I am an Openreach engineer. Ask me about your slow broadband!

Why does my lesbian porn lag but flashing porn ads with some dude pounding an old saggy granny with a monster cock load instantly?

Your lesbian porn is being streamed from a server over the internet and to your browser. The ads are loaded in their entirety when you load the page, so usually the granny ads will load faster.

Why is the Open Reach guy always working in the box at the end of our road? Our Internet is fine before hand but we have to reset it after. This happens about 2-3times a week

Lots of people moving to and from the network and probably people reporting faults.... which I'd suggest you do.

Hi, I live in Central London but don't have access to fibre as Openreach don't have a plan to install any on my property. How do I go about getting this changed?

Get your neighbours to write in. Though, in fairness London isn't a priority for FTTP because it already has a reasonably good broadband network. That, and there's plenty of competition from other fibre suppliers in London.

During the recent general election, Labour pledged to bring high speed broadband to everywhere in the UK. How feasible would this have been to implement, and do you see it happening in the near(ish) future?

It was a ballsy move for them to offer free broadband. I don't personally think their sums added up. With regard to coverage, we're already pretty much there. 96% of the UK can get broadband. Copper technology isn't being deployed much now. Fibre is taking its place. It will not be a quick process to get the country onto fibre, but it is happening.

By 'broadband' do you still mean as little as 2mbps?

I'm talking about high-speed broadband (24mbps+)

Does that mean 96% of the UK has access to FTTC or is that ADSL2+ up to 24Mbps?

A mixture of all the technologies.

What area do you work? I used to be an openreach engineer also, I've since moved to BT living the dream.

I used to be in BT, but then Ofcom got all grumpy and fucked us off to Openreach. I won't say which area I work in but I'm based at a very large site.

I moved because I was being messed around by management in Openreach. For over 5 years I'd been getting the end of day travel on my time sheets, until they decided to enforce the hour travel on my original contract after all those years. The union was useless as well, have you tried to get a job back on the BT side or do you like engineering ?

We still have engineering in BT!

Yeah but it's shit

Does moving to the master socket make a difference or is it a placebo that mostly works because it forces you to reconnect? If it does work, why?

Usually speed issues are between the cabinet and the premises. What can I do to determine which side of the line the issue is before I get an engineer down?

Using the master socket will get you the best speeds. Any joint in an electrical circuit will add electrical loss (signal degradation) which will give you slower speeds. Internal wiring in your home may not be up to date and could be affecting your speed quite significantly.

How does internet work? Is it pockets of data traveling in a wave or just waves?

Er not really waves. Or pockets. Packets yes. They travel in wires though.

How does FTTP provisioning work?

I have FTTC right now and I only live 70m from the exchange so I get 75mb+ connection but I really want FTTP speeds, the quotes I have been getting based on "Desk Surveys" are £10k plus, surely running a Fibre connection to my house cant be that hard, what am I missing?

Sure, it will be a few hundred pounds tops to get a fibre that far. Trouble is, your exchange may not be capable of supporting FTTP yet. So unless there's lots of customers waiting to go onto FTTP (thus making it cost effective), they're not going to shell out thousands for the FTTP exchange equipment just to supply your property. Soz.

I live in a rural area with FTTC but slow, unreliable copper wiring to the premise and would like to get FTTP installed. Some questions:

• Is there a public map or ordered list of areas that will have full fibre to the premises delivered?
• As we own some of the land, can we dig and install the fibre cabling ourselves and have Openreach connect it to the cabinet?
• What do you think of the Openreach Community Partnership program? Does that support FTTP and what is a rough cost per household?

Many thanks.

At the moment, the rural areas aren't likely to get FTTP any time soon. It all comes down to return on investment unfortunately. Cities are being targeted for fibre. It will be national eventually. I don't know much about CFP I'm afraid but I think it's very well received where it is done.

How good would internet be in our homes already if BT had begun their roll out of fibre in the early 1990s as they had planned, instead of Thatcher freaking out and selling you off to her mates?

We'd be living in the year 3020 by now.

I live in a shared house, and we currently have a very poor Virgin line. My PC is hooked up to power line adapters (because i didnt buy a wifi card) which is actually worse than the Wi-Fi on my phone/TV. Could this be the modem/router/isp or is it more likely shite wiring in the house?

Plug something into the Virgin box. If it gets good speeds its your wiring. Power line adaptors are cancer.

I've got a 400m d side and I'm getting a good pq at the socket with a balanced pair and good insulation, but I'm getting a continuous stream of fec errors, with nothing on tdr. How do I bullshit my way out of dealing with this?

Internal wiring

What's your UIN number? Lol

8008135

OK, let me be the first to raise a serious question:

I had ADSL with a fair amount of noise on the line previously but no serious issues. I moved to fibre (to the cabinet) a few months ago, now my router disconnects from the network 1-2 times a day. A Sky engineer came to my house, rewired my master extension, declared that there was now less noise on the line and that I would see an improvement in speed and a reduction in outages but that I might need to rewire the house because the noise was being introduced inside the house by the alarm wiring.

I still have the outages. I get that as it's an old house that I may have "sub-optimal" phone wiring, but what are my realistic next steps? I'd hate to pay someone to re-wire the phone and alarm wiring to find out that it was a circuit issue?

Yes that's pretty much it. Or, remove the face plate on your master socket and connect straight into the line coming into your house, leaving the alarm and extension sockets disconnected. That'll tell you. Sky bod should've tried that.

How the hell do you tell what is going on in the rats nest of cables inside of a green cabinet?

What measures are put in place to prevent engineers from lying about attending site and just writing it off as a missed appointment?

How unprepared are we for the PSTN cutoff in 2025?

Pretty simple once you get your head round it.

Trackers and taking photos of front doors.

Every year they add 5 years to the PSTN cut off date. We are pretty prepared for it though.

Is there a single exchange in the country that Daisy isn't 3000% oversubscribed on?

Yes. And who is Daisy?

The wholesale ISP behind companies like SSE who have little to no experience as an ISP, but somehow are at the cheapest end of the spectrum because it's all Daisy doing it in their name on the cheap. In my experience, they're heavily oversubscribed and thus use really aggressive traffic management to give as many users as possible at least a fraction of the speed they pay for, resulting in customers with perfectly clean lines getting about 5mbps during peak periods.

That's up to them then. The ISP buys a connection to the Openreach exchange equipment. Once they fill that connection up, they need to buy another. They are just cheapskates.

How big are the tubes of the internet ?

125 microns.

Howdy..american bt4 cable tech here..what kind of modulation and frequency split are you guys running? I see speeds up to 1gig down and 18 mbps up here in my small texas market.. qam modulations the big thing here..that and doccis 3.1.

Well we don't use DOCSIS (though a competitor does) but on DSL we're running VDSL2 17A profile and G.fast on 106B.

Has g.fast been worth the hype?

Useful stop gap for the rural community until they get fibre in some cases. Honestly? Not worth the time and money.

Not really a question about slow broadband, but how’s the job? Was going to apply for a Trainee Openreach Engineer role, but I’ve seen some negative stuff on Glassdoor. Also how’s the ££?

I'm not a field engineer so can't really comment on that aspect but I know things are better now than they were 5-8 years ago. They went though a phase of managing people with technology (GPS trackers, timing jobs etc) which made a lot of people very grumpy but I hear it's better now.

Why are Exchange Only lines taking so long to upgrade to fibre? This whole crap about "we need planning permission because we need more space for the cabinets in the street outside the exchange" is just bullshit. You need the same planning permission and space to put one in a residential street yet they manage to do those easily.

Not really bullshit... Can't just drop a box in anywhere. Needs to be sited properly and have duct connections to the appropriate places. Usually, these things go round and round for months because some nimby doesn't want it 'spoiling their village'.

Do you have any views/insider knowledge on why BT and Openreach have dragged their heels improving the UK's infrastructure for so long compared to the rest of Europe, other than the the obvious 'greed'? And/or do you agree that they were in fact dragging their heels, or is there some reasoning's a layperson wouldn't understand that held them back?

To be fair, there's been plenty of investment. The other CPs haven't been investing and they like to blame Openreach. The network is growing massively and we're recruiting thousands of people to do the upgrades so most of what you see in the media about the big bad openreach greed monsters is bs.

Why isn't my broadband slow? Could it be because I have fast broadband from Virgin Media?

You cheeky sausage you

I work for an UK ISP, what can we do better?

Onshore call centres

Hey! Sooo whats with my slow broadband?

How slow is it? Where are you?

Do Openreach actually know / care where the master socket is installed in a house?

If it's moved then, so long as a good job is made of it, does anyone really care?

Nope

[deleted]

The marketing wankers started this. It confuses too many people.

I live out in the sticks. Does the route from ISP to me change in comparison to in a city? I'm assuming my slow available speeds are just due to older infrastructure.

Not really. Everything's just a bit further apart. You'll still be connected to an FTTC cabinet (or direct to exchange if you're on ADSL). Longer distances mean more resistance in the wires which means slower speeds...essentially.

I'm thinking of moving to sky, is this wise?

Still our network.

Hi, i've just moved into a place. The previous owners had fibre but there are now no more ports available for me to get it. Is there anyway to get a fibre connection? Can i officislly be on a list for the next fibre port? Cheers!

I don't think there's a list as such. But if enough people are waiting, it'll be upgraded.

I'm moving into a new flat and BT says I'll need a new line to get internet. Inside the flat there already seem to be a bunch of phone sockets around the flat, including a BT master socket (Open Reach 5c). Can they just hook this up or will they ned to drill a new one?

You have a socket but the line doesn't necessarily go anywhere. It might be in place up to the top of the pole, or the local green cabinet, or maybe the exchange if you're lucky. You'll need to order a service and then they'll get you a line sorted. It's usually simpler to install a new socket to avoid potential wiring issues in the property.

What’s up with g.fast? Are they just ditching it in favour of a fttp rollout?

I live in one of the trial areas for it but was advised it’s not as reliable as virgin fibre or fttc, is that true in your experience?

Virgin uses coaxial cable and DOCSIS whereas Openreach use a twisted copper pair and DSL. G.fast is fed from the cabinet so has the same environmental challenges as VDSL. Because the frequencies are much higher, it's more susceptible to interference. There does seem to be a reluctance to deploy more G.fast kit though as 'Fibre First' is the flavour of the month now (finally).

When you open one of them Green cabinets on the side of the road, how the hell do you know what’s what?

Put a tone on the line.

Given that every time an ISP needs to call in Openreach, they threaten massive bills if it's consumer-side, how often do visits end up being reported back as a consumer side issue?

Not that often. That's why there's all the questions when you report a fault.

Why is my FTTC connection so broken? I live 500 metres from the cabinet and was predicted an easy 80/20 back when the cabinet went live, yet my upload is actually 'broken' and Plusnet have never been able to fix it, even after an Engineer vist. My real speeds are 68 downstream and ONLY 8.63 upstream.

Those are decent speeds over 500m

Hi, me and my brother have been experiencing Double NAT on our Xbox Ones and we are unsure what is the best way to solve this issue, as we want to reduce Latency whilst gaming as much as possible. Both consoles connect wirelessly as the router is on another floor. We have heard of changing our router to 'access point mode', or enabling 'bridge mode' on our router. What would you recommend we should do?

Ditch any CP devices and get a decent router. Asus do good ones.

Why the hell is BT still only going for FTTC when FTTP would be so much easier for them long term? It's just pissing money away while giving everyone a worse service.

We're openreach, and we are rolling out FTTP...

Why is it that around 10pm till 7am, the downloading or loading of shows slows down so badly that nothing is moving at all? Happens for Openload videos and some other servers.

edit happened with 2 providers

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