my Airport Extreme Base Station. I wasn’t able to use the Airport Extreme before as it did not support PPPoA, but as FTTC requires PPPoE I can now use it. As a result, it is a new(ish) router and therefore I anticipated that I would be able to do two things, one is use EyeTV remotely across the internet and two use Back to my Mac.

So what of EyeTV?

Watch, record, and enjoy live TV on your iPhone or iPad via a 3G or Wi-Fi connection. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.

The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your Apple device:

  • Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection)
  • Watch your EyeTV recordings
  • Browse the comprehensive Program Guide and view details
  • Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later
  • View and edit your recording schedules
  • Automatically launch EyeTV on your Mac at home as needed

    • EyeTV has an iPad and iPhone App which have worked really well on my home network, but so far I have not had any luck accessing it away from home, even though it is correctly configured.

    I do believe though this is because of the remote network I was on. I have yet to try on a public wifi network and I suspect I will have better luck then.

    As for Back to my Mac, Apple says.

    Back to My Mac puts any Mac OS X Leopard- or Snow Leopard-based Mac you use within easy reach. MobileMe finds your remote Mac computers over the Internet and displays them in the Finder on the Mac you’re using. So you can connect from anywhere with just a click. Edit and save documents, open applications, and move folders. With Back to My Mac Screen Sharing, you can control your remote Mac as though you’re sitting in front of it.

    Again on my home Mac, everything seems fine.

    Well I did try and do this, however I couldn’t get my work Mac to recognise my MobileMe account and again as with EyeTV I believe this is because of the remote network.

    So near, yet not quite there.

    Posted on

    Really fast…

    Finally had my broadband upgraded to FTTC and I am impressed.

    With 40Mb down and 10Mb up this is significantly faster than the 1.3 down and 0.6 up I had before.

    It has already changed how I use the internet, whereas before I would probably not consider downloading a film from iTunes during the day, as it would soak up my bandwidth and would take hours to download; now it takes under five minutes to download! No problems with downloading large files and updates now.

    The other key advantage is streaming video, which was almost pointless before due to buffering, and like downloading, previous streaming would soak up my bandwidth, having 40Mb down means I can stream and do other stuff at the same time.

    My only concern is that all this speed I will probably exceed my bandwidth quite easily…

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    FTTC

    BT Infinity is BT’s new broadband product that makes use of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) to enable even faster speeds than available via normal DSL. In some cases 40Mbs download speeds are possible.

    Of course if you are going to make best use of this and have a wireless network, if you use 802.11g then you may find this is not fast enough and want to get an 802.11n wireless router.

    Another feature of FTTC is that unlike traditional UK ADSL that uses PPPoA, FTTC uses PPPoE so that a router like Apple’s Airport Extreme is now possible to use direct with the broadband connection. Before you would have needed to use a ADSL modem between your broadband connection and your wireless router.

    My local exchange has just been upgraded to FTTC so looking forward to upgrading and trying it out.

    There are also trials with FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) that can result in even faster 100Mb speeds. I can wish.

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    Airport Extreme reliability failing

    As mentioned before on the blog, my Airport Extreme is becoming less reliable. I am having to reboot it at least once a week now. There is no warning before it goes dodgy.

    I am going to wait before replacing it, as we are getting BT Infinity later this month and I am not sure if I will need a new router. If I do need a specific type of router then I will get a new 802.11n router.