Now after a few weeks gap it is time to take a look at another broadband provider, and this time it is TalkTalk who have predominately sold ADSL2+ but do now sell two FTTC products, the 40/2 and 80/20 variants. We will also look at all the other providers where we have enough data to be confident that the results we publish are reasonable.

One of the reasons for us wanting to look at broadband speeds, is that while there is a big emphasis on the average speeds, it is still rare to find people showing the spread of speeds and with the debate on whether Fibre to the Cabinet is an engineers nightmare but an accountants dream ongoing it is good to get some actual data on the speeds people experience. Of course we cannot guarantee to have a line length spread that precisely matches the UK situation, but by aggregating results over a number of weeks we do end up with plots that are in line with the theory on VDSL2 speeds.

Speed test results from TalkTalk customers who fit the profile for the 80 Mbps download, 20 Mbps upload service

The slightly cheaper fibre service which TalkTalk sell is Fibre Medium which is limited to a 40 Mbps download and a much slower 2 Mbps upload speed turns out to be more popular with visitors to our site, and while it is tempting to try and estimate how many fibre customers TalkTalk has, we suspect that with people looking to brag about their new found speed will be using speed tests more than those where their speed has changed little over the course of a couple of years. Around 1 in 5 of the speed tests we recorded for TalkTalk were on a fibre service, which is a lot higher than the proportion of fibre customers at the provider.

Speed Test results from Talktalk customers who fit the profile for the 40 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload product

To help interpret the graphs lets through some numbers into the mix:

The thing that jumps out from the table, is that the upload speeds on the Fibre Large service exceed even the download speed for almost all ADSL2+ users, reflecting the significant improvement in speeds that the 80/20 FTTC service represents. With an average upload speed of 12.7 Mbps the Fibre Large product is fast enough to upload HD quality clips in real time or faster to YouTube. We wonder whether these vastly improved upload speeds are encouraging more people to generate content and upload it to sites such as YouTube, flickr and Vimeo.

Speed test results from customers who fit the ADSL2+ speed profile

The ADSL2+ download speeds show a different shape to the VDSL (FTTC) based services, and the plateau around 7.5 Mbps suggests that TalkTalk may still have a fair chunk of customers who could go faster on ADSL2+, but are held back by their product choice e.g. a customer on an old contract with one of the providers TalkTalk acquired over the years who does not want to migrate to a new set of TalkTalk terms and conditions for more speed.  Given that TalkTalk has only a few hundred thousand customers stuck on the old BT Wholesale IPStream Max versus millions on their own LLU platform we don’t think this kink represents just off-net users.

Upload speeds from TalkTalk customers who appear to be on ADSL2+ or ADSL based product.

The plot of the upload speeds for ADSL2+ connections which we have done on its graph to help emphasis the oddities suggests that TalkTalk appears to a cluster of  people who are on a service with an upload sync speed around 440-448 Kbps (380 Kbps throughput) and another at 288 Kbps (250 Kbps throughput). If this was a betting game, after looking at the ADSL2+ download speeds, we have a feeling that most of the people getting what looked like capped speeds are old Tiscali customers.

 Catching a FTTP deployment in mid-build and putting these few picture online may help people to identify what they see going on in their area. For example it appears that for FTTP, the blown fibre tubing used is specifically marked as FTTP.

Spring surfing in Newquay

When in the town back in March we spotted some FTTP overhead infrastructure, there may have been more FTTP in the town but the was the only area we spotted along the South West Coastal Path.

FTTP Overhead Infrastructure

The South West Coastal Path runs down an old railway line and it appears that the FTTP construction in the area is still underway, evidenced by the coils of blown fibre tubing left on other telegraph poles. The picture above also has the fibre tubing and the manifold installed, but given the state of the other FTTP poles in the area we doubt it has the fibres blown through the tube to the manifold. If the service was live and a customer connected you see the fibre drop tube exiting the top of the manifold.

Telegraph Pole with Blown Fibre Tube

 Zooming in on own of the tube bundles on a pole you can confirm that this is a BT deployment, and not a secret trial by another operator, as the black and yellow tubing is labelled as BT property.

The joys of GPS tagging on digital cameras mean you can get a reasonable idea of where these pictures were taken, and avoid the confusion that so often arises when in an area you don’t have intimate knowledge of.

The advantages of FTTP mean that knowing where it is available could potentially make a big difference to peoples property purchase decisions, but alas for now detailed information on the BT FTTP locations around the UK and even the location of street cabinets is still a closely guarded secret. You can use resources like the BT Wholesale telephone and address checker, but if you were moving to Newquay it would be a long job to check which parts of the town are already offering FTTC and FTTP.

We could arrange a crowd sourcing campaign but with the majority of FTTP infrastructure underground in pavement chambers it would be hard to tell where it was, for now it is only easy to spot in areas with an overhead deployment.

The questions are obviously not the full scope of the discussion, but by bringing some data from a wider audience it is possible to help push forward a discussion and to help address priorities in what should be discussed.

What will the next internet driver be?

The first question looked at what area people thought would be a key driver for boosting Internet use. With TV services standing head and shoulders above the rest at 40% (cloud computing was some 24% percentage points behind) it is clear that the push in marketing that has resulted in the explosion of Internet enabled set-top boxes may be the way to go and may show what will happen in the next ten years.

Of course if you had asked in a poll five years ago, whether a handheld device (tablet) with a 7″ to 10″ screen would be selling in millions and be the top of many peoples Christmas lists we doubt many would have put it high on the list. So there is scope for something no-one has thought of to explode on the scene. That said choices like Telemedicine, 3d printing and cloud computing still got a reasonable share, so while it may not appeal to everyone it maybe that for certain sectors of market this are the most important, e.g. telemedicine with the ability to enable better remote monitoring and reduce GP visits for people might be popular with those who have managed long term conditions.

Which technology do you feel could be the solution to improving quality of broadband services in the UK?

The second question sits firmly in the quality part of the IET open discussion, and shows over half the 1,300 responding to this question nominating FTTH (Fibre to the Home or in its other name Fibre to the Premises) or FTTB (Fibre to the Building – usually deployed to flats) as the technology they think is the key to quality. Obviously this leads onto the discussion of how much coverage you can get for a certain spend on money, but it seems clear the general consensus is that FTTH/P/C is the best option.

The full fibre advocates are sometimes seen as almost religious in their fervour to push the need for FTTH networks, so it is interesting to see such a clear choice from a much wider audience.

The forthcoming early market launch of Fibre on Demand from Openreach will allow us to see how popular the best quality option really is, when people are asking to put their money forward. The B4RN option while noble has yet to be duplicated at any scale but for those wanting to roll-out fibre where the community can provide a mixture of labour and money it does offer an option, and another option for villages is Gigaclear who will deploy a FTTP product for a low installation fee, though many are confused by the burst style pricing, where you pay for a data rate that can burst up to Gigabit speeds. Then there is Hyperoptic who are steadily expanding their roll-out of FTTB, and a less mentioned provider like Ask4 who feature in our speed test data as one of the providers with really fast connections.

Analysis of last nine days of speed test results at thinkbroadband

Of course it is possible that people may be finding some services or sites they access over the Internet are performing slower than usual, e.g. video streaming might be at a lower quality or exhibit more buffering, but there appears to be no evidence to say that UK broadband users have been slowed down across the board.

The numbers actually show a slight increase on Monday 25th March and Tuesday 26th March in the average speed for those days, but it looks to be in the normal range of variation we are seeing. For those who are looking closely at the graph, we can save you some trouble and say the daily average varied between 19.4 Mbps and 21.5 Mbps, which is substantially higher than the Ofcom average of 12 Mbps (but that figure is for tests between April and November 2012) so is likely to be higher as people are upgrading to faster services daily. Also it is possible ratio of speed testers does not fully reflect the spread of products across the UK, some more number crunching to weight the results for different products and providers may allow us to produce a figure that is representative of the UK market, and across a much broader product range than Ofcom can measure.

For those not used to seeing the range of UK broadband speeds, the notable points are clusters of results at 30 Mbps (Virgin Media XL 30 product), 37 Mbps (FTTC 40 Meg customers), you can also spot the 60 Mbps and a smaller number of 100 Mbps customers. The FTTC 80/20 service shows its throughput limit of 76 Mbps too.

There are some impressive speeds in that table, and it does reflect what you expect if you are looking at the big picture. The issue is that it is comparing the providers en-masse and not directly comparing products, and if you look at the following composite image, it will become apparent that the reason BT Retail has such a high average is that it has the lion’s share of FTTC products in the UK.

Speed test results from thinkbroadband speed test
 (Y-axis identical in all graphs 140000 Kbps down to 0 Kbps) 

 

So what do we learn from these graphs, mainly that fibre (FTTC) services are more popular with Plusnet and BT customers who visit our site than with Sky and TalkTalk, something that is reflected in the financial reports from the operators and the simple reality that around 9 out of 10 FTTC customers in the UK are with BT or Plusnet. An interesting aspect is that you can use the upload speeds to potentially narrow down which broadband product a customer is using, this is because upload speeds appear a lot less affected by factors such as congestion, line lengths, wireless speeds etc.

The stepped nature of the graph for Virgin Media shows the capped nature of the 120, 100, 60, 30, 20 and 10 Mbps tiers that are in operation with the provider, as their speed upgrade programme progresses we should see the long tail of people with 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps connections vanish.

The FTTC products offer three upload speed variants 20 Mbps, 10 Mbps and 2 Mbps, our speedtest results suggest that the 2 Mbps version is pretty rare, but as the graph for Sky above shows while they sell the 80/20 FTTC service as their premium product, those who have ordered it are seeing very good upload speeds. The downstream speed curve between 38 Mbps and 18 Mbps reflects the variation in connection due to line length from the street cabinet.

O2/Be would seem to be the poor man of the group, with such a low speed, but their plot does very nicely show the performance range for an ADSL2+ service and how consistent the upstream speeds can be. Certainly when ADSL2+ was the premium technology the BE service did offer some of the highest connection speeds both for download and upload.

So what for the future? Well we will return to look at how the various providers are performing, particularly as it appears to give a reasonable indication as to what is actually selling. The graphs for BT and Plusnet show a glimpse of the future with a handful of testers heading above the 100 Mbps mark and even above 140 Mbps as parts of the UK get access to FTTP services, with just 200,000 properties in the UK with access to an FTTP service at this time it is difficult to get meaningful data but we expect that to change as the year progresses.

For the critics of Openreach and their FTTC heavy superfast broadband roll-out, the curves from people using the up to 40 and up to 80 Mbps products tend to undermine statements that the service is useless, particularly if you compare the performance difference it makes compared to O2/Be.

All the graphs so far have shown the downstream results from the HTTPx6 test we now use, which uses six HTTP downloads to flood a connection. If we compare the single thread test versus our newer HTTP test the correlation is still pretty good, and certainly we plan to continue to run both tests.

The reason for running both tests is that it can be used to assess whether an ISP is suffering congestion, i.e. if we see a big difference between the two across the board for an ISP we may be able to infer a widespread congestion problem, and when looking at an individuals connection you can actually spot whether the connection was busy.

In the sample button from our speedtest, you can see that the graph for the single thread is consistently slower than the HTTPx6 test. This is because when this test was carried out, we were also streaming a HD stream at around 3 Mbps. The average figures are pretty straightforward and such that for the HTTPx6 average this speed was the average over an 8 second period (the same test time is used no matter how fast your connection is), the burst figures approximate to the speed your connection was seen to manage for just 1 second, generally we always quote the average figures as this reflects much better your ability to stream and dowload material. The duration of the TBBx1 test will vary from test to test, but is usually in the 7 to 15 second timeframe.

We all love a conclusion after a long read and it is time to make one, perhaps it should be this, currently amongst the big providers the difference in speeds between them is less about the ISP and more about the physical connection you purchase, i.e. an 80/20 FTTC connection from BT will perform very similar to one from Sky and TalkTalk. The differentiating factors are much more price, level of support and the other less tangiable factors.

The survey generated 1,200 responses and gives an insight into what people who are interested in broadband are doing with regard film and TV spending. The first question was looking to see if the overall spending on film and TV had increased and for 22% of those answering they are spending more than they did a year ago. With 70% saying that their spending stayed the same or answered No (which would include those spending less), the next poll question which looked at spending on Virgin Media and Sky TV services should provide some further insight.

Some 20% of people appear to be reigning in their spending on the traditional cable and satellite services. The large chunk that was 26% with no opinion reflects those who do not subscribe to either of these content platforms. We may in the future try and look in more detail into what people have dropped from their packages, it may simply be that many are abandoning multi-room subscriptions or not reducing the channel line-up but ditching the £10 per month extra charge that HD carries on Sky TV.

It is probably no surprise that a website with a focus on broadband would have lots of visitors that use or have used Lovefilm Instant or Netflix, with 26% of those taking part in the poll saying they subscribe now, or have done so in the last 12 months. If these OTT TV services were to replicate this with the wider population they would have around 6 million subscriptions in the UK.

A common complaint about Internet TV streaming services is the constant re-buffering. Netflix generally avoids this by adapting the picture quality on the fly, whereas Lovefilm Instant can tends to still buffer in the middle of playback on a variable performance connection. What will be interesting to see is whether in 12 months time the take-up of OTT TV services has changed significantly particularly as more people subscribe to a super-fast service.

The general conclusion from the poll is that Sky and Virgin Media are not losing out to Netflix and other services just yet, but there are signs that people are willing to try the new services and while the new entrants may not have the latest movies, at a price point of £5 to £6 per month compared to the £16 for Sky Movies this may change. If the streaming services can launch streams that utilise 6 to 10 Mbps of bandwidth they will match the quality level that Sky and Virgin Media can offer.

The interesting cat amongst the pigeons is the new Clubcard TV service from Tesco and while it is does mean putting up with adverts, it is free and effectively puts an end to the bargain bin DVD section where you would pick up a six year old film for £3, why pay £3 when you can watch it for free.

Perhaps the question that now needs to be asked is whether people who use peer to peer systems to get hold of films and TV series for free are now happily paying the fairly low subscription fees for  the OTT TV services. One aspect that may be helping reduce peer to peer usage is that many US TV services now air at the same time in the UK, or have a minimal gap, e.g. Game of Thrones Season 3 airs on 31st March in USA and plays out on Sky Atlantic on the 1st April in UK.

So why does this grind my gears? Simply because the assumption from so many is that existing HD video is as good as it gets, I cannot be alone in watching films and when there are sharp scene changes or explosions to get annoyed at the block effects that can be present even on 4 Mbps bit rate H264 streams that claim to be HD material.

Having seen the same event in raw 1080p which means a bit rate of 1.6 Gbps, to see it in the edit suite where it is usually produced as a master with some compression, perhaps down to 220 Mbps, to see it transmitted over a satellite connection at 25 Mbps and then compressed further until you get the block fest that is Freeview, even the 10 Mbps HD streams from satellite TV pale into insignificance to the original version.

If H265 results in content producers deciding to try and save bandwidth then the codec will be a step back in time, in the same way Freeview has created more channels at the expense of the quality of picture. The cost of satellite transponder capacity means that there is a real chance of this happening, or the next range of TV standards will simply have the picture compressed down to fit existing infrastructure.

There is a Cisco demo of H.265 which looks impressive, but the key to H.265 will be not how it manages talking head type shows, but things like football matches where the grass pitch can become a green blob with poor encoding and more importantly how it manages the encoding and onward transmission of a live stream.

I am willing to bet if you took a master of any film and played it on a TV in store and labelled the set as ultra-HD it would sell like hot cakes compared to the other models with their Freeview or Freesat feeds. Not because the TV is better, but the feed has less artifacts and will blow people away with the clarity. 

We should be increasing the bit rate of video at the exact same time as improving the codec’s used, this is where the wow factor will come from. If we move towards using H.265 to squeeze something that people will buy believing it to be HD into 1 Mbps streams, then we will be giving the politicians less reason to bother with upgrading broadband and broadcast TV infrastructure.

A recent telehealth initiative that aims to get 100,000 of us in the UK talking to our doctor over broadband by 2013, led us run a poll and see what the opinion of our visitors was like in this respect.

Poll Results: Do you think the idea of video conferencing with a health professional is a good idea?

The results show that while 56% of people think that a video conference with a health professional is a good idea, the fact that 30% think otherwise indicates that many are wary of this sort of move. Certainly while we are excited by the prospect of easier access to health professionals and their advice, there will be many for whom their condition requires various actual physical checks, or simply the person is uncomfortable talking to a random person over the Internet. Something that is beyond the scope of our quick polls, but should be considered is whether video conference consultations work better if the patient has previously met the person at the other end.

Poll Results: Have you ever contacted your GP or other health professional using your Internet connection?

With basic email being used so heavily in day to day and business life the results of asking people whether they have ever contacted their GP or other health professional using their Internet connection gave a very surprising result. 82% claim to have never done so, and only 3% use the Internet frequently to do so. While this may be in part attributed to most of us not having need to be in contact with our local surgery, the suggestion is that even for routine stuff like making an appointment with the dentist we still use the telephone rather than an online system.

Poll Results: If telemedicine leads to savings (both time and money) for the Health Service, should these savings be invested in more home visits for those who need them?

One area that there appears to be over whelming support (72% support)  for is that if telemedicine does lead to the proposed savings, which appear to be the political driver behind the push is that for those who are actually require home visits to see more investment in this part of the health care regime. As more of the population year on year are living at home alone this becomes even more important to ensure that isolation and the potential for depression are avoided. The total immersion in the online world can mean that people will assume that daily contact via video conferencing will solve social isolation, and while it helps in the same way as a phone call to distant relatives helps, there is no substitute for someone visiting, and actually having the time to stay for a 20 minute chat after any ‘official’ business has been concluded.

The final question in our quick poll may not reflect the general population, as many of the visitors to thinkbroadband are likely to the tech literate and the sort of people who already use Skype to communicate with friends and family, but even so we still have 25% of those responding to our poll saying they have never carried out a two-way video chat.  Critics of the UK broadband infrastructure will be dissapointed to see that only 8% have tried and failed, we even gave the pointer that if your broadband was too slow to indicate this.

Poll Results: Now a general Internet usage question. Have you ever used your Internet connection for a two-way webcam video call? e.g. Skype, MSN, Yahoo etc

In summary it seems there should be no problem with video conferencing as a way of interacting with health professionals starting in 2013, plenty of people appear to support the idea. For telemedicine to gain acceptance though it needs to be done in a way that is not forced upon people, and that there is no dilution of the quality of care. There are many people among the retired population, who simply due to the facts that as we get older we all require more access to health resources who will not be comfortable without face to face contact with their local GP surgery, but with a wave of teenagers who know nothing but online interaction, things will be very different as they grow up, have families and hopefully look after us in our old age.

The reason why Cornwall features in fibre broadband news so heavily is that by starting its own Superfast Cornwall project well before the BDUK / local authority projects had even started to have meetings, let alone pick a commercial operator provide a service.

So people can do a bit of 21st century trainspotting, here are a few pictures taken in the summer of 2012 on the one day it did not rain, when we paid a visit to Cornwall.

Example of Superfast Cornwall / Openreach plastic wrap

The standard FTTC cabinet is 1.4m high and in Cornwall they usually get a nice vinyl overlay to make it clear what it is for. There have been people who see the branding and assume this is a BT Infinity promotion, but it is pretty clear if can stop to read the poster that this is a provider agnostic promotion.  The QR code on the cabinet takes people to the http://www.superfastcornwall.org/ website which provides a lot more information on the project.

With the commercially driven superfast roll-out by Openreach in the rest of the UK covering around 40% of properties, many people are now well used to the FTTC services, what is more unusual in Cornwall is the amount of Fibre to the Premises including some early Fibre on Demand trial work.

View from balcony of engine house used by uknetweb and enjoying 330 Mbps fibre connectivity

One of the early locations for Fibre on Demand has been St Agnes, where the business UKNetWeb who operate from a converted engine house on the north Cornwall coast. They have gone from a fixed wireless solution, to FTTC to now a 330 Mbps Fibre on Demand product, which allows them to much more quickly deploy completed development projects for clients, while enjoying wonderful views.

One of the advantages of fibre on demand and FTTP where available is that the system relies on passive optical networking, so only power is needed at the handover node (telephone exchange) and customer premises. This does mean that there is very little to see on the ground. In Falmouth which has some pretty narrow streets, there is a fibre to the premises deployment that is using overhead cabling. Overhead fibre can be easier to deploy, but is probably only going to appear in areas where overhead telephone wiring is already present.

Telephone pole in Falmouth with connected FTTP customers

The only real giveaway that there are fibre services from this pole, is the present of the manifold (black round lozenge around 20cm), the main fibre feed enters from the bottom, and in this case two black fibres can be seen leaving the top.

Fibre manifold open to show support for 12 fibre connections

The above picture (taken in Milton Keynes) shows what is inside the manifold, which is fibre connections for up to 12 consumers lines. The manifold is the last link before the final fibre drop that runs to a property.

Fibre drop and associated telephone line arriving at a property

The running of a fibre to a property results in an overhead run that is only slightly thicker than the usual deployment and in the above picture the fibre would have continued around the outside of the property to where it would terminate on the outside of the property in a weather proof box. When the service is activated, the final engineer visit involves running a shorter piece of fibre more suited for use inside a building from this external box to a location inside the property.

Once problem that arose in Cornwall was that with cobbled, narrow streets locating the fibre splitter, which is used to feed several manifolds, and usually each street one or two. The normal method is to locate the fibre splitter in a pavement chamber, the solution was to locate it on the telegraph pole.

Innovation creates pole mounted fibre splitter

The green box is carefully designed to be the same width as the telephone pole, and when opened the 32 fibre trays are revealed. Waveguides are used to split the light for onward distribution to the manifolds.

Pole mounted fibre splitter with cover removed

The other end of the fibre deployments is very different to the old fashioned PSTN (copper) network, and the following picture shows the incoming fibre management cabinet which while serving several exchange areas has scope for lots of expansion. Once fibre take-up reaches the point that the copper network can be de-commissioned the scope for a serious reduction in the size of telephone exchanges is very evident.

Trays where incoming fibres are terminated and linked to internal fibre in exchange

The fibre management cabinet backs onto the actual handover node, where the fibres are terminated. The rack in this picture shows a fairly full top segment, with plenty of capacity in the lower half of the cabinet.

The business end of fibre connections in the telephone exchange

As with almost all cable systems, be they fibre or ethernet in a data centre there are the ubiquotous yellow tags to help identify each wire. The FTTP, FTTC and Fibre on Demand fibres all terminate at this location. The less populated left hand side of the cabinet is the fibre connectivity carrying the data to the various providers own hardware, i.e. BT Wholesale and its WBC network, and Sky and TalkTalk who both also buy fibre services from Openreach.

So there we have it, a short pictorial tour of some fibre in the UK. While Openreach is still only planning FTTP for around 10% of UK homes, if the pricing of FTTP on Demand is right we might in 2013 start to see those who work from home, or are just speed freaks opting for this option, and perhaps if demand levels are high a point at which FTTP can be seen as more commercially viable.

In one of our regular polls we asked people whether they had a smart TV or set top box that could be connected to the Internet, and we got over 1,600 responses. As a website dedicated to broadband in the UK, while we would expect to see a higher proportion of people connecting their box, the results were surprising, and may actually show what the future will be all about, which is not just having a nice shiny 50″ gadget in the corner of the room, but homes where everything is interconnected.

The answers to the second question are a little confusing, as the suggestion is that among thinkbroadband.com visitors the vast majority with an Internet enabled TV device actually have it connected up. Where the confusion arises is that the control question of not having a device at all appears to have been answered differently, we believe they may have split themselves between the No and Don’t have Device responses.

The main thrust of the poll was to see what sort of devices people were using to connect set-top boxes, and whether we should maybe focus on reviewing more of this ancillary hardware to help those who don’t have a connected box connect their device. Given that almost every smart TV and set top box has an Ethernet socket it is perhaps no surprise to see 44% using this method of connectivity, particularly as a direct cable connection generally provides the best type of connection to your home gateway (broadband router).

The split between the technologies is interesting, in theory wireless connectivity should be the simplest method, but we suspect that for many of our visitors the TV stack comprises of a set top box and a games console both of which benefit from Internet connectivity, and the location of the TV in the corner of a room with the wireless devices buried in a pile of wiring many will have tried wireless and learnt how variable its performance can be.

The high showing from HomePlug devices is perhaps a sign of the fact that BT Vision gave them away and they remain a popular method with TalkTalk and BT for connecting YouView boxes. They are very much a close second in comparison to Ethernet, and are one of the few broadband devices that are truly plug and play – entering long complex wireless encryption keys via a TV remote control is not a past time we would recommend.

We only recently reviewed the EchoBox devices, so to see even 2% connecting via this technology is a surprise, the MoCA standard is more common in Europe and US, where some IPTV firms actually supply the devices to connect boxes, it is particularly in homes when connecting a TV in another room where you previously had an TV coax lead.

One aspect we are seeing grow on our forums, is people buying wireless hardware that operates in the 5GHz band, as many are finding congestion in the usual 2.4GHz band is impacting on services like streaming at peak time. Certainly if you are streaming contention over an 802.11b/g/n network before you launch into a tirade about why broadband in the UK is so bad, it is worth checking that the problem is not something local to you.  While the 5GHz wireless networks don’t suffer from interference we still find that throughput over a period of time e.g. 30 seconds or more is much more variable than Ethernet, HomePlugs or the echoBox units.

We doff our hats to the 0.85% who claim to be using a mobile dongle to connect their TV or set top box

If people have suggestions for broadband hardware that they would like reviewed then do suggest them in our comment, our http://www.thinkbroadband.com/hardware/reviews.html generally a go a lot further than the usual review, which is a reflection of the fact we actually use the hardware, rather than just providing an unbox and plug in review.