OK, I’ll come clean. I already have fibre broadband. That’s FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet). Then the connection from the cabinet on the corner of my street to my house is copper wire multiplexed over my phone landline.
My ISP (Sky) offers a maximum speed of 80Mbps (mega BITS per second), and when I test it with a computer hard-wired to the router I get all of that.
But there’s a chap with a digger making a hole in the pavement outside my house.
He’s a contractor working for Swish Fibre, which is installing an entirely different sort of fibre broadband. This is FTTP (Fibre to the Premises). This means fibre all the way to my house with a potential maximum speed of 1Gbps. I could get the basic 400Mbps version, 5x faster than my current broadband, for not much more a month than I’m currently paying Sky.
There are, however, some questions which I’m pondering.
Do I still need a landline?
My existing Sky broadband includes an analogue phone line. Of course it does, because it’s the copper wire that connects me to the phone network which also carries the broadband signal from the cabinet to my home. Do I still need a landline? Probably not. I was getting approximately 20 times more scam calls than genuine ones, although Sky Talk Shield has done a brilliant job of stopping those. I think we currently get no more than three landline phone calls a week.
Could I get those people to call our mobiles instead? Yes, I could, and that would solve the problem of the scam calls.
Can I use the extra bandwidth?
At the moment I’m using PowerLine adapters, rated at 500Mbps – which IRL actually means 50-65Mbps. This is OK, it’s almost the full broadband bandwidth. But what’s the point of increasing my broadband connection to 400Mbps if I’m throttling it to 50Mbps internally?
So I’m now debating, do I lash out £200 on some 2000Mbps Powerline adapters which might get much closer to 400Mbps, but I won’t know until I install them? Or do I embark on chasing plaster and drilling walls and installing an internal Cat6 Ethernet network to actually make use of the higher bandwidth?
Do I need this at all?
Or do I admit that, now I’m largely retired, 50Mbps is plenty, and I just stick with FTTC from Sky? In which case I might lash out on some new PowerLine adapters just to get the full 80Mbps over my existing network. Now that seems like an easy way to improve my broadband speed without getting building dust everywhere…
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