UKC

We have just been connected to high speed fibre broadband, after years of struggling with inadequate internet, courtesy of Broadband for the Rural North. Fantastic improvement. I do have one or two questions with which the technophile sub-group of UKC members may be able to help.

1. I want a longer (2m) ethernet cable to link the desktop to the router. Would this one be good for the job? https://www.cartridgediscount.co.uk/cat6-ethernet-network-cable-2-metre.htm...

2. The smart TV is just above the cellar-based router and seems to work fine using wi-fi. Is there any point in going to the trouble of using an ethernet rather than wi-fi link between these two?

3. Our phone has worked through a VOIP connection as part of our previous broadband contract. I imagined (wrongly, I've been told) that I could just get a VOIP enabled phone and plug it in to the router and get totally free phone calls for evermore. What is the best solution to this, as I clearly don't want a copper BT contract when I've got high speed fibre. I plan to talk to B4RN about this but would like to be prepared. Please don't tell me to go mobile-only!

If anyone can advise me on these issues I would be most grateful.

1 - Yes, that's a standard ethernet cable, it'll work fine.  You don't really need cat6 for a 2m cable, but it'll work fine.

2 - If it works ok, then leave it.  However if you do have problems in the future, then a wired connection is always the way to go.

3 - You'll need to have a voip provider, Gradwell have a good reputation, but are a bit more business focused.  Andrews and Arnold are good, but not cheap.  https://www.aa.net.uk/voice-and-mobile/voip-information/

You won’t believe the difference. We went from 0.7mbps to 400 overnight in deepest Derbyshire. Watching iPlayer had been impossible and suddenly everyone can watch their own thing. 

Thanks for your helpful reply.

The cables at the end of my garden, should be up and running soon.

What I can't fathom is why is it so cheap.

£150.00 installation fee that you reclaim from the government and then 30 quid a month!

Is it not that B4RN is a not-for-profit outfit?

Because it's owned by the customers.

What I can't fathom is why BT copper is still considered 'normal' for 90% of people, at £20-30 per month? It's 2020 FFS. We had 10/100/1000mbs connections in every building and student room in the entire university in 1998, 22 years ago. It was about £9 a term. 

Can't wait for it myself. It's a few hundred metres away in Caton.

1000Mb/s connections in every room 22 years ago? I find that hard to believe.

Cambridge Univeristy UDN. We had fibre connections to the switches in each staircase, in every college. I'm not sure what the fibre bandwidth was(?). The copper switches themselves were 100mbs to each room. Room-room & room-department connections were limited by hard-drive write speed. This was before laptops or desktop motherboards even had RJ-45 sockets. We had to buy ISA/PCMCIA cards.

One of the lads in my college built a dual cpu pentium server with a small raid array to run napster, at the time that Star Wars Phantom Menace was released. He was dragged into a meeting with the college and university information services for using a significant percentage of the bandwidth on the backbone connection to JANET on a single student room connection. It wasn't even in a college hall, it was in a college owned house with a switch locked in a cupboard.

The impressive thing about it was the forward thinking with regard to the ducting & infrastructure. Fitted through cobbled streets and into ancient stone buildings. The vast majority of people and buildings had no need for the bandwidth. Most people were using telnet for email. 

Thanks. 1Gb/s networking was just emerging in 1998; the fibre uplink bandwidth of the switches would have been 1Gb/s at most. Of course, the entire University's JANET connection would also probably have been 1Gb/s  - so let's not think about contention ratios - i.e. the practical bandwidths available to the end users.

On your last point, B4RN will provide a list of recommended VOIP providers. We went with Vonage, who provide a good service for about £10/month.

Because Thatcher's government decided a national fibre to the home network would be anti-competitive, and we've been left to market forces ever since ☹️

Thanks for suggestion.