speed test

Is that a fibre to premises circuit? Mine out in the wilds could only supply ~300M on a nominal 500M line on a "free" trial so I opted to fall back to the 150Mbps service that I had ordered (I get 100% of that).

I'm surprised that they upgrade you 10x for free. In the UK they invariably try to extract extra money out of you for such speed upgrades which means a lot of people are still on rather slow legacy speeds.

Likewise with phone contracts they try to extract constant or ever increasing amounts of money from you by increasing mobile data.

A lot of those multi-hundred megabit connections will go to a wireless router where all user devices are connected to it via 802.11n or

802.11ac in a super-cluttered RF environment, and topping out at 50 or 100 megabits throughput on a good day

We have a coax into the house, cable TV and internet and POTS.

My household WiFi is much slower, 7+3, downstairs in my office. There's steel and concrete in the way.

No, cable TV coax.

It seems like suppliers here are upgrading for free to keep up with competition. We could use cable, a microwave dish, or a couple sources for Gbit fiber.

We had an AT&T internet connection over the traditional phone twisted pairs, but it was slow and expensive and died when it rained. Comcast threw in POTS telephone service for free when we got their internet service. I unplugged the phones because all the calls were spam.

I don't find speed tests to be very useful, because they are not measuring anything I use often. What I find, is that I can get a very high speed on the test, but when using the web for the things I mostly do, the delays are caused by latencies. A web page may have many MB or even GB of graphics involved, but they are all separate files. So they get downloaded when they get downloaded. Web pages often show up at a much lower speed number than the streaming speed tests show.

A streaming speed test might show something useful for watching videos. But I never need more than 12 or 15 Mbps for that. So, web based speed tests are not particularly useful to me, other than telling me there's nothing wrong with the connection.

That seems very socialist. It surely makes more sense for them to extract at least some additional income for increasing your speed. UK telcos are considerably more mercenary about upgrading their customers.

I presume the POTS phone service is actually a POTS connector on an all digital VOIP service offered over their backhaul. This is causing a lot of trouble in the UK with BT rolling out "Digital Voice" over an unwilling population of mostly elderly people who depend on features of copper based POTS for living independently. Notably that POTS phones still work if the mains fails and various alarms and care on call services will only work correctly with a true copper physical line.

ADSL in its various forms shouldn't be that unstable unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the local wiring (as there is in my village - no-one past me gets more than 2Mbps ADSL on copper).

However since I now have a fibre connection I don't care. The failing junction box (think black plastic policeman's helmet with multicoloured wire knitting and joints inside) is buried in the verge in front of my house. If the water table rises it floods and shorts out circuits. When the guys come to sort it out it sounds like maracas when they shake it!

In theory I think it is supposed to be water tight but in practice rodents do for the catches or seals and after a few years it isn't.

That's one of the strangest comments I've heard anyone make... even here.

Competition is the core of capitalism. If they are upgrading the neighborhood, it may well be they simply don't have the slower speed anymore, or that they've changed their rate structure so that the higher speed is the same price as the old lower speed.

Maybe for new installations, but this is an area where the rule applies, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!". The POTS home connection works very well once in place. Even if they install fiber, they don't remove all the POTS wiring.

Yeah, a friend moved into a retirement community some years ago and they use fiber to the home, but he's actually has voice with his cable service. No 911 location info and when power goes out, so does the phone. I gave him a UPS for his cable box, and a non-powered phone plugged directly into the unit. So, as long as the rest of the cable system works, he can get a call out. But, they've also given him an emergency alert unit that is supposed to work in a power failure. I just don't know who it summons.

Capitalist competition is the opposite of socialism. Compete or die.

It surely makes more sense for them to

The AT&T POTS twisted pair worked direcly into an old analog phone. I guess some people here still do that. It was expensive, with a big "long distance" charge. I think most people here just use cell phones, with wi-fi connection at home.

In the Boston area, I had exactly that until recently, and for those same reasons, when the local traditional telephone company discounted all copper service and forced everybody to optical fiber a year ago. They also thought that they would just sweep in and install the new equipment in some random place, but there was not space in my basement for that, so I insisted on doing the physical install myself. They were balking until I explained that I also had cable, and so if the telco threw me out, my next call would be to their main competitor - no install needed. So they sent me the stuff, and I installed it, and added a dedicated power outlet for it to use.

If the local power goes out, this stops working unless one has a backup battery, which they made quite awkward (must be a large collection of ordinary alkaline D batteries; rechargeable not available for homes, only businesses. So the fallback is cell phones, until they run out of juice.

In the Boston area, many people had ADSL, and the general report was that it never worked while it was raining. One assumes that a little bit of water was getting into the legacy cables, and then it dried out.

Around here, the rodents seem to have color preferences, which is odd because mostly this happened in permanently dark places. Must be taste or smell.

Joe Gwinn

Why would a squirrel do this?

I dunno - never could get a word out of them.

But that looks to dainty for a squirrel. Looks more like mice or a rat.

The automotive wires that had soy-based insulation of jackets were the first to go. All rodents like them.

.

Joe Gwinn

Competition might be, but if the provider can get more money for shareholders by selling the upgrade to their customers they will do so. It is very anti-capitalist to give something away for nowt!

In the UK if you aren't talking to customer retention at least every couple of years you will be ripped off. That applies to utilities, mobile phone, internet and insurance. There is a big penalty in the UK for being loyal to your supplier since they like to price gouge. (most people don't seem to notice either)

Sometimes the only way to get a decent deal is to switch supplier.

As a concrete example our Village Hall gets its electricity from British Gas because they were the cheapest electricity supplier when we last looked at it (there is *no* mains gas in the village!).

How odd! The reason for installing fibre in my village is precisely because the corroding copper is on its last legs and I had about the only good for 5Mbps copper line pair on the exchange. They couldn't take it off me quickly enough once my fibre line was operational.

I'm on transitional drop cabling which is a figure of 8 profile with the fibre on one half and a copper line pair on the other. In the air it has a distinctive whirlygig appearance so you can tell at a glance who has fibre. The copper line pair is not even terminated just cropped off.

There is a waiting list for copper circuits! They had already DACS'd all the copper lines not used for internet connections a long time ago. They tend to break one copper circuit for every three they try to mend.

It has become a bit of a mess. They can't source enough batteries for the old people they are trying to upgrade and have left vulnerable people with no phone for way too long. If they had standardised the optical receiver and router to take power from USB C it would be easier but as it is they each require their own random choice of voltage and connector (and two mains sockets nearby to power them)!

We must surely have a lot more rain than in the US and yet our phone lines generally do hold up for ADSL unless it gets very very wet (as in flooding). Being on the wrong side of the beck doesn't help.

They connector housings do fail from time to time but they seem to last

5 or 10 years before they fail badly again. I'm not sure how they protect wet wires from corrosion though. There are places near me with hybrid copper meets aluminium phone wiring which partially rectifies ADSL. So bad that some don't even get 256kbps. Peer to peer microwave has been claiming these dead zones for some time - farmers need it.

There may be a slight difference in texture which is what seems to guide their choice of exactly what to nibble. We solved our problems on radio telescope cable runs by flooding the ducts with dry nitrogen.

Exactly, "IF" is the magic word. But you don't seem to understand what I'm saying, so I won't bother you with it further.

Perhaps you could read what I wrote and make more effort to understand it. If you continue to focus on your own thoughts, you can't learn anything new.

Sorry, by "copper", do you mean POTS? If you have significant corrosion in copper lines, there's something very wrong with that. The POTS to my house was installed around 80 years ago and has never failed from corrosion. I've never heard of a POTS line failing from corrosion. Maybe this is something unique to the UK. Do they mix in other elements into your copper wires?

Wow! That's some bad copper. Someone should investigate this. It may be something like the massive installation in the UK of foil wrapped power lines where the foil was used as one of the conductors. It was aluminum and corroded over a few years, requiring massive replacements. Or am I getting a detail wrong on that? Sounds very similar to me.

So, on top of everything else, the UK has a battery shortage??? Jeez. I can see why there is so much resistance to EVs in the UK.

LOL You talk as if the US were the size of a city! Do you think the southwest deserts have the same rainfall as the pacific northwest? Is New England the same as Florida? The US is hugely varied.

I thought you were saying how crappy your phone lines are with corrosion and general deterioration??? I'm confused.

I don't get that. In the US, we have junction boxes that last for many decades without any attention. Maybe the UK needs to outsource some of this?

The best way to protect them is to keep the junctions dry in water tight boxes. But you've already said this is beyond the state of technology in the UK.

That is easily fixed by proper installation techniques. Again, perhaps the UK should outsource this if you can't get it right after how many decades???

I would assume that in both countries, cable designs suiting their local environments were chosen.

I don't know of any aluminum telephone wire in the US, ever. Only copper alloys. (Power wiring is different.)

I've heard lots of theories on why rodents like to chew on wire, but none has ever been shown to be more likely than any other, let alone proven.

That would certainly do it.

In the US, the old dry multi-pair telephone cables were pressurized with nitrogen, largely to exclude water despite flaws in the jacket. One would see the nitrogen tanks strapped to telephone poles here and there. The advent of flooded or filled cables rendered the nitrogen bottles obsolete. The filling goop is a mineral oil gelled with a mineral wax.

In the old days, the twisted pairs were copper insulated with dry pulp paper (newsprint paper basically) cable sheaths were extruded lead, and the joints were soft-soldered by hand.

Nowadays, the twisted pairs are insulated with low density polyethylene, and the cable jacket is heavy polyethylene, often with an aluminum shield/protector just underneath.

Joe Gwinn

Modern build is usually the latter but where I am the cables travel underground from the exchange to the village and then up onto poles inside the village. We are a bit unusual in that our lines are archaic "Exchange Only" lines with no cabinet between us and the exchange.

Electricity also comes in overhead on the same set of poles which makes it difficult for the telco - they have to bring in a cherry picker to work on their signal level cables at height because of the live wires!

That is pretty much the situation here except that it is a lot wetter and the groundwater is mildly alkaline and so corrosive. In addition tree branches can strip the insulation off the overhead cable runs which makes it very noisy and can break conductors.

That is how modern installs are done with a so called master socket so you can isolate the house wiring and plug into the test socket. You are supposed to do this before reporting a fault. My master POTS socket is "conveniently" located at the far end of the loft where the old copper cable enters the house. The new fibre install comes from a different pole and has a splice box at ground level with a fibre up to my office.

Prehistoric ones were little more than a 4 way terminal block with a Bakelite soap bar shaped cover over the top.

It is almost invariably the wet corroded joints that cause trouble or rodents chewing off the insulation. Ours are incredibly fragile now and any disturbance from working on a fault tends to break something else.

It got so bad at one point that they had to ship in additional POTS engineers from outside the county to get on top of pending repairs.

I haven't been able to find a picture of our underground configuration (it is quite rare now) but this one of a normal passive BT cabinet isn't too dissimilar if you image no supporting structure and the whole lot of multicoloured knitting stuffed randomly into a double width manhole.

Apparently pine martens are keen on BMW brake hose and wiring insulation (and they are now moving into my area of the UK).

>

We had a working theory that somehow they knew the price per metre and generally preferred the most expensive one that they could find! (or the one that was most difficult to replace)

It also meant there was no variation in humidity to affect timing or signal phase (which was the main reason for doing it).

I collect pictures of disgusting wiring.