Now I've got Truespeed, what's it like? 

A year ago I placed my order with Truespeed and at the same time started to "champion" their investment in the village. This involves spreading awareness of the technology and what it means to the user. It's not for all but if you value fast and consistent broadband it's the best there is.

It's taken two years in total from when Truespeed first talked about investing in Saltford to the point of getting installed, set up and running.  Some in the village were lucky and got online three months sooner however the BT Pole close to my house was "defective" and so we had to dig up the drive and use ducting.  Some still don't have access.  Some landowners are preventing installation which to me is incredibly short sighted.

Of course, in the middle of this project we had the small issue of a global pandemic but Truespeed carried on as best they could.  It obviously caused some delays.  Telecoms counts as critical national infrastructure but installing new fibre in semi-rural conditions is not easy whilst maintaining social distancing.

Was it worth the wait and now that it's in, what is it like to use?  In short it's a dream, if you are the sort that dream about broadband (I'm not sure what that says about me :-). 

For me, the biggest thing is the ultra low latency.  When you request a page, BANG, it's there.  I must admit, I was quite sceptical about some of the ping times people reported but I've done a lot of testing. The Internet is only as strong as the weakest link so regardless of the "last mile" connection if the trunk network is poor the service is poor.

Truespeed is crazy fast even outside of the Truespeed network.  Here's a test I did to Jump Networks in London which is 120 miles from me.  Jump provide business connectivity services to a wide number of providers, so they will provide circuits for Truespeed I'm sure.

4 milliseconds is just insanely fast.  Most of my internal network can't match that and we are talking 120 miles away, but that's the beauty of fibre.  It's not as distance dependent.  More testes from Exascale in Telford 15ms or Exa in Bradford 12ms, the fastest I would get from Virgin would be 60ms + at busy times over 300ms.

That doesn't sound like much but many web pages might have 20+ data sources and some source you to wait whilst adverts are loaded.  You will know the type.  That can mean you waiting 5 seconds for a page to load even if you have 200Mb/s bandwidth.  It can also cause buffering and glitching is video steams like iPlayer.

Here's one testing to KPN in Amsterdam. 11ms is crazy fast!!  Upload speed is down but that's probably a limitation of the KPN policy.

This shows Truespeed has a very high quality network and great connectivity to others around it.  Of course bandwidth is great but most importantly it's constant.  I haven't been able to measure any dips or issue at busy times.  I feel contention free.

Here's a good video which will give you more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA5LVBrg6fE

In Practical Use

Last night we had five people in the house all streaming and I was on a Zoom call with 12 users.  I also had my work machines running and we all have smart phones.  We didn't notice a single issue but when you think about it, that's exactly how it should be.

Internet use should be like water on tap.  You just expect it whenever you demand it.  It doesn't matter if another machine is doing an update or downloading a movie... it just works, no glitches.

One issue is you very quickly find the limits of your own home network.  If you are a user who only uses the Router and the WiFi connected to it then this is not an issue.  However, if you are like me with quite a complicated home network it's very easy to find significant bottlenecks.  

Every network cable and connection needs to be running Gigabit Ethernet as all of a sudden 100Mb seems a bit slow.  WiFi can be a huge limiting factor.  2.4Ghz isn't fast enough to make best use of the available speed however it reaches further so still has a place.  5Ghz on my network will go up to 1700Mb/s in theory although I tend to get more like 350/400Mb/s... which is fast enough! This is because WiFi speaks in turn to every device on the network and is the same reason why public wifi is very often so poor.

Even my garden wifi now gives me over 200Mb/s even sitting in the far corner.  That will do me!

Getting the most out of your Connection

Your Truespeed circuit is very powerful.  At one of my work sites we run a site with 24 users off a circuit half the specification of Truespeed and it works well.  Until very recently it also cost us £600 a month but that's another story.  The point is it's got a lot of potential but how do you get the most out of it?

Your network is only as good as the weakest link so you need to try to find it/them and then find a way to improve it.  If you connect an ethernet cable in the back of your router you will get very close to your maximum potential speed, as long as it's a decent cable. With Truespeed that will be very close to 200Mb/s and you can measure it by going to the website www.speedtest.net.

If you connect up to the Truespeed Ultrafast (5Ghz) wifi network and you are close to the router you should get close to the same as long as your phone or device supports that speed.  As you move further away things get tricky.  This depends on the building, what it's made from and lots of sources of interference.  Electrical cables, other wireless devices and even Microwaves can kill wifi speeds.

For this point it can get quite complicated but here are a few suggestions;

1. If you have a route for a Cat5e or Cat6 data cable it's worth running it.  The cable is about £50 for 300 metres.  Data Cable is always best unless you have really long distances in which case you might even run fibre. Running a cable from your Router to the Loft, perhaps hidden behind a drainpipe is a great solution.  You'll get almost zero loss and super fast speeds elsewhere in your house.
2. Next best I think would be "powerline" systems.  These transmit the data upto 1Gb/s across your mains power cables.  They work best if your wiring is good and sometimes don't work at all on very old mains systems, but if that's the case you probably need a professional to check your system.  If your wiring is good you can locate another wireless access point wherever there is a plug.  This means you can move the access point around to get the best coverage.
3. A "MESH" wireless system has the clever feature of being able to bounce access point to access point without the use of cables, so you can link say three access point to each other but they must all be in good range of the next one, so you need good overlaps.
   
   
   
   

   Most MESH systems also have a "Roaming" feature which enables you to walk about your house without losing connection but not all do so check if that's important to you.  These systems are normally sold as "whole home wifi" and can be expensive.  
   
   

Quick Note as to why I support what Truespeed is doing

A few people have asked me why I support Truespeed and do I get paid. Answer to the second point, first; no, I don't get paid anything from Truespeed.  I run by own business and I'm not interested in broadband sales.

The "why" part is more complex.  Firstly, I really need good communications as I live and work from home.  There are five sometimes six in our house all using the Internet concurrently.  My wife works from home too and our daughters study from home.  So we are a target customers for good broadband.

I work in technology and I have spent much of my career dealing with BT and other networking providers including Virgin, Mercury, Level3 and a whole host of others.  I used to be a buyer for a major bank buying networks and then for a major travel business providing data comms to travel agents right through to data-centres.  Negotiating with an arrogant monopoly certainly shaped my thoughts over the years.  I could write a book on it.

Small independent network providers are a good thing.  We basically only have two alternatives; BT Openreach (who provide the infrastructure for Sky, Talk-Talk, PlusNet, Zen, Post Office and all the other ADSL phone line based services) and Virgin Media who bought up all the Cable TV networks (such as Telewest, CableTel, Blueyonder etc).

Both parts of the Duopoly are "milking their assets" in that they have recovered their initial investment.  They are making some investments in infrastructure but not in Saltford. Even in the big cities they are painfully slow.  This is why the UK is falling behind in global broadband speeds. [1] If you had Truespeed's most basic package and you were a Country, you would be ranked 4th in the world not 47th like the UK as a whole!!

Truespeed is far from faultless and I'm not blind to that.  Their customer communications after you order is poor.  It's painful to wait without feedback.  The "Order to Build" model makes business sense as they only invest when they have sufficient take up to make it worth their while. 

[1] Source

The UK is tumbling down the table and is now among the slowest countries in Europe

https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/

"The top of the table is dominated by Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltics, as is evident from even a quick glance at our interactive map. Of the top 50 countries, 32 of them are in Europe. Last year’s results placed the UK 34th in the world. This year the UK places 47th.

Last year, we predicted that with the UK only just beginning to roll out FTTP (fibre to the premises), and with a number of other European countries already a long way ahead of the UK in this regard, it would likely slip down the table when we took these measurements 12 months later, and that is exactly what has happened."