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G fast question

voltized

Regular Member
I have a bit of a strange question which has been bugging me for a while now

Before Virgin (my current ISP) serviced my area, we used openreach and only the maximum of 76mbps was available to my house even though at that time the wholesale checker and thinkbroadband maps said G fast was available on my street.
However in the past few years/months doing some digging I found out only the other side of the street has G fast and my side doesn’t. And what makes it even weirder is that not every house on the other side has it available, only a handful. The closest house to have it available is directly opposite to my house. Both sides are served by the same cabinet, as I remember asking the engineer one time, he also didn’t know why this may be the case. Does anyone know why this could be the case?
 
Assuming those homes and yours are all on the same PCP cabinet (not FTTC). It probably has to do with the fact that G.fast is prone to aggressive signal degradation over distance, so only those homes within 200-300 metres of the cabinet get good speeds (the copper cable loops around underground, so the actual straight line distance to your home will be less) and past that it falls away very quickly - to the point where ISPs can no longer guarantee a good performance (i.e. they won't sell it). So, at a guess, you may be just past the cut-off.
 
Are you sure about both sides being on the same cab? You can check with the wholesale website. https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/ just put in an address instead of a phone number and it will say "Served by Cabinet 123" at the top.

The other thing is the cables may not necessarily take the same route as others do. Thus yours could be longer/shorter than ones just opposite you. I have a 300m long copper line (299m to be exact) and G.Fast just did not work properly at all for me (slower than VDSL).
 
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Assuming those homes and yours are all on the same PCP cabinet (not FTTC). It probably has to do with the fact that G.fast is prone to aggressive signal degradation over distance, so only those homes within 200-300 metres of the cabinet get good speeds (the copper cable loops around underground, so the actual straight line distance to your home will be less) and past that it falls away very quickly - to the point where ISPs can no longer guarantee a good performance (i.e. they won't sell it). So, at a guess, you may be just past the cut-off.
Thanks for the insight, turns out I’m just unlucky then but it is what it is, my luck with network builds never seems to be good. Also this is probably completely unrelated but before Virgin did their network-wide gigabit upgrade, the other side of the street could only get 350Mbps while my side could get the 500Mbps and 600Mbps with the Oomph upgrade. All just odd

It’s not a problem as much now as it was when we had open reach, just more my curiosity, however if they offered it to us before Virgin came along I definitely would’ve used it back then. We’ve got Virgin now and have a preorder with YouFibre but they’re taking so long and it looks like I’ll have to extend my contract with Virgin, even though their build team visited months ago and installed a fibre duct of theirs 5metres from my front door. Even their support still seems to think my area is still in the design phase and couldn’t explain to me why there is already a duct, doesn’t add up to me

I double checked the cabinet serving my house and the other house and it says both houses are served by Cabinet 41
 
Are you sure about both sides being on the same cab? You can check with the wholesale website. https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/ just put in an address instead of a phone number and it will say "Served by Cabinet 123" at the top.

The other thing is the cables may not necessarily take the same route as others do. Thus yours could be longer/shorter than ones just opposite you. I have a 300m long copper line (299m to be exact) and G.Fast just did not work properly at all for me (slower than VDSL).
Yep, just checked both and they’re both served by Cabinet 41. My address doesn’t show Gfast as being available on the checker but the house opposite displays estimated clean and impacted Gfast speeds. The max speed shown is 224 which is a whole 100mbps under the max advertised speed and I’m guessing this indicates a weak signal to the other house which lines up with what Mark said about signal degradation
 
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