How fast is your Internet?

**Marco** · 24-09-2018, 07:46

Originally Posted by shane

Living in a rural Devon village these days is interesting. I’m the early 60’s the GPO built a new telephone exchange about the size of a decent sized four bedroom house, which was filled to the brim with uniselectors. This fed out to nearby houses. and to two PCPs (green cabinets) distributing to the more distant parts of the village.

In the 80s, all the uniselectors were ripped out and replaced with a box of electronics about the size of a wardrobe, then ten years ago we got ADSL. If you were close to the exchange you got about 20 mb/s. Outlying farms maybe 1 or 2.

Then fibre came along. Fibre to the cabinet means exactly what it says. If your line goes directly to the exchange, you can’t have it, so they put a cabinet outside the exchange and fed all the direct lines to that instead. Brilliant! I now get a steady 70mb/s. Unfortunately they didn’t take fibre to the other two cabinets because they’re in dangerous roadside locations, so two third of the village don’t have fibre, and never will.

Enter Gigaclear. They are now in the horrendous process of digging up the entire village to bring FTTP to all. They’re even digging trenches out to local farms up to two miles away. They’ve made an enormous mess all over the place, caused massive disruption everywhere, and one of their 20 ton earthmoving lorries managed to write off my car last week but hey, that’s progress... once the dust has settled we’re promised anything up to 1gb/s. Happy days...

Interesting story, Shane, so thanks for sharing. The sustained disruption was pretty similar here, although thankfully I didn't see any damage to cars. If super-fast/reliable broadband is important to you, it'll all be worth it in the end!

Marco.

**struth** · 24-09-2018, 08:00

It's asymmetric because it was made that way basically. Costs were the main factor and after looking at what they THOUGHT was the demand went for it.
Physics plays its part in that you can only get so much traffic on a road. If you make the road 2 way in equal proportions then either you build a bigger road or reduce the traffic one way to increase it the other. Afaik

**Marco** · 24-09-2018, 08:59

Originally Posted by struth

It's asymmetric because it was made that way basically.

So why isn't it asymmetric in Jeff's case?

Marco.

**struth** · 24-09-2018, 09:05

Originally Posted by Marco

So isn't it asymmetric in Jeff's case?

Marco.

it is symmetric in that it has equal symmetry in each direction; give or take. unusual to get as i say because decisions were made as to what they thought you wanted. tbh it wouldnt be much dearer to do if your going straight to house; just cost of another cable, as long as its put in at beginning. some services say they are symetric but obviously arnt as you still get piss poor uploads in comparison.

**Marco** · 24-09-2018, 09:51

Soz. I missed out the word "why" in my last question, which completely changed the context!

Perhaps it would be better to ask why, in Jeff's case, is it symmetric, and so heavily asymmetric here (certainly with all the results I've seen posted)?

It would also be interesting to find out how Jeff has achieved such symmetry (i.e. what's technically in place in his installation/service provision to cause those results), and is it typical of others in his area?

Marco.

**struth** · 24-09-2018, 10:16

usual versions of it are with leased lines, ethernet in the first mile and ethernet over fibre To The cabinet. mostly used by business that need a good upload speed. think he is in n america so things may be different over there. of course its usually much dearer

**Marco** · 24-09-2018, 10:30

Yup, fair enough. In that respect, it would be interesting knowing what Jeff pays for his broadband provision. I still think that something should be done here to level the disparity between download and upload speeds.

Let's face it, few people will fully utilise download speeds of 350+Mbps. However, I suspect that many would benefit from considerably faster upload speeds, than 22Mbps!

Not me though, as I upload hee-haw.

Marco.

**hifilover** · 24-09-2018, 10:55

We're on 300mbps via Virgin fibre

I'm on the web all day for my business and use iTunes/Apple TVs/Amazon PrimeNetflix for all films and music; but we use nowhere near the download capability! No idea how I could

Still; it's great as it's super fast and generally faultless

**Marco** · 24-09-2018, 11:03

I completely concur, Dan. However, if available, would you make good use of much faster upload speeds than you're currently getting?

Marco.

**Gazjam** · 24-09-2018, 11:12

Taken 5 mins ago, not too shabby for peak daytime?

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