I have found out that my exchange will be enabled for ADSL2+ via BT on the 18th August.  LLU for Be is already available on my exchange, and Sky isn't far behind either.  Do we know when Zen are going to follow the rest and offer the same services....  As it's getting hard for me to resist changing to another ISP for half the cost of Zen and upto...  24Mb/s  when presently I only get 1.3Mb/s on a 8Meg service....

 Cheers

 Scam 

Hi there,

We don't have specific details at this time, however as BT role out their 21CN network - which will allow ADSL2+ over the BT Wholesale network - we will look to adopt these services.  Specifics are very much dependent upon what BT are doing but will obviously provide far greater coverage than LLU providers in time.

I would point out that if you are only getting 1.3Mbit/s from ADSL then you're unlikely to see any significant improvement on ADSL2+ as you are likely on a fairly long and/or low quality line.  ADSL2+ drops of quickly on long lines to the point where it is fairly close to ADSL - I expect you may only see a few hundred Kbit/s more on ADSL2+ so may well not break the 2Mbit/s mark unfortunately.  This illustration will help you get a picture of how the technologies compare:

http://www.internode.on.net/residential/internet/home_adsl/extreme/ 

Kind regards,

Phil. 

Hello,

I would have to strongly agree with Phil and his comments. I have an old friend who lives in central London just round the corner from Post Office Tower, he has had ADSL2+ from "Be" for quite some time and he is VERY close to the local exchange. And although its supposed to be a 24meg service he gets between 18 -20 megs on downloads.

**Remember that with ADSL2+ the maximum "theoretical speed" the service can sync at is 24megs but that doesn't mean you will ever get 24megs on download. The same over hype was used constantly by BT & other companies when ADSL came out and frankly I think it was quite dishonest in my opinion. YES! 8megs is the maximum in theory but less than 1% of users ever get anything even approaching 8megs. The average UK broadband users get around 2-3 megs, some very unfortunate people get less than 2megs due to line length and a very very few lucky people like myself can get 3megs or above if the line quality is good.

**In a recent speed test I was pleasantly surprised to get  4807kbps on DL and I live less than 1kilometer from my local BT exchange (I'm on the DSL MAX, upto 8meg service). Thats probably the first time I've ever seen that too.

Ivan

For more people than not, ADSL2+ is a farce to allow companies to even further overstate the bandwidth you'll actually receive.

My connection is above average at 4.5Mbps. ADSL2+ takes that to 5.2Mbps. The only people who care about this technology are those who won in the exchange distance lottery. Personally, I think we should invest in getting everyone to 4Mbps (which I already have so I'm not biased here) before getting anyone to 24Mbps.

Hi Jcornwall

I absolutely and totally agree with what your saying. I can already see ADSL2+ as being another broadband fiasco.

Ivan

**If it ain't broke don't fix it !!**

jcornwall:

Personally, I think we should invest in getting everyone to 4Mbps (which I already have so I'm not biased here) before getting anyone to 24Mbps.

It's not going to happen until we have a UK based fibre optic network.

The lines that we are using for broadband were originally designed for telephony (i.e. voice) and it's a fundamental law of physics that the further you are from the source (i.e. the exchange DSLAM), the weaker the signal and therefore the slower speeds you are likely to get

Indeed. And I firmly believe that the UK telecoms infrastructure isn't going to advance in any meaningful way without FTTH.

Unfortunately the current players in the industry barely have a grasp on the economics of our current, low performance connections. I'm not holding my breath for fibre.

jcornwall:

And I firmly believe that the UK telecoms infrastructure isn't going to advance in any meaningful way without FTTH.

Unfortunately the current players in the industry barely have a grasp on the economics of our current, low performance connections. I'm not holding my breath for fibre.

I think that BT do realise the need for FTTH but have yet to be convinced of the argument for laying a UK wide fibre network because of the huge costs involved (billions of pounds)

BT shareholders want a return on their investment.

As far as I know, the old cable companies (NTL, Telewest and BlueYonder) had a government grant to help them with the costs and when the money ran out, they stopped laying new fibre hence the reason why only towns and cities are in Virgin Media enabled areas.

Well, that's kind of what I meant.

The current infrastructure is creaking under low sync rates, bandwidth caps and FUPs. Connecting people with an enormously expensive fibre network would allow everyone to push their connections to unsupportable limits.

Great for the consumer but an absolute nightmare for telecoms businesses, who invested a lot of money only to see their backhaul costs quadruple overnight. The service would have to be charged at a much higher rate than current connections are to be sustainable, reaching only a limited audience and leaving a big hole in the telecoms investors' wallets.

To be honest, I see no real need at the moment for fibre lines with 100mb down and X amount up, especially for the home, most websites/servers pump out less than 1/2mbit anyway, so even if we did have in excess of 100mbit lines we would still probably only be able to download from the majority of the net at 500kbps or less, usenet and torrents excluded, so for what we do now and for the foreseeable future I see no real need for huge amounts of bandwidth, ADSL2+ will suffice for a good few years before we see a real need to change from that to fibre.

Am I saying we should'nt have fibre, no I am not, it would be great to have as more is always better, but at this particular moment in time it's overkill, as I can do every single thing I want to do on an 8mbit line, well its sold at 8mbit but capped at just over 7mbit - 7150kbps TBP, so a jump from "8" to the guts of "24" will do me very well and I consider myself as a hardcore internet user.

Thats just my thoughts on the subject.

Hello,

I have to agree with the comments made by Curlywhirly, the problem is that if the UK is going to keep up with other countries in terms of E-Commerce & services like video on demand (such as the BBC's iplayer or AppleTV) then we have to make a serious investment at national level like the Koreans did some years ago. The UK telecoms & internet infrastructure needs government backing & help with government funding in order to take it to the next level of greater speed & capacity i.e. fiber optic lines. I cannot see a private company making that kind of large scale investment less they had extremely deep pockets (sky might be one exception possibly?).

**I think the public demand for such a high speed service is already present no! doubt about it, its just the sheer scale of laying that kind of infrastructure that is so daunting. Even BT's 21CN network is going to take about 5years to complete end to end. Think how big a project laying a new national network would be?

**The only question is can we as a country really afford NOT to invest in a major way in new internet infrastructure?

Ivan

Evil-Scotsman:

Am I saying we should'nt have fibre, no I am not, it would be great to have as more is always better, but at this particular moment in time it's overkill, as I can do every single thing I want to do on an 8mbit line, well its sold at 8mbit but capped at just over 7mbit - 7150kbps TBP, so a jump from "8" to the guts of "24" will do me very well and I consider myself as a hardcore internet user.

As you must live quite close to the exchange, you will probably benefit the most from ADSL2+ when it's launched.

On the other hand, I won't benefit much as I have a long line (54 dB attenuation) and will be lucky to see any speed improvement from the current 3 Mbps BRAS profile I get on Max.

I would think that BT will come up with a way to get those who live further from the exchange and have high attn a better line speed, kinda like what they did before, where they increased the distance for people to get adsl.

Maybe not, but I would tend to think they will come out with some new trick that will enable people on bad lines or who live further away from the exchange to get better speeds and more stable lines for those whos stats make adsl not the most reliable, I can see that happening long before fibre gets laid.

Evil-Scotsman:

I would think that BT will come up with a way to get those who live further from the exchange and have high attn a better line speed, kinda like what they did before, where they increased the distance for people to get adsl

Yes but this was only possible because the BT limits were conservative in the first place!

Evil-Scotsman:

but I would tend to think they will come out with some new trick that will enable people on bad lines or who live further away from the exchange to get better speeds and more stable lines for those whos stats make adsl not the most reliable

I think that Max ADSL pretty much pushes our connections to the limit and I'm afraid that no one can defy the law of physics i.e. the further you are from the exchange, the higher the attenuation (signal loss) and therefore the slower the speed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jul/15/btgroupbusiness.news

Looks like BT finally has some plans for a (limited) fibre rollout.