Why I don’t want superfast broadband

On copper cable my speed was 1.5. On fibre to the cabinet it became 32 (20 times faster). All for £5/month/special offer with Talktalk. Well worth it!

Raw speed isn’t everything. We’re on virgin media cable and do get the stated 30mb speeds when performing speed test but have constant problems with any streaming services such as iPlayer and YouTube. We’re not the only ones it seems when reading VMs own support forums.

Much preferred the old 8mb service which wasn’t as fast but always was reliable.

If that is so (and PNet always take pains to stress they are not ‘part of BT’, in my experience anyway), BT needs to take customer service lessons from its minnow. This small estate of 17houses suffered 6 months of lines going down, no bband, ultra slow speeds etc. A junction box had flooded, and ancient wiring from 80s had begun to disintegrate. Service suppliers for us and our neighbours were many…BT, PNet, TalkTalk, etc. No exaggeration, BT must have sent 75 – 100 engineers out to the same junction box in that time period – none of them knowing a thing about the same problems other neighbours were experiencing and previous engineer visits. Unbelievable. And, during that time, the ONLY customers who were contacted, kept informed, treated well were the PNet ones. The worst (appalling in some cases) customer service was experienced by those with BT and TalkTalk. We all had to wait for BT eventually to get its act together and sort things, but I know which provider I am glad we were with during that stressful time.

I have been with Force9, which then became Plusnet, for many years. The service is reliable, fast and the customer service is excellent. I get my phone from them as well. They may be owned by BT but the seem to remain separate from them. Having previously been with BT, I would say that Plusnet are in a different league.

ADSL Broadband utlises the original telephone network cables which were only designed to carry speech frequencies (ie narrow band). To achieve Broadband over these lines the mathematical theories of Shannon, Hartley and Nyquist are utilised. In essence, these theories link quantity of information (eg data speed) to the noise/interference present on the transmission medium (eg telephone cable). As the noise/interference increases the achievable data rate decreases. The noise/interference increases more or less linearly with increase in distance from the Exchange, hence much lower data rates are achievable at the maximum distance from the Exchange (5 to 6 miles). The noise/interference also increases the more Broadband Users there are on any particular cable, hence the lower achievable speeds in the early evening. Very clever engineering in the form of digital coding has been used to utilise the local telephone network for Broadband. Changing the cable from copper to optic fibre increases the bandwidth phenomenally and also reduces the noise greatly hence giving the very high “Superfast” Broadband speeds that we see quoted. Prosaically the biggest cost element of making this change is digging up the roads and laying the new cable which is why Superfast Broadband is being rolled out along existing cable routes (ie the ducting is already there in the ground so it is relatively inexpensive to achieve). So if you live “out in the sticks” like I do, don’t expect Superfast (or even Fast) Broadband over cable this decade – it’s not a cost-effective proposition for the provider (usually BT).

We have an ADSL connection out here in Norfolk. Previous internet /phone providers have included BT and talk talk with associated poor customer service/high cost. We have now been with the(good old British!) Post Office for a couple of years and customer service is excellent. It hardly ever gets a mention in our ‘beloved’ mag but, tell me, what other ISP includes free week end calls to mobiles as well as the usual STD and international calls.Long live our Post Office!