Sky Broadband and Sky Fibre

[calenture]

My sky BB speeds have always been very poor (long way from exchange - 2mb at best). Now after years of neglect and no competition, we suddenly have Virgin and BT fibre installing services. ADSL would have done me fine if I'd got the 17mb that most folk seem to get, but I feel I'm forced down the road of either fibre or Virgin cable.

My question is a technical one. Obviously I don't need the Virgin setup explained because it is a completely new and different connection. But the BT (and third party) line confuses me. If BT has upgraded the line to fibre then surely it's using the exact same line that my ADSL connection is? Now, I know my line is limited to 2mb on ADSL... but what is the physical difference between my connection and a fibre one?A neighbour upgraded to fibre and all they said they got was a new modem from BT to plug in themselves and..bang..50mb..so i'm under the impression it's still just the same BT line....there's not an additional fibre line that needs connected too? So, is it just down to new modem being able to detect a fibre connection? Is my line now working on the new fibre line but limited to 2mb?

Sorry if these seem like dumb questions, but I'm genuinely confused.

[Shonk]

the line leaves your house and goes to a cabinet then from the cabinet off to the exchange
with adsl your data signal goes all the way back to the exchange over copper

with vdsl2 you data only goes to the cabinet over copper then its fiber

so in my case its

50m to my cabinet from my house
then 300m to my exchange

so it has cut my line lengh down from 350m to 50m

[calenture]

Ok,, thanks for the info...so when I sign up for fibre then someone actually has to come out to my local cabinet and connect me to the fibre then?

[Isitme]

Yes, an engineer will go to the cabinet a add the connection to fibre. Your phone will still use the copper all the way to the exchange. The speed you will get depends on your distance from the fibre cabinet, not the exchange.

[Scubbie]

Ok,, thanks for the info...so when I sign up for fibre then someone actually has to come out to my local cabinet and connect me to the fibre then?

Sort of, yes.

What actually has happened is that a new second cabinet has been built near to your main telephone cabinet, which has all the copper connections. The new cabinet has all the gubbins for Fibre.

An engineer will need to complete a connection from the new Fibre cabinet to the specific port in the old telephone cabinet. The BTO Engineer will not come to your home unless he/she is installing a new telephone connection now.

At your end you will need to complete a couple of things. When your new Sky router arrives there are easy to follow instructions inside the box.

The first and most obvious would be to fit a router which can work with the Fibre (VDSL2) connection. The other is to ensure that the filter you've been using is either compatible with the new connection or change it to a new one.

Sky will supply a new microfilter to replace any olds ones you have been using, like the picture below.



If you have not been using these, please could you take a picture of your master socket and post it so that we can see what you have been using? We can advise from there.