Starlink or stick with FTTC…can’t get FTTP

[mr_tony]

Anyone else using Elon for broadband here in the UK - Is it any good? What kinds of speed are you getting?
Is it worth switching off a regular FFTC home setup to go to a satellite service.

Current setup for Context ;

Live in rural area - Oxfordshire…
Currently on 50mb/s, bt cab is around 75m from the house on the other side of a road.
BT says I can’t get FTTH, FTTC only arrived last year anyway…
Spoke to airband, which is connected to my neighbours property 500m away, but they said they’re not interested in running more cable to me.
Spoke to Cerberus networks, they will survey if it’s possible to run a 300 mb leased line from the bt cabinet for me, but the survey is 300quid, and if they agree to install it will be in a years time and probably cost over 10k to install…

[xeny]

mr_tony said:

Is it worth switching off a regular FFTC home setup to go to a satellite service.

There was a multi page thread very recently about how much broadband speed do you need and it came down as much as anything to what you want to use the connection for.

What is currently annoyingly slow?

[theboss]

I've recently moved from a home where I had Starlink (plus several other wireless services) to another where I have ~55Mbps Zen VDSL as an interim solution waiting for a fibre install.

I'd take the VDSL all day long for its stability, consistency of service level and lower latency.

[mr_tony]

theboss said:

I've recently moved from a home where I had Starlink (plus several other wireless services) to another where I have ~55Mbps Zen VDSL as an interim solution waiting for a fibre install.

I'd take the VDSL all day long for its stability, consistency of service level and lower latency.

Ok that’s useful. Starlink might be a bit higher bandwidth than the current connection, but if stability is an issue then it’s not worth it.
Considering paying for a survey to get FTTH but seems there is no guarantee and it will take ages and cost a load…

[Captain_Morgan]

If you haven’t already checked it out there is a thread on here about starlink that was mentioned earlier.

The responses seem overwhelmingly positive, yes latency can be higher than a fttc or fttp connection with is less ideal for gaming (but perfectly usable) and it can have small 1-5 second drop outs but remember its still in beta and more satellites are being regularly launched.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

Now a leased line at £10K plus a monthly charge of what £100-200?

That buys a lot of years of starink at £500 + £90/m…

And here’s where it get more interesting, if the prospect of micro outages and higher latency are really a deal breaker, why not have starlink and keep your fttc connection?

You’ve already suggested your going for unifi so you could go with the new USG pro which supports load balancing across two WAN connections in your case fttc & starlink.

Not my preferred solution, I would recommend using Unifi for the local networking (switches, AP’s & cameras etc) and use a pfsence firewall router to handle the load balancing, fw & routing aspect.

That’s going to give you ~150-300Mbits/s across the two connections depending on starlink performance at the time and allow you direct more latency sensitive traffic to the fttc line and more bandwidth sensitive traffic to the starlink for around £130/m.

In all likelihood this is on par or lower than the leased line costs with £10K still in the bank and allows you to flex to new solutions as they develop without writing off the investment in installing the leased line.

Now if the prospect of setting up a load balanced setup sounds daunting then you could take some of that leased line cost and pay a networking professional to set it up for you I’d guess 5-10% fo your leased line costs


Just a thought…

[pmanson]

Borrowed and ran a starlink for a month or so when we moved house and had a prettt decent experience

Circa 160 down and 30 up. Occasionally the signal would drop for 30 seconds as satellites moved around

Pretty impressive tech I have to say and for minimal cost

[mr_tony]

160 down would be a major shift, 3x faster at least… if I was able to run Starlink and FTTH load balanced together that could be really cool for over 100MB/s pretty much guaranteed. Kids will be happy that their Fortnite ping will be fine, and they won;t mess up mine and mrs_t’s work video calls….

[rxe]

Been using it for a few months now. Typically it is 160 down, 20 up. If there are outages, I don’t notice them, and I seem to spend a lot of time on Teams calls at the moment. The children have not reported latency issues with games.

Our old FTTC connection was about 20 down, 10 up, we are a fair distance from the cabinet. That worked fine for Teams, but not Teams + games.

Based on everyone’s experiences with the recent storms, I’d say Elon-net was more reliable - pretty much everyone here was wiped out by trees falling on lines, we had zero issues. And if the Russians invade, our internet is now impervious to jamming!

To cap it all, I am happier to be funding colonisation of Mars rather than BT Sport.

[theboss]

mr_tony said:

theboss said:

I've recently moved from a home where I had Starlink (plus several other wireless services) to another where I have ~55Mbps Zen VDSL as an interim solution waiting for a fibre install.

I'd take the VDSL all day long for its stability, consistency of service level and lower latency.

Ok that’s useful. Starlink might be a bit higher bandwidth than the current connection, but if stability is an issue then it’s not worth it.
Considering paying for a survey to get FTTH but seems there is no guarantee and it will take ages and cost a load…

It's only my perception, but I spend my working life on Teams calls, screen shares of various technologies and RDP/Citrix connections all over the world.

VDSL has much more consistent latency (less jitter) and no appreciable packet loss so is noticeably better for anything that depends upon real-time interactivity.

For streaming and bulk downloads its useful to be able to offload to something a bit faster.

People are raving about Starlink but generally from a context of not being able to get anything like 50Mbps VDSL. If you are living in the sticks and putting up with single digit or even lower xDSL then suddenly something semi-reliable which can burst to 400Mbps is transformational. If you can get 50Mbps VDSL the benefits are questionable. The main issue I had with Starlink was its intermittency. You can sit there doing speedtests until you get an impressive result but if you actually leave a long file to download in the background the bitrate will vary considerably. The satellites are moving constantly overhead and you're swapping between them every few minutes and this has a bearing on the service level.

I was doing, and am still doing WAN link load-balancing, so I have gone from this to this:

1) old house - Starlink, fixed wireless (50Mbps), 2 x 4G (EE and Voda)
2) new house - awaiting 1Gbps leased line - meanwhile 55Mbps VDSL (Zen) and EE 5G at approximately 100Mbps

Putting the leased line aside, if I had to live with any of the other listed technologies on their own, it would be the VDSL without any question. I could just about get by in terms of being able to carry the household streaming / kids factor on top of business connectivity requirements.

When you consider my current 5G connection, it's not reliable enough to depend upon. Contention (of spectrum or backhaul, or probably both) means you can get 150Mbps one day and 5Mbps the next. Latency is all over the place. If my RDP/Citrix connections failover from VDSL to 5G I know about it immediately. Therefore what I do is prioritise business workstations on the VDSL line and all the other clients share both links simultaneously. The 5G therefore ends up picking up every other netflix stream for example (you can see when watching a few episodes of something back-to-back one episode might stream on WAN1 and the next one on WAN2).

A point on Unifi - its excellent, but the USG's built-in load-balancing is crap - I use a Draytek 3910 in front of my USG with NAT disabled on the latter.
If you get a UDM there is no load balancing support whatsoever. The Draytek does a much better job of TCP session-based load balancing, link monitoring and failure, and also has policy-based routing controls making it easier to prioritise certain traffic or devices on specific links.

With regards to FTTP on demand or leased line, either will piss all over any other option discussed in terms of service stability and quality, bandwidth and latency. I didn't get fibre at my old house because (1) Openreach wanted £100k and (2) it was a rented house. Now I have bought my own house in a slightly better connected location I'm having a leased line brought in scheduled for July. Cost is about £340/month VAT with install costs of about £5k both ex VAT. FTTPoD would be a lot cheaper but as you realise you have to pay for the survey. If you can devise a joint project with one or more neighbours you may be able to get on one of these gigabit broadband voucher schemes. If there is any financially viable prospect of fibre I would ditch any of the above immediately and pursue that option.

[mr_tony]

Interesting. I can apply for the survey - costs us 300 quid, but I guess once I’ve done that at least I’ll know if it is viable…

[theboss]

When you refer to a survey is this for FTTPoD?

Do you know if there are any alternative fibre networks building out in your area? These are becoming quite common now. Indeed I have one enabling my new neighbourhood soon apparently, but proceeded with a LL on the basis that it was a definite capability whereas the other ISP could say 3-6 months but take another few years to actually deliver.

[bitchstewie]

A few people have mentioned latency and I don't think it can be overstated.

Starlink sounds great if you can't get a decent service where you live but if you can (and you have one) I'd take that all day long over higher headline speeds but higher latency on normal (low bandwidth) stuff like browsing.

[mr_tony]

theboss said:

When you refer to a survey is this for FTTPoD?

Do you know if there are any alternative fibre networks building out in your area? These are becoming quite common now. Indeed I have one enabling my new neighbourhood soon apparently, but proceeded with a LL on the basis that it was a definite capability whereas the other ISP could say 3-6 months but take another few years to actually deliver.

Well it’s not clear. Open reach / broadband checker shows FTTP as available, but max speed of 300/mbs.

.

Equally BT says it’s not available, and any domestic provider says no too.

Airband is installed locally, they are connected to my neighbours property 500m away, but having spoken with them they have no plans and no inclination to connect me in the next couple of years. Probably because it means crossing a road and that there’s technically a bt cabinet here so it looks less profitable,to them.

One other option, I’ve read about Gfast too - could that be what the 300mbs FTTP could be? Anyone used that?

[bitchstewie]

If you go to a decent ISPs website like IDNET or AAISP and use their checkers what do they think is available?

[mr_tony]

bhstewie said:

If you go to a decent ISPs website like IDNET or AAISP and use their checkers what do they think is available?

Both thowe sites just give FTTC connection. IDNET basically says call them for a leased line up to 1GB but it’s a bespoke install.
AAISP tells me I’m 3km from the exchange…

Guess I’m stuck with what I have. Can still pay for Cerberus to do a survey, but somewhat of the opinion now that it’s probably not worth it and they’re just keen to do they survey to book 300 quid in a site visit… all the survey is going to tell me is what I already know which is that it’s going to be a hat load of cash, and more likely several years to sort out even if I do pay up…

[bitchstewie]

Might be worth speaking to both of those AAISP in particular as they have a reputation for being useful with tricky/ongoing BT type issues.

[theboss]

Gigaclear are in parts of Oxon - anywhere near you?

You mention Airband - is this one of their new FTTP schemes? They are local to me in Shrops/Worcs as a fixed wireless provider but seem to be getting fttp delivery contracts everywhere now.

[mr_tony]

theboss said:

Gigaclear are in parts of Oxon - anywhere near you?

You mention Airband - is this one of their new FTTP schemes? They are local to me in Shrops/Worcs as a fixed wireless provider but seem to be getting fttp delivery contracts everywhere now.

Yes Airband have put FTTP along a 5km stretch of road near me - fibre on telegraph poles. Annoyingly it stops around 500m away.
Spoke to their customer service team but no interest from them, all they say is we might extend in the future but don’t hold your breath. Given that it’s clearly a planning requirement to get the poles in - combined with the speed at which planning moves around here I agree it won’t be a quick option…

[Captain_Morgan]

mr_tony said:

Well it’s not clear. Open reach / broadband checker shows FTTP as available, but max speed of 300/mbs.


Equally BT says it’s not available, and any domestic provider says no too.

It’s not.

It shows FTTP on demand which is a different product, one where a provider will install a fibre connection on request from the & payed for by the customer.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/11/open...

My understanding is that desktop surveys were foc to give customers a indication of cost, have you asked Cerberus for one?

If the aim is a faster connection rather than redundancy/resiliency have you enquired about a second line from bt?

You could load balance across two vdsl2 lines as easily as vdsl2 & starlink

Edited by Captain_Morgan on Monday 2nd May 08:31

[mr_tony]

Got a call with Cerberus tomorrow - but if someone knows a better option to get a survey from then pm me.
Cerberus is charging 350 plus vat for the survey if I proceed….