The recent roll out of fibre by BT has brought high speed internet, 80MB maximum, to areas outside of the towns and cities covered by Virgin and more choice within. Fibre lines are available through BT, Plusnet, Talk Talk, and Sky. Not all areas are covered as yet but it’s getting fuller.
I bought a Plusnet line a few weeks ago and the transfer from my old provider was easy and happened within 2 weeks of order. The engineer took about an hour in our house.
Plusnet are a small Sheffield company that was bought out by BT and seem to be selling cheaper packages than BT using BT lines, although without the frills that BT offer such as wireless hotspots.
The instructions seemed pretty straightforward but if you’re not keen at all on technology I’d buy fully assisted set up.
An upside is you don’t need filters, on the other hand they fit a second wire from your master phone socket to the router.
Running the www.thinkbroadband.com speedtest and looking at their map of results shows that people are getting 69MB in Preston and in the surrounding countryside. Although speeds vary according to how far from the exchange and cabinet you are.
The fibre connections are what is called FTTC. That is ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’. The cabinets being the green boxes at the end of your street or nearby. So there is a fibre cable from the exchange to the cabinet and then it runs on your ordinary telephone line from the cabinet to your house. Speeds up to 120MB are forecast for this technology in the next few years.
To check if you can get fibre run a check on the BT website if you have a BT line. Click here to go to the BT page.
High speed broadband, what do you do with it? Pages load faster. Downloads sometimes happen almost immediately. Uploading at nearly 20MB makes the ‘cloud’ very usable. If you have a few people doing their own thing then you won’t notice they’re on.