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Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Ironhide
Newbie
Posts: 1
Registered: ‎07-06-2015

Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Hello,
I hope I've posted this in the right section.
We are considering moving to a rural property in Lincolnshire. It is on standard broadband at the moment but is planned to be upgraded to fiber this month. The problem is it appears to be 1.6 miles from the cabinet. As I understand it, that means even though fiber's going to the cabinet it will be traveling 1.6 miles over the old copper cable? I was wondering if someone could tell me how this will affect both speed and latency?
We are currently living in a town with Plusnet's fiber and tend to average around 50Mbps (a speed test just now came up at 38.15 download and 15.88 upload with a ping of 26)
There are three of us and we are all pretty heavy users. My brother and I are both PC gamers and all three of us also do a lot of downloading and streaming (like Netflix etc). We also run a business from home and need to upload images quickly to websites and ebay.
As mentioned above, our concern is how having 1.6 miles of copper will affect the speed and latency? Before we got upgraded to fiber here we used to get kicked out of game servers for a high ping.
The people funding the upgrade are Onlincolnshire, though BT are carrying out the work. They have said if they can get enough people in the village to request it that they will put a terminal in the local villiage. As I understand it this is some device that goes in between the cabinet and the property to extend the fiber and reduce the length is has to travel by copper? If the speed will be too low/ping too high without it, will the terminal improve things?
Thanks
8 REPLIES 8
bill888
Champion
Posts: 1,254
Thanks: 263
Fixes: 38
Registered: ‎18-10-2008

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

fwiw, if you do a google search, there are quite a few speed distance graphs available.
eg.
https://nbnmyths.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/fttn-speed-graph.gif
https://community.bt.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/14176iD69872355BBFDBEA?v=mpbl-1
http://www.ospmag.com/files/Gold_Fig3_0410.jpg
At 1.6 miles (2.6 km), perhaps 10 mbps downstream at best by my reckoning straight from the cabinet, but it could be far lower if the cabling is poor.
ex-Plusnet (ADSL, FTTC) 2008-2023. now BT (FTTP) 2023-
dragon2611
Grafter
Posts: 283
Registered: ‎20-10-2013

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

At 1.6 Miles I'd expect FTTC to either perform pretty badly or it's possible you won't even be allowed to order it at all.
Expect maybe 10-15 Mbit/s on a good copper pair.
http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart-bt-fttc-vdsl2-speed-against-distance
dragon2611
Grafter
Posts: 283
Registered: ‎20-10-2013

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Depending on the distance to the exchange ADSL2+ might actually be faster in the downstream direction than the FTTC.
The only thing I can really suggest is check if there are any alt-net providers (E.g wireless ISP) in the area or perhaps look at bonding multiple lines together (which sadly gets quite expensive quite quickly)
dick:quote
NoZephy
Rising Star
Posts: 190
Thanks: 12
Registered: ‎27-01-2015

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Check the image I've attached to my post.
I'm about 450-500m from my cabinet and this table seems to be pretty accurate based on how I sync at the moment.
When it comes down to BTOR I wouldn't take anything they say and hold any hope to it whatsoever. I'm not sure what they were referring to when they told you about a "terminal" but I'd give up hoping that they would do something like that.
"If" means it won't happen and any confirmation they might release means it will happen but 20 years later Grin
godsell4
Rising Star
Posts: 3,366
Thanks: 15
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

At short distances where the chance of having wires with poor performance and the minimum number of joints between you and the cabinet, that chart may be pretty accurate, at 1.5km and higher, the numbers are theoretical and very unlikely to be anywhere near reality, some might say they are just wishful thinking.
By road I am 1.7miles, i.e. 2.7km from the cabinet, BT test equipment on my line says I am 1.6 or 2km from the cabinet. Currently finding it difficult to get 2Mb or better on VDSL2, but get 2.5Mb on ADSL1.
--
3Mb FTTC
https://portal.plus.net/my.html?action=data_transfer_speed
PeterLoftus
Pro
Posts: 2,599
Thanks: 182
Fixes: 5
Registered: ‎27-05-2011

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Hi Ironhide and welcome to the forum.
I live in the sticks and would estimate I have about a mile of copper. I get a solid 30Mb which was considerably above my estimate when I moved over. I suspect that, reading the forums, we have the benefit in the sticks of things being more slow moving as well, meaning your not up at 79 Mb this week and down to 50Mb in a fortnight because of the number of people piling in an the cabinet getting filled up.
I hope your moving to the country for the right reasons and don't want to bring the town with you  Lips_are_sealed
Too many townies complain about the smells, noisy church bells and being woken by cock crowing.  Roll_eyes
To do is to be - Neitzsche
To be is to do - Kant
do be do be do - Sinatra
AlanL33
Dabbler
Posts: 13
Registered: ‎29-05-2015

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

From my recent experience it depends on the quality of your line from the cabinet, we are 2.37km (1.5 miles) and can only get 1 mbps both up and down. It seems that we have aluminium cable in the run so I would suggest finding out about other users speed before committing if it is important to you.
Alan
NoZephy
Rising Star
Posts: 190
Thanks: 12
Registered: ‎27-01-2015

Re: Moving to rural property. Upgrading to fiber but 1.6 miles of copper?

Quote from: godsell4
Currently finding it difficult to get 2Mb or better on VDSL2, but get 2.5Mb on ADSL1.

That must be awful to know you have VDSL service but for it to be slower than ADSL because of the distance (yet again) Cry