Forum Topic

Fibre Broadband

I've seen a few vans and workmen around W4, the last week or two, working on a fibre cable network, which will hopefully one day bring modern internet speeds to our homes. (For those that need decent upload speeds, for example, it's long overdue). Has anyone heard any whispers as to when we may actually get access to it?

Jamie Wiseman ● 24d10 Comments

BT are guaranteeing 700mb on a 900mb service here.

Chris Lucy ● 20d

The fibre to your cabinet will come from a cabinet, likely somewhere in your road and probably quite irritating to the people who live closest to it due to the noise from fans. There will be a much larger bandwidth connection from the cabinet to the wider network (internet). The more people that take up broadband who connect to the switch in the cabinet, the less the maximum available guaranteed speed as the overall capacity is shared with more users.As time goes by the overall capacity does increase but if the number of users increases proportionately more, your provider can’t guarantee the higher minimum rates

Andrew Jones ● 20d

In some postcodes BT are offering 900mb

Chris Lucy ● 20d

Thanks Bruce. Appreciate your helpful comments.

Jim Currie ● 22d

Jim, I can't explain the variation in guaranteed speed, but Sky are being a bit less than transparent in labelling their product as "Super Fibre".With speeds such as you describe this sounds like it is fibre to the cabinet, with the last leg to your property carried over the old copper wire. This is not the same as full fibre which is identified as "fibre to the premises" in other words fibre from beginning to end. For various reasons parts of Chiswick have been kept waiting for this upgrade though from the opening post it seems it may finally be on the way. I would input your details to a broadband checker website to see exactly what is available.

Bruce Hammal ● 22d

On a related topic, I have had Sky Super Fibre Broadband for several years. In 2021 they estimated that my line could provide between 49.4 and 68.2 Mbps download speed.  I could expect a guaranteed minimum download speed of 43.5 Mbps. This year on renewal the estimate is that my line could provide between 37.8 and 42.0 Mbps and I should expect a guaranteed minimum download speed of 34.0 Mbps. There have been no changes to my landline. Why are the speeds so dramatically down?

Jim Currie ● 22d

Well that's a good start, Paul.  In terms of download speeds at 1.1Gb's I don't really need much more from Virgin, but the upload speeds are pretty slow.

Jamie Wiseman ● 24d

Community Fibre, which is actual fibre optic into the house I get 800mbps down AND up.

Paul James ● 24d

That's interesting, thanks.  Checking the Openreach site doesn't give much away in terms of timings, but does seem to suggest it won't bring much improvement over what Virgin offer with their DOCSIS cables, unfortunately.  When rural France can offer 8Gb's download and 2Gb's upload speeds, (8x and 20x faster than 'Britain's Fastest Residential Broadband') and at half the price, it seems we are still going to be behind.

Jamie Wiseman ● 24d

We have a booking with Sky for them to install whatever's needed inside the house in the next week or so, with BT Openreach having previously installed whatever's needed outside.

Peter Evans ● 24d