UK full fibre availability rises to cover 81% of UK premises

31 pointsposted 3 months ago
by ksec
(thinkbroadband.com)

16 Comments

physicsguy

3 months ago

I’m in a rural village and even we got full fibre last year. It’s happening because the government is allowing shutting off the copper ASDL network next year so it has to be done and soon.

gambiting

3 months ago

Ironically small villages got fibre much faster than some of the bigger cities in the UK because there were many different schemes to bring fibre to those communities. Not that long ago I was in a truly idiotic situation where in the middle of a 1M+ city I couldn't get anything above 50mbps, but a friend of mine living literally in the middle of Northumberland in a village of maybe 50 people had 1gbps fibre directly to his house(and very cheap too!)

Arnt

3 months ago

What's "truly idiotic" about that?

gambiting

3 months ago

I mean I thought it's pretty obvious?

Arnt

3 months ago

Many things are only obvious until you try to spell out the details.

Do installed cables, switches etc. have a shorter lifetime in the cities, such that they'll be replaced more often and thus will tend to be newer and better? Does fibre face less competition from installed alternatives in the cities than in the countryside, such that digging is more likely to be profitable?

I live in the city. This street was supplied with 20-100Mbps DSL early on. Now the ISPs don't want to dig here, because selling fibre against the installed DSL connections is so difficult.

wdb

3 months ago

I live in Central London and I don’t have fibre they have been talking about for the last 6-8 years that we will get it. UK lives in the dark ages internet wise

martinald

3 months ago

Ironically London is one of the worst served places. Outside of hyperoptic noone is focussing on flats (MDUs), and inner London has a lot more apartment buildings than elsewhere.

tim333

3 months ago

I think partly because it's congested and expensive and awkward to install stuff. I'm in the center with 8 Mbps adsl over copper lines. One of my friends got 1GB fiber to his office put in but had to pay ~£3k for them in install the line.

_Wintermute

3 months ago

It's because you're in London. I have family in rural Cumbria with full fibre, yet none of the flats I've rented in London have availability.

AndrewDucker

3 months ago

There are holes.

Sometimes they are caused by property owners not allowing entry into a block.

Eventually those properties will have to be dealt with, but a legal change may be necessary.

ksec

3 months ago

I long have an idea that Flat Rental or Selling should be required to list their Maximum Internet Speed availability. I hope this will change the dynamics that landlord do not work or start treating Fibre Internet as part of their infrastructure and sales channel.

tetris11

3 months ago

I'll see it to believe it.

My street has no Fiber deals. The one just around the corner has it rolled out since last year.

Coverage seems vast but sparse

g-mork

3 months ago

Meh, you might be lucky and get XGPON first, at least Virgin is already primarily rolling it out, no idea about Openreach. I'm living abroad and have 350 mbit up by default. It's considered crappy for the area. Max you can get on consumer GPON in UK is 100. It'd certainly suck for you to wait only to get the last rollout of last gen tech

martinald

3 months ago

? Only really openreach uses GPON. Altnets nearly all use XGS-PON (cityfibre is an exception but they are replacing the GPON with XGS-PON).