Broadband just not up to speed (From York Press)
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Broadband just not up to speed
8:25am Thursday 6th December 2012 in Letters By Reader's letter
IT WAS uplifting to read that York has an ambition to become the digital infrastructure capital of the north (The Press, December 4), enabling download speeds of up to 1 Gbps.
This is very useful to attract businesses using digital technology to come to York.
However, imagine how sick I feel, only two miles from the Dringhouses BT Exchange, achieving a speed of only 1.5 Mbps as I struggle to upload anything more than the odd email attachment.
York and BT must realise that companies contemplating moving to York need employees and these days those workers need to be connected to their office hub from home.
They are not going to like the crawling speeds in the outer environs of York and the surrounding country village dwellings. It is more a case of heads in the cloud than core in the cloud.
Bob Redwood, Main Street, Askham Bryan, York.
Comments(8)
NickPheas
says...
10:21am Thu 6 Dec 12
As far as I can tell the company that was originally doing it went bust about 10 years ago, with cables laid to within 200 yards of my house and no-one's put any more down since.
TheTruthHurts
says...
3:42pm Thu 6 Dec 12
YSTClinguist
says...
3:52pm Thu 6 Dec 12
TheTruthHurts wrote:Type "Speed Test" in the search engine of your choice and take some for a drive whilst ensuring your modem/router is directly connected to the BT socket (not on an extension) your cabling is within a reasonable length and no other devices are attached to your net at that point.
How did you measure your speed Bob?
I feel lucky to get what I do (approx 6meg) but with bandwidth constraints on most new contracts, it's more a case of 'hurry up and wait'. It'd be interesting to see if fibre optics and 50/100meg connections will be capped to 20gigs a months too.....
fred02
says...
8:59pm Thu 6 Dec 12
they are only interested in selling you tv or phones that you do not want. why not force virgin to let other companies use their cables (like BT cables are used). the prices would then come down and broadband speeds go up.
Magicman!
says...
3:23am Fri 7 Dec 12
NickPheas wrote:In a way yes... Cable and Wireless had the ambition to lay cable to the vast majority of hosues in cities across the country - but then lost funding and went bust. It was taken over by NTL who were only concerned with taking profit of those in cabled areas without any further investment. Then in a license deal, NTL became authorised to use the "Virgin" brand name but still refuses to invest in any new infastructre (ignoring the fact more houses with access to their cables equals more potential customers!) - and for their existing customers they give out the cheapest pieces of tatt you can imagine for routers or "superhubs" - routers that cannot handle more than one wireless device connecting to it at any given time, and superhubs that won't connect at all.
Supposedly York is to get Ultra-fast broadband as a result of government investment. I'm just hoping that this will mean someone's prepared to actually lay some more fibre optic cable.
As far as I can tell the company that was originally doing it went bust about 10 years ago, with cables laid to within 200 yards of my house and no-one's put any more down since.
BT did get their hand forced into opening up their ducts to other companies providing a competing service, but BT is allowed to levy a service charge to the other companies.
The letter writer complains at their speeds, but here in Huntington I am in almost the last house on the line and so have the worst contention ratio imaginable. At 3am I get a download speed of 1.2MB/s - at peak times this goes down to 0.7MB/s at best.
TheTruthHurts
says...
12:18pm Fri 7 Dec 12
YSTClinguist wrote:Yeah i knew that, i was getting download speeds of 0.25mb over my wireless but wired was consistently getting 8,9,10 mb/s. I played about with the settings on my wireless router (changed the channel) and ran the test on each different channel until i found the one which gave me the best speed. (i assume its down to interference) and got one that gives me a fairly consistent 7 Mb/s which is good enough for me. If Bob was testing his speeds over a wireless connection then he could be well out
TheTruthHurts wrote:Type "Speed Test" in the search engine of your choice and take some for a drive whilst ensuring your modem/router is directly connected to the BT socket (not on an extension) your cabling is within a reasonable length and no other devices are attached to your net at that point.
How did you measure your speed Bob?
I feel lucky to get what I do (approx 6meg) but with bandwidth constraints on most new contracts, it's more a case of 'hurry up and wait'. It'd be interesting to see if fibre optics and 50/100meg connections will be capped to 20gigs a months too.....
yorkshirelad
says...
1:07pm Sun 9 Dec 12
capt spaulding wrote:Well...maybe he couldn't explain it and maybe I can't.
Quite so Bob, I had a nice man from Bt ring me up and offered me fibre optic to give me FAST internet.
I pushed him on the tec aspect only to find there will be a fibre optic box in my village but not to my house.
So F/optic then back down to copper cable ? How does that work then I asked and thats when the conversation came to an end.
Connect us all up properly and then we are in the race and not before.
But just to put your mind at rest, when I had similar 'FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) done, my speed increased from 8Mbps to 25Mbps.
What is it about people that makes them so negative and paranoid about new technology?
I presume it's that fibre is much faster and the higher the proportion of the route from the exchange to your house is fibre, the faster your actual speed will be.
No worries...it's faster and I've no connection at all to BT or any other internet provider.
capt spaulding says...
9:45am Thu 6 Dec 12
I pushed him on the tec aspect only to find there will be a fibre optic box in my village but not to my house.
So F/optic then back down to copper cable ? How does that work then I asked and thats when the conversation came to an end.
Connect us all up properly and then we are in the race and not before.