If your broadband speed was pitiful, was fibre any better?

[Wetdressinggownsleeve]

Currently getting 0.97mps , Netflix is buffering itself to death and I've switched to 4g to post this.

Talktalk claim I should get up to 7mps. Lies. 7mps is a distant dream.

Is there any chance of the 35mps they claim fibre will get me?

*Mbps

If your broadband is that speed, can you actually get fibre where you are?

We are currently getting fibre installed in our area - can't even watch a you tube clip or Facebook video at the moment. I just presumed that fibre will be all singing, all dancing - please tell me it's true?

We don't get 3g either so can't even use that 4g is all but a distant dream

The short answer is no.

We were switched to fibre to ty to speed up our shitty broadband speed and we get a whopping 2mps.

Ours is a local infrastructure issue (too far from cabinet and open reach can't be arsed to connect us to a new one) and we're in daily conversations with our provider complaining about the crap speed and drop outs but they keep bouncing us back to open reach, open reach then say 'speak to your provider'. It's bullshit. More rural areas get better speeds than we do.

We're rural, had fibre installed about 2 years ago and paid the stupidest amount of money imaginable to have it. It's better, that's true - but nothing remotely like the speeds we were promised. Download speed is around 16Mb, but upload speed is a lot less at 6Mb. It's advertised at 36Mb..............

A timely question - exactly this transformation has been achieved in this house 2 hours ago by switching from EE broadband to Virgin Media fibre (now getting around 50mbps).

We couldn’t get fibre from any provider other than Virgin due to having an exchange only line.

Until last October we were averaging 0.5mps and suffered constant dropouts. Then we got fibre to a new cabinet in the village and, since it's right outside our house (the telegraph pole is in our front garden) we now get 65-75mps as normal.

It's a lot to do with where you are in relation to the cabinet as for 90% of the UK, the fibre is to the cabinet only and normal copper wire to the premises.

Yes. We’ve gone with John Lewis.

Yes was on standard Sky broadband getting about 1mb now on Sky Fibre getting about 30mb.

Virgin spent all summer digging up my village and now I'm being bombarded with providers saying FIBRE IS HEREEEE.

How do I find out how far from the cabinet I am?

And I'm 8 miles from Manchester city centre, not really rural although my broadband would beg to differ!

Oh god YES!!!! We have just changed to sky fibre and I can now download a programme from on demand and it literally goes 'downloading 1,2,3..ping programme is ready to view' Its so much better

Follow this guide https://kitz.co.uk/adsl/cabinet-lookup.htm#fttccabb_info to find the fibre cabinet number in your area then it's a case of tracking it down somehow. Also there's a broadband checker which gives an estimate of the dsl speeds you should be getting.
We went from 4mb to 60mb, exchange was 1.5 miles away, fibre cabinet at end of road.

Thanks Palmer.

Yes I was with sky and it was constantly buffering, swapped to virgin and it never buffers. Just done a speed test it's 47, no idea how good that is. I'm 11 miles from Manchester

Good luck with the cabinet hunt.

Yep! 155 mbps - just tested. Cabinet 100m away (virgin not open reach).

Had a similar problem, I was with EE, speeds were ridiculously slow, they claimed up to 10mps but at times it was 0.1!! They had engineers out 3 times and in the end decided they couldn’t speed it up for me so let me terminate my contract early.

The only fibre available in my area is Virgin so I went with them, speeds are currently around 60mps, sometimes a bit faster, I never have any problems with amazon prime (which i would imagine is similar to Netflix?).

@Wetdressinggownsleeve, you sound in a similar situation to the one we were in. Very rural, dial up used to measure under 1Mbps and when we got broadband it was double that and no 2 hour cut off. We did get lots of drop outs though and it wasn't possible to watch much on You Tube.

The trouble is that we're about 6km from the exchange and 1.5-1.6km from the cabinet in the street. To add insult to injury it's an area of low competition, so hardly any choice of provider and not only is the service poor, but we get charged a lot more for it

Anyway, they did enable super fibre to the cabinet and although the last 1.5km+ is overhead copper wiring, the speed now varies between 5.6-9.5Mbps which is over the wireless connection. If we hardwire in then it's 10-12Mbps. Yes, it's definitely worth it as most of the time we can stream films or tv programmes so long as the wi fit is stable.

So although the figures look very poor against advertised potential speeds, it does make a huge difference to the service.