Brits get super fast broadband trials

17 Years Ago newsguy 0 255 Views

Although the kind of 1Gbit/s broadband service that is a reality in Japan remains but a pipe dream for most people, the Brits can look forward to super-fast 60Mbit/s broadband real soon now. National telecoms carrier BT has announced that it will be installing upgrades to no less than 29 telephone exchanges as part of a fibre to the cabinet overhaul during the course of the year.

To put that into some kind of context, broadband running at 60 megabits per second across your telephone line is around 8 times as fast as the absolute maximum BT can provide today.

The BT Openreach installations are due to go live by early 2010, covering around 40 percent of UK homes and businesses by 2012, although there are plans for trials of the technology in both London and Wales during the coming summer months.

The FTTC technology achieves the high speeds courtesy of bringing thin optical fibre from the exchange to the street cabinet, with copper lines providing the last few metres to the door. By reducing the distance, in many cases down from a couple of kilometres to a few metres, higher-frequency signals are achievable and thus more data can be carried.

In a double whammy of good news for Brit broadband users, BT also announced that it will be implementing an up to 24Mbit/s ADSL2+ upgrade for every exchange over existing copper lines.

Of course, this should all be read in the context of a recent UK government report which suggested that many people can expect broadband access at maximum speeds of 2Mbit/s in the years to come.

Anyone reading this in the UK will probably want to know which exchanges are to get the FTTC 60Mbit/s upgrades in the first wave, so here is the full list:

Belfast Balmoral
Bury
Calder Valley
Canonbury
Cardiff
Chelmsford
Chingford
Dean
Didsbury
Edmonton
Enfield
Failsworth
Glasgow Halfway
Glasgow Western
Halifax
Heaton Moor
Hemel Hempstead
Highams Park
Leagrave
Luton
Oldham
Pudsey
Rusholm
St Albans
Taffs Well
Thamesmead
Tottenham
Watford
Woolwich

Dani AI

Generated 8 Months Ago

Good roundup by . The following is a short, practical checklist for what to expect at the home/network edge when an exchange is upgraded to cabinet-fibre services — focused on router, proxy/firewall and cloud-backup implications rather than the rollout details already posted.

Hardware and LAN: an ADSL-only modem will usually be replaced by a VDSL-capable device or a modem/router supplied by the ISP. The home LAN often becomes the bottleneck long before the line does — check that WAN and LAN ports are gigabit and that patch leads are Cat5e/Cat6. Wireless will rarely deliver headline rates, so wired tests are the definitive check.

Router/proxy/firewall: stateful firewalls, DPI/IPS, VPN termination and heavy logging can reduce throughput on low-end boxes. Look for devices with hardware NAT/NAT acceleration or offload security functions to a small dedicated appliance. Re-verify port-forwarding, UPnP behaviour and dynamic DNS after any provider swap; remote-management should be locked down.

Quick verification and troubleshooting: connect a test PC directly to the ISP device over Ethernet (Wi-Fi off), note the modem/router status fields for sync rate, SNR margin and line attenuation, and run repeated speed tests at varied times to check contention. Use iperf3 to measure LAN throughput:

# on a LAN server
iperf3 -s

# on a test client (replace 192.168.1.2)
iperf3 -c 192.168.1.2 -P 4 -t 30

If real-world rates fall short, isolate the master socket to bypass internal wiring and record the modem stats for the ISP — many issues trace back to internal wiring or pair condition, not the cabinet. For cloud backups, reschedule heavy uploads to off-peak times and confirm any ISP traffic-shaping or fair-use rules.

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