Fibre optic?

[robbruce]

Is it really fibre optic i have wires coming into my house surly this creates a bottle neck same as ADSL.

Rob

[cybernetic_tiger]

No... You have Coaxial Cable (copper) coming into your house. Then depending on the size of your cabinet in the street its either fibre to the headend or more copper to a bigger cabinet which will have a fibre connection to the headend.

[chickendippers]

It's not Fibre Optic to your house, but fibre to the end of your street (or somewhere nearby as cyber mentioned). However the coaxial cable is of such a quality and short distance that there is little noise interference and attenuation.

As a result all cable customers can receive the advertised speed and not "the best your line can support" (subject to network congestion).

[Kymmy]

ADSL wiring is unshielded and travels for anything from a few hundred meters to a few kilometres to get to you, by that point the signal is degraded..

With the co-axial cable coming into your house it's only travelled a few hundred meters, it's shielded from interference and has a bandwidth capable of giving you the full service without bottleneck... Also when it was fitted the tech would have checked the power levels and adjusted them to give you a good quality signal.

[sparky621]

As a result all cable customers can receive the advertised speed and not "the best your line can support" (subject to network congestion).

For "can receive" read "may,if their lucky, standing on their heads, and the wind's from the right direction, just possibly receive"

The "BT" telephone network also uses fibre optic for the main "trunk". The problem is that the rest of the network was only intended for low quality voice transmission.

BB in this country is rapidly approaching the same situation as our road network. Strange they use some of the same terminology "too much traffic" and "congestion":(

[cybernetic_tiger]

With VM It's only the small roads (Access HFC) that are the main issue. Once you get on the motorway (IP Core) its fine. Once they put some money into developing the Access portion it will be fine (said with hopefull hat on :)).

[arch101]

eventually they might clue up and realise that for something the country relies on so much...they need to stop using old technology, we're only just heading towards 50 mb speeds whilst other countries have had speeds like that for years because they aren't running off old wiring/technology....japans a could example, even sweden

[sparky621]

Problem is unless we are willing to put up with the inconvenience and costs associated with replacing the whole network we're going to have to shut up and put up.
I well remember the cries of derrision when this area had cable installed. Pathways and drives were dug up, grass verges, hedges and trees damaged. There was an endless stream of letters to the local papers. Imagine what would happen if that was the whole telephone network country wide!
Affraid were going to have to live with the compromise of ADSL for non-cabled areas for quite some time to come.
Maybe satelite is the way foreward?

[CIS]

I used satellite internet for two years. I’m from a rural area of the UK. It was super fast (2mb) and you used your modem as the upload (or in my case dual channel ISDN 128k) and it really was fast, no drop-offs or anything. Only bad part was, I was paying big money for it back then (about 8 years ago I think) and you were capped at 5 Gig. (Which went in the first week)

But I tell you what, my gaming pings were sweet on the 128k ISDN (30 – 45) and solid, sometimes I don't even get that on 20mb.