BT Open reach outside

[DiggyGun]

I was with BT Broadband who then upgraded me to FTTC. This gave me improved speeds of 70mbps down and 18mbps up.

Used this for a few years but started to get many dropouts and after eight or so engineer visits, BT found the issue. This was a corroded copper cable from my house to their box in the street, they had cut it back, but now needed replacing as now too short to cut back further.

Their suggestion was for a new copper cable to our house, which would mean digging up the street, lifting my block driveway, etc.

However, over the previous months Gigaclear had been installing fibre in the town and we had their connection box in front of our house in the pavement.

Decided to go with Gigaclear as they were FTTP. Come the day of installation they put the fibre in a sleeve, buried it in the garden, one Stihl cut to a bit of concrete with a bit of touch up mortar. Twenty minutes later , job done.

This now gave me speeds of 400Mbps up and down, plus about 25% of the cost I was paying to BT.

A good result all round.

DG…

 

[jjbomber]

This now gave me speeds of 400Mbps up and down, plus about 25% of the cost I was paying to BT.

A good result all round.

DG…

Gigaclear 400 Mbps is £22 a month. Why were you paying BT £88 a month for 70 Mbps?

 

[DougK1]

Get ready for a large price increase with Gigaclear at end of contract. Apparently they are renowned for it. I won't consider them as their contractors severed my phone line when they were installing fibre in my road. Cowboys. But then two years later BT did exactly the same 🙂

 

[Dave_]

The trouble with all of the altnets is because of the huge burn rates/debts they amass building out their networks they inevitably end up in the hands of vulture capitalists.

Which means cost cutting, usually through huge layoffs, scaling back rollout ambitions, cutting corners etc, etc and then inevitably huge price hikes.

The core networks are also built on a shoestring, so tend to have less resilience than the established players and use bodges like CG-NAT to circumvent IPv4 address exhaustion.

It's all just a massive house of cards that'll lead to the bailouts/buyouts, mergers, and eventual consolidation we saw with the cable companies decades ago...