[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.