Fibre to the Property

At last, we have Fibre to the Property (FTTP) Broadband, and it seems to be working well. If you read my previous post on this matter you’ll know that BT somehow managed to mess up our order so it took a couple of months to actually get it. But, now, finally we are living life in the fast lane and have upgraded our old slow Broadband to Super Fast Broadband courtesy of Fibre to the Property.

Fibre to the Property Speeds

Here’s a typical speed test from our old Broadband line

Speed Test Before

Speed Test Before

And here’s one from our new Fibre to the Property Line

Speed Test After

Speed Test After

Quite a difference hey? What’s more, we’ve only gone for the cheapest, slowest package available to us which is capped at 52Mbps. We could if we wanted have paid more for a 76Mbps connection or even more for a 100, 200 or the maximum 330Mbps connection. Having coped with less than 2Mbps for so many years we though that 52Mbps would be plenty for now.

Usable Broadband at Last

It is certainly making a difference. We can watch streaming TV shows and movies on our Amazon FireTV stick now without any buffering and in HD. Most notable though are the increases in upload speeds. I upload lots of things and have had to limit what I uploaded due to the previously slow 0.2-0.3Mbsp speeds that we got. Offsite backups to the cloud were impossible as I generated more data than our slow connection could cope with. Despite uploading continuously for several months such a backup just couldn’t catch up with the data I needed to store. Having a backup that didn’t have all my data in it was pointless, so I stopped that service and reverted back to ‘sneaker net’ backups where I store a physical external hard drive backup offsite in a different property and swap them over frequently.

Uploading videos to YouTube wasn’t easy either. Even a short 2 minute video at low quality would take several hours and usually had to done overnight. Now, with our 10Mbps upload speeds I’m able to upload longer, HD quality videos in a matter of minutes.

We’ve finally got a usable broadband connection and it’s great! It’s highly unusual for us at Ynyslas to be ahead of the cruve but for once Ynyslas actually has faster broadband than most people in the UK. With speeds available up to 330Mbps, it’s miles faster than anything available to people on standard Fibre to the Cabinet Broadband connections, and even faster than any cable broadband servcies currently available – Life in the fast lane indeed.

Simultaneous Connections

Probably the best thing though is that we have so far been able to connect all of our devices to the Wi-Fi network at the same time. Previously we had to do a ‘Wi-Fi dance’ where we had to disconnect one or two devices before we could connect the device we wanted to use. We’d tried everything – 5 different routers, various different DHCP settings, IP Address reservation, IP Binding, guest networks and such like but none of it worked. Whatever we tried we just couldn’t get all of our devices to connect to the Wi-Fi network at the same time.

Now, with our SuperFast Sibre to the Property it doesn’t seem to be an issue. I can only suggest that the slow connection before just couldn’t be divided up enough to be routed to all of the devices so the router just wouldn’t let them all connect. It’s early days yet of course so I don’t want to say too much but so far we’ve simultaneously connected all of the following devices to our new Broadband Wi-Fi network and they have all stayed connected / reconnected whenever we have need them.

  • My iMac
  • Morgan’s Mac Mini
  • My Weather Station PC
  • The Laptop PC
  • My iPhone
  • Anna’s iPhone
  • Morgan’s iPhone
  • Morgan’s Android Phone
  • Anna’s iPad
  • Morgan’s iPad
  • Our Withings Scales
  • Our Amazon FireTV Stick

It’s so nice having a Wi-Fi network that works, and one that is fast enough to cope with modern day needs…. 52Mbps should be plenty for a while, although that top of the line 330Mbps that I know is available is very tempting too!

 

4 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author Mum says:

    Now I won’t be moaned at when I come to visit and want to connect my kindle lol

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  2. Friday, July 17th, 2020

    […] Getting FTTP back in 2016 was a game changer for us. The painfully slow Broadband speeds that we had endured until then were suddenly brought into the fast lane. We were one of the first places to get FTTP so we leap-frogged those who were closer to exchanges and cabinets and rather than lagging behind with Internet speeds we had a faster service than most people. That has remained the case until now. With typical downoad speeds of just over 70Mbps and upload speeds of just over 20Mbps we have enjoyed useable Broadband ever since. Even if all three of us are streaming video to separate devices simultaneously there was no longer an issue and everything worked fine. […]

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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