Dear Register,

You got me all excited that we'd be getting "fast fibre" rather than plain old slow 100mbit fibre. Turns out that fast fibre doesn't even meet my expectations for plain old slow fibre.

In the same way that 20Mbit in the exchange equates to under 2Mbit at my house, "due to the mix and match of cables from the cabinet to my house" (thats what BT said anyways).... does that mean that we can still have the fun of being told a HEADLINE speed of 40 Mbit that is nowhere near, yet we can still pay for the high speed.

BT are a waste of space.

That's great news, me being from Scotland and having the slowest available connection on offer to man. How about instead of spending our money on upgrading already fast lines, they upgrade my nasty telephone exchange so that we in the more rural areas can join the rest of the UK and benefit from the wonders of faster connections.

IS there an abundance of sheep porn that needs downloading or sommat?

And what is to be the upload speed or is it symmetrical (some hope)?

BT need to give everyone the extra bandwidth to cope with all the "on the fly" Phorm header/markup manipulation of course.

In theory the upload could be as high as 16Mbps, but I wouldn't count on that for a variety of commercial and technical reasons.

This is based on sub-loop unbundling, which I believe is being trialed by a few other LLU players at the moment isn't it?

RE: Virgin Media's 50MBit Upgrade Next Month

Will Virgin be amending their draconian bandwidth throttling - or traffic management as they prefer to refer to it as - in light of their intended upgrade to 50MBit? I recently noticed that their bandwidth throttling scheme is now enforced from 10:00am now, as opposed to during the "peak time" of 4:00pm - 9:00pm... so that's 11 hours a day, every day of the week, where I'm subjected to the "mother of all bandwidth throttling" (as Samuel L. Jackson keeps on reminding me). Hardly just peak time any more, is it, Mr Branson?

Currently I'm on their 20MBit package, and find that it is incredibly easy to trigger their throttling - it takes approx 30 mins of donwloads for it to kick in. If I upgrade my speed by a factor of 2½, then I'll be hitting their threshold even quicker... in fact I'll end up capped more than I'm not capped.

40Mb seems slow, and as Stuart has already asked, what's the upload speed going to be?

Anyway, its all irrelevant to me. If I'm forced to go through Phorm equipment, BT can f**k right off.

When it was initialy talked about it was suposed to be 100mbit. I was starting to worry it would be faster than my virgin line, but as they're upgrading to 50mbit anyway, guess BT will be left behind again.

Yup, rural like "Aberdeen". 200,000 mostly oil-jobbed / studenty people (i.e. not too hit by the credit crunch so we've still got some disposable income to drop on decent Broadband). We used to have a cable network but they inexplicably died about the time Aberdeen got big.

And I'm stuck with a max "theoretical" top speed of 3Mbit (from a supposedly 16meg exchange). What it's like in the actual sticks I don't know. And don't want to think of, or I'll get depressed for them...

BT! Listen up! Scotland is a good investment- plenty customers (though not too many) and a whole new parliament to corrupt/mislead! If you can handle some of the terrain and prise the Scot's wallets open you can handle anything- so it's a really good test of range/durability of your new tech.

Take it to Wick, the homeplace of the Fax machine and a good northern point. It'd mean you'd have the fibre backbone running right up the UK, making expanding the network later a lot easier and pass through Edinburgh, birthplace of the inventor of the Telephone.

@Previous poster

100Megabit isn't fast enough for you? Okay, so 1Gig would be nice and 10Gig (actual, not just "up to") non-fup'ed unlimited-a-month at an affordable price would convince me to bend over, lube up and take a Phorming. But a 100Megabit line (with decent upload and well spelt out restrictions) would probably do me just fine.

So they are putting some expensive kit in those cabinets that can be opened with a radiator bleed key?

The trouble isn't that they won't make money from rural areas; They'll make more than enough to cover the cost. Hell, they could aggregate it between the rural and urban areas and spread the cost.

The problem is that they won't make AS MUCH money if they roll out broadband to rural areas.

I work at a secondary school with 10Mb symmetrical, which is shared from the local council with two primary schools. This place is on THE VERY EDGE of the Authority border, but still has a decent urban sprall. Go 5 minutes up the road to another school, further IN to the Authority area, and they barely get dial-up. It's old copper all the way, despite only being a couple of miles from a DEDICATED fibre connection.

It's not just BT who are money-grabbing tits.

Whitchurch is a well-heeled middle-class suburb of Cardiff. It really is quite tiring to see any story which references Wales automatically triggering comments about sheep...

Meanwhile for the rest of us without Whitchurch and London have to struggle on using ADSL (of varying speed) or even Ye Olde Dyall-uppe.

Since when was 40Mbit considered 'fast' for fibre?

Pulling a fast one more like.

I thought, well, why not save 70 mins on the train, be good to the environment and cease the commute and move to Muswell Hill - where the Post Office R&D centre used to be before they relocated to Martlesham Heath in Suffolk (where BT's R&D facility still is).

Muswell Hill - 3 bedroom terraced house - £865,000 !!!

I know you don't believe it - take a look :

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails-15380359.rsp?pa_n=1&tr_t=buy&mam_disp=true

I reckon it'll be Fibre to the Home - 100 Mbit/s for only £100 a month. The folks living there can afford it !

<irony>

Why would you want to do that? the internet is all about take take take (aka bunch of pirate thieves!) , god forbid you'll want to give.....

</irony>

Pirate well because...

Ahh good ole Be* 2mb upload!

and I am looking at you marmite toast and Jeremy..

why do you have to be so negitive?

FTC is going to increase speeds, it will make speeds more constant from customer to customer, speed will only be limited by the length of the line from the cabinet to your home and as the cabinets will typically be less than 200 meters from your home speeds should be close to what is available at the cabinet !!

You backward limies make me laff. "Fast" you call it. I have had 100Mbps in my house in Japan for about 5 yrs now. So has everyone else I know. And it costs me less than my mum pays for 512k ntl "broadband".

But I know why Britain is no longer Great. Its because of generations of eating detergent caused by failure to rinse the dishes.

I worked in Muswell Hill telephone exchange on a couple of occasions.

There used to be a bloke who worked there who loved his radio and if you turned it down/off or changed the channel, he'd go completely bananas.

He was actually a nice guy, just as long as you didn't touch is radio...

Should take about 5 mins for someone to come up with a massively ineficient format to wipe out any potential bandwidth gains.

How about ultra high definition videos of someone saying hello when ten bytes of text would have done?

Luckily, I won't be moving to UK anytime soon. I've had 50Mbps (symmetric) fibre for almost a year here in Slovenia (and the ISP offers up to 1Gbps, but that one's a bit pricey for home connection).

(oh, and this isn't "up to" 50Mbps, I never have problems saturating my line assuming the server on the other side has big enough pipe - or I download 2 or 3 files at once).

Will this service come with a 5G monthly cap?

What's the point of ever increasing speeds and ever decreasing allowances? I don't need to use my entire monthly allocation in 12 seconds, I'm not using burst transmissions to hide from the government's prying eyes.... yet.

So, what do people need all this bandwidth for anyway? Stop your moaning and go find something else to do whilst your porn downloads!!