Welcome to fibre broadband!

Having been pretty happy with many years of standard ADSL at about 5 MBit/s, pretty reasonable for UK standards, we decided a week ago to upgrade to fibre optic. Well, I say fibre optic, we don’t get magic cool looking fibres in our house, but rather there is a fibre optic cable to the cabinet down the road. The same old twisted pair copper is used to get the actual internet into our house.

Having been told that the man from BT would be popping round today to upgrade our junction box, and that unless we wanted a modem and router right next to the front door, would also be adding an extension cable round the kitchen, I’d carefully moved all the furniture away from the wall.

When the bloke arrived, it seems that it’s perfectly acceptable to use the existing internal extension, so it took him less than an hour to get everything in, tested and running.

Admittedly he did replace what I consider to be our mega router with some piece of shit we got for free (ok, so that’s not quite true), but that was easily reverted once he had left.

All in all, we’re now paying an extra £5 a month, but our download speed is now in the region of 45 MBit/s, and upload at 15 MBit/s. Well worth it I reckon.

PS: Our ISP is PlusNet (referral link). I’ve used them for years, and have always been pretty impressed, however irritating their new adverts might be…