Hi there!

The phone line that I use is connected to the Foxhall exchange, Ipswich. I know, that the fibre optic cable will be fitted so that there should be faster broadband speeds. Will BT / Openreach be fitting the fibre optic cable up to the property and into where the router is? If not, what would the price be? If Virgin Media can have super fast speeds then surely BT line users should be able to. Can anyone from BT / Openreach kindly comment? Thank you.

Brooke Bond

From what I have read 21c isn't fibre and you certainly won't be getting it into your home, not for an affordable price.

Seems to be an upgrade of current technology, we're still going to be stuck with crappy copper wire for the 'last mile' from what I read at BT's site.

This may help...
http://www.btplc.com/21CN/Thetechnol...ogyintheUK.htm

depends on various things. you'll be stuck on copper wire for the foreseeable future. bt are doing 1 of 2 things

1. fibre to the cabinet - with improvements in existing technology to increase bandwidth

2. fibre to the home - which is what you are ideally after.

what "flavour" you'll get depends on population density (ie. expected that highly populated areas may go fibre first) and ability to instal fibre (some places it may not be possible).


yeah - i get what you mean. why can't bt broadband have the same bandwidth... simple reason is that bt put lines in the ground a long time back and continued to use the same type of technology until recently. cable on the other hand went optic as it was required for carrying telly pictures (someone correct me if i am wrong on that bit ???) and can benefit from spare capacity on the optic cables.

long and short of it is, cable is benefiting from the technology they put in the ground when BT was (by law) not allowed to be a broadcaster. since there was no requirement for bandwidth over the last few decades bt stuck with copper.

bt's announcements to change can't happen over night and will need time to dig up the entire country and replace everything. if you get fibre tothe home then expect speeds on a par with cable. they reckon fibre to the cabinet will still use copper for the final few hundred metres but you'll possibly get upwards of 50meg.

if you search for bt adsl2 on google etc you can find out more info. looks like 50% of the country will get upgraded to adsl2 in the next 6months. chances are you'll be able to get "up to" 24meg. that's really defendant on what speeds you get just now.

ie. chances are if you get 4meg, you might get ~ 12meg.

i am hopeful for about 20meg.
either way, i'm a bt broadband user just now and still delighted when i see downloads regularly above 700k per second.

or this

https://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/new.../nga/nga003.do

21CN has never been about fibre in the first instance.

it's about changing the back end to be more efficient and scalable for the future.

the adsl2 standard has been grouped with 21CN as BT integrated it with those upgrade plans. since large parts of 21CN has been completed and ADSL2 is not overly complex to deploy (as 02/Sky etc have done) we're getting it ahead of the other stuff 21CN is supposed to deliver.

with regards to ftth home prices - i think there are prices out there. from what i remember it wasn't cheap. don't take this as gospel, but i have a vague memory it was 100meg and could have been £50 a month.

i'd half expect that price to plummet though...

Despite Virgins Media's advertising implying otherwise, they dont have fibre to the home, they use co-ax with fibre to the distribution point. There were a number of complaints about the VM adverts, but the ASA did not uphold them.

21CN is going to replace the core switched telephone network with an IP based network, it's nothing to do with consumer access. So ADSL+ is a service that can be provided over the proposed new network, it's not a design requirement of it.

I say proposed because it certainly isn't true to say that "large parts of 21CN has been completed", if anything the complete opposite is true and there is very little of the 21CN network carrying any live service.

sorry mate, but you are wrong.

The 21CN progress report for July 31st 2008 Indicates: "The national infrastructure rebuild of metro and core sites in the UK is now complete"

large parts of 21CN are complete, live services are currently trickle feeding into service. you are right about very little live service, but not the deployment of infrastructure.

I hope the cost doesn't plummet. The price war with ISPs just means that as soon as people start to actually USE their connections it all grinds to a halt because the ISP is running on the knife-edge of profit and hasn't got any cash spare to pay for any network upgrades. I'd rather a slower connection that you can batter to death, or a faster connection with well defined limits (Kudos here to Entanet resellers, Plusnet, Zen and any other providers who are honest about the usage limit. "UNLIMITED* *please don't use it" broadband sellers can rot. Hope you are gone soon, Tiscali.), than a £30 FTTH link that falters as soon as I try to use it.


Sorry, rant there!


Anyway, 21CN merely upgrades all the backhaul of the networks to bring it all up to being an IP network.

As someone who works for one of the companies supplying BT with the hardware for 21CN and who spends a lot of time in BT telephone exchanges throughout the country, all I would say is that I wouldn't believe everything you read in a company press release...