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Paul Sutton wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Rob Beard wrote:Hi folks, Looks like BT have announced 300 more exchanges which are going to get Fibre To The Cabinet between Autumn 2010 and Summer 2011. Not terribly exciting for this area apart from Exeter which is said to be enabled by the end of September 2010. There's more on the ThinkBroadband web site here: http://tinyurl.com/yfjzzze ...and a list of exchanges with dates here: http://tinyurl.com/yzcblua <cynical> I wonder if enabling Exeter is anything to do with the fact Virgin cover that area? </cynical> Still has to be good for those folks who can't get Virgin (or want to use an alternative provider for instance). RobFTTC means what exactly ?
Fibre To The Cabinet.It's where BT put a new cabinet in posh areas where folks get all uppety about conservation and complain about having a big ugly BT cabinet on the street outside their house (Muswell Hill for instance) [1].
No seriously, it is where BT run fibre optic cables to a cabinet which is nearer to a BT customer's premises. The cabinet has VDSL equipment installed in it and then the customers phone line is connected to this cabinet. The idea is that the phone line length from the premises to the cabinet is shorter then from the exchange to the premises thus enabling faster speeds using VDSL technology (kind of like ADSL but on steroids).
You're supposed to be able to get 'up to' 40Mbit/sec downloads and IIRC something like 5Mbit/sec uploads (although I believe it can go faster, and the upload and download speed depends on phone line quality and how far you are from the cabinet).
I understand it's a much cheaper solution than BT actually running fibre from the BT exchanges to each individual customers premises (they are doing this but it's pretty limited, other companies too are laying fibre) but because it still goes over a phone line you're not going to see the sort of speeds that fibre can do.
However, compared to say 2 to 4Mbit/sec that some people can get (or slower if you're really unlucky) then it has to be a positive move.
I'd be interested to know if BT put a cabinet in Marsh Barton. An old customer of mine had an ADSL line to their premises in Marsh Barton and the best they could achieve was 1Mbit/sec because the exchange was so far away (it wasn't the Exeter exchange, rather Exminster I believe).
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/02/muswell_hill Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html