I wouldn't agree with that. I live in a large town (Bournemouth), on the outskirts where I was getting a variable ADSL service of between 0.5 and 2Mbps depending on the weather; my cabling is not copper but aluminium back to the exchange (about 2 miles away), and was often troublesome, and unlikely to be replaced in the near future.

I now have Infinity, running at a rock solid 38Mbps down and 12Mbps up, for a decent price (almost the same as I was paying for ADSL), and it's been totally reliable.

Bournemouth had FibreCity which promised fibre to the home, and 100M/1G service. The original delivery mechanism (in sewers, with minimal digging) didn't work out, and instead lots of micro-trenching was done. It cost them much more than they anticipated, and the company went bust (more than once, I believe), and provided a sub-standard IPTV and ISP offering (I had it for a month on trial, and it was patchy), so while the numbers would look great, there's more to it than the raw figures.

FTR, my postcode always showed that my area was going to have infinity, but my specific address wasn't going to get it, and even though I registered to be told when it would be available, I was never told - it was only bored clicking one night when stuck at 0.5Mbps that led to me getting upgraded.

BT and openworld definitely need more separation, however, IMO.

May I ask if Virgin Media are also in the area?

the inclination being that BT only goes where Virgin goes.. if you have fibre then you have a choice, but if you're running ADSL then BT doesn't hear you.. BT doesn't care.

Virgin is available at home, but I have two friends who have it, both hate the service, and I don't like the TV setup at all (and know that the ui would not be popular with my mum who is in her late 70s and lives with me), so I wouldn't have gone with them anyway.

I have BT Infinity 2 FTTC in an area (in central Edinburgh) where Virgin is not available.

Oh excellent, I love to be proven wrong when I'm feeling cynical. :)

Cheers.

Another anecdata, but on the other side of the coin:

Virgin cable available right now, BT have put off upgrading my cabinet to FTTC for over 4 years now.

Still, I'm getting ~8Mbps/1MBps so it's hardly a reason to complain.

FTTC provides a decent connection speed ("up to" 76Mbps according to BT) but my main gripe with it is that I have to continue with the archaic process of "renting" the copper telephone line between the exchange and my house - for a sum almost the same as the broadband itself. Openreach have clung onto this cash cow by opting for FTTC over FTTP, forcing customers to rent a telephone line they don't want

I recently changed ISP and told them the copper line was part of the broadband package with my previous ISP (for an extra £10/month) and was assured everything was fine.

One month after the transfer, Openreach ceases the PSTN line and the reaction from my new ISP was "well it's your responsibility to keep up your BT subscription" (never had BT).

Two weeks later, the PSTN line is still dark, and I'm waiting for Openreach to install a new MPF line provided by my current ISP (for an extra £10/month of course).

Apparently the reason for doing this rather than re-start the PSTN line is part of a process called "Local-loop unbundling".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

I'm amazed they still can't get LLU -> BT/LLU -> LLU migrations right. We sold ADSL as a second tier provider and once upon a time if you were on an LLU service and needed to migrate to another LLU provider the only sure-fire way of doing it so it didn't fuck up was to migrate back to a BT based service then migrate again. We once had a business customer, paying proper business coin migrate from one LLU provider to another. On the day of the migration the gaining provider's engineer didn't turn up to pick up the pairs and jumper onto their rack which left the customer without service for over 24 hours. So glad I don't have to deal with that crap any more.

I have this gripe too. I recently received a letter from BT to say that my line rental was increasing by £1/month so that they could offer more "great services and a wider selection of content".

The only reason I have the line is for the FTTC connection that runs over it (using Goscomb as my ISP, rather than BT) There isn't even a phone connected to it.

> (using Goscomb as my ISP, rather than BT)

Same scenario and ISP here, but I switched line rental to Zen's most basic no-calls-included package at 12 UKP per month.

Still not 'cheap' but cheaper than BT Retail.

We don't even have a landline phone in the house.

I got FTTC at home last year, and it was great to go from 1Mbps and unreliable to 20Mbps and reliable. Many people nearby are still stuck at the old speeds.

By the way - the openreach site you mention was totally misleading in my area - it said that 'superfast' was available when in fact it was not (it also gave rollout-time estimates that were wrong by years). Any naive regulator or reporter using their data would be given a falsely rosy view of broadband rollout.

Some of our leaders don't even need the lipstick.

> (i.e. 10 downing street). Status of the exchange: no plan for optic fiber roll out.

I imagine the entirety of Downing Street is connected back into the larger Whitehall network via redundant private gigabit circuits.

But Westminster is also the area where most of the MPs live, and it doesn't get more central London/densely populated than that. You would assume it would be at least on BT's radars. Not even...

I am not ashamed to be using FTTC in the UK, it is fast enough for what I do with it and I don't even pay for the fastest speed that is available for my line.

FTTC varies -- I've had it in one location where it was 10/1, and in another at 240/24. Overall experience, when they were working is fine. The Sky/Eircom was slow, but latency was low, the UPC/VirginMedia has dropped packet issues, especially with dns queries. It's also a little odd that the bottleneck is actually the in-house wifi most of the time.

> FTTC is just putting more lipstick on the pig.

Depends on how far the curb is from you. VDSL2 Vectoring is pretty good and I'm pretty sure if someone has the option of no fiber or fiber closer so them they would pick the latter. Not everybody lives in cities and FTTC is often the only thing available.

FTTC is highly used in France, but under the "VDSL" name because it uses the existing copper/ADSL network. We also have cable (so-called fibre with coaxial termination)

It might be used too but all the people I know in Paris have FTTP. In central London there are typically only a handful of buildings, if any, in an area that are connected.