[saulr]

Just to add a piece of data to support this:

> It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground

I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down!

https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/6831252952

[dgxyz]

That always hurts. I live in a particularly nice bit of London and there is virtually no mobile phone service other than voice and can only get 80 meg ADSL. Yet the mole people get better service. Grr.

[MagnumOpus]

One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)

[ErroneousBosh]

> One might even suspect that the particularly nice parts of London are full of NIMBYs who successfully petition against the eyesore of mobile masts being put up…

I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.

He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.

"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"

"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"

"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."

[dgxyz]

There's plenty of riff raff here. Like me :)

[hotstickyballs]

That directly goes against the earlier post where you said you lived in a particularly nice part of town

[zipy124]

London has a very high ratio of extremely nice houses on a road opposite council houses, or former council houses. There can often be a very large mix of housing in one area.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

FWIW ancient Rome was also like this, and for example in Pompeii you can find extremely fancy houses with frescoed dining rooms right next door to single room hovels. They didn't have subways or mobile phones though.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It seems to me to be quite the feature ... well, everywhere except the USA. Certainly all over Europe, one finds this mix. In the USA, you generally only find cheap/low quality/small housing stock adjacent to expensive/high quality/large housing stock where there's some municipal or other border, and the two just can't avoid being where they are.

[ceejayoz]

There are a good number of places in the world where people of varied incomes live relatively close.

[alexfoo]

London tends to get that because it has never really been planned. It just grew over the course of 1600 years and absorbed other areas as it went. There are plenty of areas where a row of £20m+ homes are opposite blocks of 3-bed flats that go for a hundredth of that price.

Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.

Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.

However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.

National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.

As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.

[drnick1]

I am not sure why you would want that however.

[ljm]

I have the opposite problem where I can only get HyperOptic. Not even OpenReach stuff. No problem with bandwidth but zero price competition, and 5G broadband isn’t viable either.

Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.

[tialaramex]

Wait, why can't you get Openreach ? Even if it was a new build by idiots who forgot to push the "Free fibre, yes please" button when breaking ground you should have DSL at least.

[alexfoo]

As a generalisation: OpenReach prioritise areas that have no fibre.

If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.

It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.

Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:

If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles (which involves digging up the roads to get fibre to the poles) and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.

You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.

If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts (it's easier for them to deploy fibre alongside their existing copper pairs) and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.

Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86 where there are no telephone poles.

[stephen_g]

Do they seriously still do FTTC? In Australia we had an idiot government that stopped our national-wide open access network doing fibre to the premises (i.e. FTTH) and changed to FTTC to “save costs”. After it actually being more expensive (our copper was decades old in most areas and had been under maintained by the old privatised monopoly - and it turns out having to send techs out to fault fix all the time really adds up), they had to abandon the program and now have to go back and are gradually re-doing it with full fibre, costing more money all over again.

It was actually a worst case scenario, because FTTC often actually gives you a sub-optimal point to build out full fibre from, because you need way more cabinets to get decent copper speeds than you need optical splitters if you’re going to a passive optical network, so just building a decently optimised PON network is much cheaper than doing FTTC and then transferring to full fibre.

[ljm]

Nobody serves the postcode any more.

[tialaramex]

Huh. I'm really surprised that it could make sense for them to entirely withdraw service when you're (as you apparently are) in a city. But I suppose the Universal Obligation technically wouldn't apply. I've never seen anything like that myself.

[marliechiller]

Reading this hurts. I'm on £26 a month for a gigabit connection in Z4.

[speedbird]

Sigh. Urban expectations. Come live in the sticks where I do and pay £35/m for about 15Mb. Actually had to go Starlink to be able to work from home properly. Swish fibre came round a few years ago and dug up all our roads and put fibre to all the phone poles but then vanished and nothing has happened since.

[dgxyz]

Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well. CGNAT or pay extra on top of already insulting prices.

[traceroute66]

> Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well

Sounds like they haven't changed !

I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.

Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.

If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.

And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.

So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.

Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.

[maleldil]

I feel like I'm going crazy. Hyperoptic is fine. I pay 40 quid for gigabit, and it's stable and fast.

[drnick1]

Unless you want to self-host things, in which case CGNAT is a non-starter.

[zipy124]

I almost moved into a nice warehouse space in farringdon once only to discover it only got 12 meg service somehow. I didn't even know you could get less than 80meg now.

[qingcharles]

I moved into a commercial warehouse/workshop space in the center of Chicago in 2021 and was asked to install wired Internet for the building. The workshop that made up the other half of our building had Comcast. All the buildings across the street had Comcast.

Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000.

AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps.

Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.

[signal11]

Is it practical to pay BT or HyperOptic to run fibre to you? If enough households commit to a contract they’ll sometimes do it for free.

[SecondHandTofu]

Like many of London's woes, that's because of planning, councils have to approve infrastructure and block it: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/why-exactly-is-londons-pho...

I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.

[dgxyz]

There are also some absolute morons out there. Couple of local things around me...

First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.

Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.

[userbinator]

Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.

Reminds me of this infamous decade-old story:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161010203002/http://mybroadban...

[myself248]

This is standard advice among ham radio operators. If you're putting up a tower, put it up, mount the antennas, run the feedlines, but resist the temptation to operate for a while. Or use it for receive-only.

Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.

[exikyut]

I wonder what that group of people would have made of https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8

(Chaotic lawfully :D)

[HPsquared]

PvP systems are absolutely exhausting. What a waste of energy

[phatfish]

This happens a million times all over the country by YouTube and social media addicted morons. Who go on to complain about how "nothing ever gets done in this country" and they want the "good old days" back.

Except in the good old days things just got done when there was demand for them and NIMBYs were told to fuck off.

[userbinator]

I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.

They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.

[hdgvhicv]

During Covid people were attacking engineering laying fibre because it was “5g”, and facebook had told them 5g caused Covid.

[mgaunard]

tl;dr people reject installing ugly masts in densely urbanised neighbourhoods, meaning there often isn't enough capacity for everyone to get fast 5G.

[KellyCriterion]

Great - what does customers do with 640 Mbps downstream in the metro then? :-D :-D

[alexfoo]

Take their laptops and do any big bulky downloads/uploads they have queued up.

[hexbin010]

640 or more customers stream TikTok at the same time

[KellyCriterion]

Interesting. I would have guessed, that TikTok does the replication on their servers? (like multicasting) Does the native client handles a lot of load?