Truespeed Fibre to the Home
I wanted to share with those who might be interested, my experience trying our Truespeed. We've all heard a lot about it, but what is it like to use?
Truespeed approached the Parish Council in Saltford, and as I look after many of the Tech stuff, I agreed I would take a look at it. The Parish Council do not support one company over another, but we are supporters of those investing in the village.
The views in this Blog are my own and not those of Saltford Parish Council.
I had the chance to try Truespeed at Corston Village Hall a few weeks ago. Not doing anything by half, I took my iMac and a few friends with laptops to help.
I plugged an ethernet cable straight into the Truespeed Router, so I was in no way testing the wifi. With internet speeds this high very often the bottleneck can be the local wifi, especially when you have walls and interference from other appliances.
The immediate thing that struck me as soon as I opened a Browser was the page was almost instant. It was just there with zero delay.
I proceeded to do some network tests, and I was really taken aback. www.speedtest.net measured Zero Latency. Latency can best be explained as the delay before the data starts. It's like turning on a tap and waiting for the water to flow. Bandwidth is the volume of water, latency the delay. Well, actually this site couldn't measure it. I've seen down to a few milliseconds, but it came up as zero. To put that in perspective, the average Virgin Latency is about 25ms, and BT is about 80ms, but I have had above 150ms. The higher the number, the more time you must wait for a page to refresh or data to update.
I used the system both at 200Mb/s and then Truespeed raised the limit to 1Gb/s (1,000Mb/s). Downloads were incredible. You could download a HD film in a few seconds. Even with four of us working independently we saw no degradation of the speed.
So here's the thing; With both Virgin and BT (which includes, Sky, Talk-Talk and all the others as they piggyback BT) even if you are paying for their Fibre products you only get Fibre to the cabinet in the street. Then you share it with over 20 others. If they are streaming or downloading your speed drops. This is why, at busy times, the internet speed is poor. It's called "contention" as you are all fighting for the bandwidth.
The next part relates to Upload. We are sold the download speed as most of our data is coming down to us rather then us sending it up to the web. The problem is that every time we download, we have to upload too a smaller amount of data to say it's been received. This is fine normally but when you all of a sudden have five people,e in your house all using it at the same time and then multiply that across your cabinet you get bottlenecks.
Truespeed provides the same speed up as they do down. It's called a synchronous service. In business, this is very expensive. At our facility in Scotland, we have a synchronous service of 100Mb/s, but we pay £600 a month for that! All of a sudden £47 for twice that is sounding good value. I can honestly say the Truespeed service is FAR better. We share that 100Mb/s between 25 users by the way.
This is why I believe Fibre to the Home is important. Fifty years ago most people used Coal to heat their homes. It worked, the coal man would deliver to bags and you'd get up early to make the fire so you could have hot water. That's how I grew up. Then somebody came and offered you gas central heating. It was cleaner, faster and cheaper. Now we take gas for granted. It's the same with Fibre to home, or sometimes this is called full Fibre.
The cable Truespeed install is an asset for the future of technology in the home. BT and Virgin has spend a lot of money on their infrastructure, but it's now out of date. More importantly, they are being run by accountants who want their return on investment.
The internet speeds BT offers in the UK are slower than the average in Hungary, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania. The UK Government target only 30Mb/s. That might be enough for you, which is great, but it doesn't allow for the future. Coal was fine for some in those days.
The Fibre which Truespeed installs is tested up to a speed of 10,000Mb/s or 10Gb/s. That's the sort of speed data centre's use. It's future-proofed. Copper Cable seems a bit like Coal.
In terms of the future; we have HD, HDR and Ultra HD content available now. If you have more than one downloading at the same time or a machine doing and update you can say goodbye to Strictly Come Dancing! 4K requires bit rates of 25 Mbit/s for high-quality, fast-motion content like live sports per stream. 8K could push those requirements up to 80 Mbit/s or even 100 Mbit/s for each channel/stream. If you share the Internet with many people in the house, you may need this bandwidth sooner than you think.
Having ultra-fast Internet to your home has been shown to add between 3% and 5% to your house value. Poor Internet is also the single most common reason for people discounting a house purchase. More and more people are working from home, me included. I already notice the drop in Virgin speeds at 4 pm when kids get back from school. Unfortunately for me, that's just when the USA West coast opens up.
Coming back to using Truespeed.... it's like driving a sports car after driving a 2CV. There's nothing wrong with a 2CV if you don't need the speed and capacity. However, if you do, Truespeed is a great Internet experience.
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