The state of UK broadband in 2013

You may or may not have read my previous post about the UK broadband situation back in 2011, where I was rather disappointed in not being able to get ADSL2+ on 21CN and knew I'd never get FTTC there. I eventually got ADSL2+ in the beginning of 2012 and I really didn't notice a change. Well not a lot has changed, other than I've moved to a newly built house and now have FTTP.

Yes, I have Fibre to the Premise now with the little battery backup box to keep the internet / phone line up for up to an hour after a power cut. It's pretty neat. Not a lot has changed else where though. You should be able to get 21CN in most places, but fibre is still touch and go. We and the rest of our area at work can't get standard FTTC or FTTP because "we're too close to the BT exchange" - well the boss got a dedicated 100Mbps fibre line installed (supposedly burstable to a gig) instead. Now that's quick. Especially when we're doing updates to servers/workstations we're about to roll out, we can do a bunch at a time without a slow down at all.

Having fibre at home is great, web sites do load marginally quicker, however, BT have pulled a fast one on me and have now, without prior warning and within a month or two of the FTTP installation downgraded me from 160Mbps to 80Mbps. Will I ever notice the difference? Most likely not, but I'm paying a premium for the faster service, FTTP instead of FTTC and for them to downgrade me without notice is damn rude, immoral and cheeky! Not to mention they billed me for the first three months which were meant to be "free", so I'll be making my complaints heard soon.

So to sum it up, overall in the UK we've move a bit, but not enough. People on the Isle of Wight, and other areas, are still using ADSL 20CN on sub 2Mbps lines. Poor sods!