It looks like PlusNet are the first to resell the BT offering

BT have now over-run their original commission date by twelve days and whilst I have been offered 6 February as the revised date - the dig-up team only arrived today.

They confirm completion by tomorrow morning at which point another engineer will return to lay the fibre optic cable, just in time for the final engineer to come on Monday, fix the termination box, connect the modem router and commission the installation.

All seems a little tight time-wise and I will not be surprised if I am called by BT on Friday and given a later commission date.

I speculated about the possibility that BT are packaging the excavation work into small batches of adjacent properties - I can confirm that this is not the case.

My neighbour had an earlier install date than me, but the dig-up team advise that they have not been instructed to install his duct - nor for the other neighbours that I saw being surveyed. So it might be the case that I have leap-frogged the others.

So make or break time tomorrow - will their long awaited plan come together so that the commission can be completed on Monday or will I get another call deferring the work ?

Anyone else experiencing unexplained delays on FTTP installations ?

Well - I am now a fully fledged member of the fibre-to-the-premise BT Infinity superfast highway

However I must also confess that I have been proven wrong in three counts - two assumptions and one matter of fact.

The assumption that time was too tight and I expected my commissioning to be shunted further downstream - I got completely wrong - BT got everything together, turned up early Monday morning, installed the optical fibre termination kit and modem and hey presto - light speeds were delivered.

Speculation that excavations were being packaged seemed inaccurate as my dig team said they had no further work adjacent to my property.

They completed my work, loaded their pick-up and hitched up their compressor and drove off round the corner only to return two minutes later to my neighbour's house and set themselves up all over again. Seemingly their job list and sat-nav system had a disagreement - oh how my neighbour and I laughed.

Any assumption that I had leap-frogged my neighbour's installation also proved inaccurate - they withheld their agreement from BT on the proposed cable route and consequently where precisely the trench would be dug. This led to BT deferring the dig phase until another site visit could be conducted.

The drive-round-the corner-and-return team resolved the matter quickly and had the trench dug, back-filled and reinstated in jig time.

For any BT managers seeking feedback - both digs and re-intatements were each done in under four hours. Olympian by any measure.

Long awaited but so far very impressive - I am running at within 5% of the guaranteed speed - but then BT needs to deliver the guarantee.

Perhaps the only real issue is - can I type fast enough to keep up with my high-speed Infinity.

This post was last modified: 07-02-2012 11:47 PM by jgdoherty.

@jgdoherty


congratulations about your new connection

hoping fttp will come in kirkdale too in the near future.


take care

I too have just had ftth installed, installation was on time and everything went smoothly. Achieving between 65-90 mbit/s down and 15 up. It is worlds apart from the O2 adsl I had previously, especially in terms of latency. Browsing the Internet feels more like loading locally stored content.

Thanks kannanni

As to your hope that FTTP will come to Kirkdale in the near future, I spotted yesterday that BT Openreach are trialling "FTTP On-demand".

They describe this as extending fibre from the nearest cabinet to the premises in areas already enabled for FTTC, if and when requested by the subscriber. There is no mention of installation costs or achievable speeds.

Timescales as ever can be open-ended with BT - they go through phases of "trialling", then "pilot" and finally "rollout".

It is worth remembering that BT did make public statements at the end of 2011 that their 40mbps offering would have the speed doubled in first quarter 2012.

Good luck.

Now into day eighteen of FTTP service and the improvement in performance is not insignificant - but BT are seemingly unable to deliver the promised speed.

BT's own speedtester software and other creditable test sites provide evidence of severe fluctuations in the performance of my fibre optic link.

I waited the obligatory ten days for the initial "training period" to be completed, although from experience I know that 72 hours tends to be enough to know if the system is settling in or not, and then contacted BT.

The main selling point of FTTP is that the user should suffer no degradation in performance between exchange and the premises.

I was fortunate enough to record the information and technical specs provided by BT when they made their initial sales call to me and specifically sought assurance that it was a guaranteed performance that was being offered and not a woolly "up tp" XXX speed (a practice that the Regulator has deemed unacceptable in advice to BT).

I received an error ridden letter of confirmation from BT and made further calls to have those errors corrected before proceeding.

These steps have provided me with just a little comfort.

Recent calls from BT have focused on when and from whom did I receive the calls offering the guaranteed service. Noticeably on the technical front BT have not made progress on how a solution will be implemented.

Whilst contractually I feel BT will do their best to deliver the guarantee, astonishingly during one of the several long calls I have been advised that the numbers of FTTP installations have risen rapidly and BT are creating a small backlog of of individual premises where performances are only reaching as little as 65% of the planned speed.

It has also become evident that internally, between the retail part of BT (that part that sells their services to the customer) and the Wholesale unit (BT Openreach - they install and maintain the services) this 65% performance is deemed to be an acceptable level of performance.

This however is not the view of the Regulator. He has stipulated that if BT know they cannot deliver say a 100 mbps service - they are restricted in how they can advertise and sell the service and must state what speed will be delivered as part of the contract and not hide behind the spurious and dis-credited "up to" terminology. Especially when BT know in advance that potentially there is a large shortfall in magnitude that may be as much as 35%.

This is particularly important to the customer if BT already know that they themselves will attempt to set aside any customer's complaint where the performance meets their internal 65% rule. It also seriously contradicts ALL of BT's early statements about the specification of this performance level being guaranteed to the customer.

I have been promised further calls from BT but as yet none has identified how BT will resolve the under-performance at the technical level.

This issue is specific to FTTP as BT still utilise this infuriating "up to" terminology for their FTTC installations - although even for those BT should inform the customer at point-of-sale what speeds will be achievable. I feel this point is extremely important as the customer can then make an informed choice about how much speed he or she is prepared to lay down additional money for.

Are there any other Forest Hill exchange FTTP customers out there experiencing the same problem of underperformance?

Whilst, as discussed in the past, I am not with BT but have questioned all connections locally I have noticed that over the last six months my Sky connection has grown from a fairly steady 6meg to 10meg then 12meg and now sits at 15meg.

I use speedtest.net which seems to be fairly good and reputable. Not to sure where the extra bandwidth is coming from.

I had experienced increases in speed of the same magnitude on my BT pre-Infinity service, right up until I switched over.

BT had no explanation for this either. I also use speedtest.net, amongst others such as speedtester.bt.com and thinkbroadband.com

I speculated that perhaps as the number of BT users moved away from the copper based service to the fibre optic based Infinity, there was less contention on the copper based service and thereby the non-Infinity users were being benfitted as a by-product of the migration.

But you know what speculation gets you.

It may be that BT prioritise network traffic from speedtest.net......

Would that BT could be so devious and then could possibly make such a thing happen competently...................

Hi jgdoherty,

Have you tested your speed downloading files in addition to speed checker sites?

I'm a little dubious about the speed I get from Sky. The router stats says that I'm on a download of 16Mbps and I get similar values when I check the speed with http://www.speed.io and http://www.speedtest.net of 15-16Mbps. However when I check with http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk, I never get beyond 4Mbps. The upload speed is the same across all three checkers and match the stats on the router.

Broadbandspeedchecker gave me up to 14Mbps until six months ago and has gotten slower and slower and has now settled at 4Mbps. I personally believe that is what I'm getting as my Internet experience feels slower these days.

I've also noticed that I get sub-par download speeds when I actually download files. Never above 0.5Mbps these days(!!!). Whereas six months ago, I use to get up to 12Mbps.

I'm not sure what I can do as if I contact Sky Support, they might fob me off with "Well, our stats are showing you are connected at 16Mbps and so does our broadband speed test site.". I wonder if I have contention issues because every teenager in Forest Hill is playing Call Of Duty and Halo online 24/7? That's how my nephew spends his life.

This post was last modified: 24-02-2012 06:06 PM by Muss.

As a test, I will be downloading a file from Microsoft's website every day at different times to see if my download speed flutuates.

The Sysinternals Suite is a 13MB zip file. A good size for a test file and it has excellent tools for Windows PC diagnostics (that's a bonus).

Theoretically, at 16Mbps, this should take no more than 10 seconds to download. I've just completed three downloads in a row taking 290 seconds, 295 second and 300 seconds . Not good at all. I would have been happy with 20-30 seconds, but an order of magnitude out?

Apparently http://fuller.zen.co.uk/test/ is a useful, reliable download site.

Good news from BT for all you FTTC customers (that is those customers whose fibre connection reaches to the nearest cabinet).

BT's slightly delayed promised rollout of the doubling of FTTC speeds for Infinity 2 customers is scheduled to start today.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/11/..._increase/

Downside is BT have re-introduced the dreaded "up to" terminolgy and have relabelled the 40mbps service as the "up to 38Mbps" service, magically reducing the previous service provision by 5% without apology or explanation. This means that the doubling of speed offers a theoretical speed of "up to 76Mbps".

In practice BT must comply with OFCOM's directive that the customer must be advised in writing of the estimated guaranteed speed that will be achieved at the customer's premises when signing up for a new service or are renewing an existing contract.

Experience now informs us that BT Retail (the part we as customers deal with) and BT Wholesale/Openreach (the guys who provide the installation and the technical support) work with a hidden agenda between them that states that the customers line speeds are deemed satisfactory if line speeds achieve any level that is over 30% of the proposed "up to" speed.

In practice this means that if you have been promised "up to" 40mbps and yet your line performs at say any speed just over 12Mbps - BT Wholesale will state that your line performance is deemed satisfactory- irrespective of whether BT has given you a written estimation of guaranteed line performance or not. They will then decline to offer any further support based on their assumption of this fallacious unpublished agenda.

What additional value for the "high speed network" based on this infallible fibre network and what value is the seemingly toothless regulator OFCOM bringing to any meaningful resolution for the BT customer ?

Not a lot - and BT unashamedly keep hiking the price for these so-called premium services.

I had not expected to be making further contribution on this post as I was enjoying initial speeds of 36-38 ish Mbps on my FTTP service for about 80% of the time and expected my line to settle down.

Regrettably the 20% portion of non-performance has remained unacceptably and stubbornly unfixable by BT. I have experienced high levels of drop-outs, slumps in line speed to virtual zero and a degree of unreliability that is best described as appalling.

Nine weeks in, several episodes of shuffling of BT feet and moving of the issue "off my desk" within BT, I am almost totally unable to obtain a coherent or competent response from the BT Wholesale/Openreach division.

Late last night I was informed that my case specifically was being escalated and that I should anticipate an update today.

Do I thing it will be meaningful or competent - watch this space.

I must say it is admirably courageous of jgdoherty to be one the pioneers in the uptake of FTTP. As a reliable connection is far more important to me than the speed per se, have been watching this thread with interest.

As a long time user of data connections, it is sadly not a surprise to me that BT treats the pioneer as more of a guinea pig. They did this with dialup, ISDN and ADSL, so for them to do the same with fibre is no surprise really.

I agree that you should expect better than that though, so best of luck with it.

Thanks lacb.

In one of my favourite tv progs - "Yes Minister", Sir Humphrey explains that the use of the term "courageous" by civil servants, when discussing matters with their Ministers, should often be interpreted as really meaning foolish or naive.

I feel as if I am firmly in that territory at the moment.

I used to be able to get infinity (FTTC) up until 2 months ago, does anyone know what has changed,as I can no longer get it ?
Does anyone know if FTTP comes with a Static IP ? I know BT do not offer one for FTTC

nikolarun

Standard FTTP does not come with a fixed IP address - if the modem is switched off or reset, a new dynamically allocated IP address is set by BT.

Interestingly within the BT Broadband range, only the Business Broadband ADSL products offered an option where with the payment of a premium (I think in the order og £5-10 pm) the line could be allocated a fixed IP address.

I think the only constraint was that you had to have a BT Business Line.

Given that BT are not yet offering FTTP to business customers yet in Forest Hill that point might therefore be moot.

As for availability of FTTC and/or FTTP, that will be dependent entirely on what the physical location of your premises is. It is very unusual for BT to state that a product is available and then to change that status.

This is possibly a reason to wait for wholesale provision of fibre? My ISP allows a fixed IP (not difficult after all). Bizarrely, they are owned by guess who... BT.