This started out as a section in my Resilient Internet Connection Caper post, but it grew large enough to warrant a post of its own. It's also nothing, really, to do with how my current connection works, instead it is an interesting (perhaps) glimpse into one person's history of Internet connections in the UK.
So without further ado, here's How Places I've Lived Have Connected To The Internet a.k.a. The Quest for Internet Connection Speed.
The Nineties Teenager
In about 1994 my dad brings a demon into the home. A demon in the form of Demon Internet. He unboxes a shiny new Hayes Accura modem and connects it to our Windows 3.11 PC with a DB9 serial cable. He installs Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator and Turnpike (for email and Usenet). Our household takes its first baby steps into an online world.
We go through the following modems over the subsequent few years:
14.4K (Hayes Accura modem, external)
28.8K (Hayes modem, PCMCIA card)
33.6K (Motorola modem, external)
I spend most of my time with the 28.8K modem, inserted into a laptop in my bedroom. Many hours (and hours, and hours) are lost on IRC and Usenet - a tame life compared to what I could have been up to but it nevertheless teaches me a bunch of lessons about online life.
University Student Hall Life
I end up starting uni living in a room in a student house. Although on campus, the uni hasn't got it together to run Ethernet to the place, but lets me use a 56K modem to dial the uni's ISP through the internal phones. Never before have I seen a 56K modem connect at actually 56K!
After a couple of months I manage to get a place in halls and my connection speed takes a huge leap up to a JANET connection accessed through a wired NIC hooked up to the uni's ResNet (residential network) service. It might only be a 10Mbps 3Com PCI card, but goodness it is fast.
Introduced to computer networking at uni, I network up my parents' house. I find out how to share the house's single dial-up Internet connection to PCs across the LAN using Windows 98 SE's Internet Connection Sharing feature. To let me dial up on request from across the LAN I use a little LAN tool call Rasman.
University Student House
Two years on, halls have run their course with me and it's time to move into a house with friends. JANET-like speeds for residential connections are unheard of, sadly, instead the best available connection is a 512Kbps cable modem from Telewest (now Virgin Media). We use the (at the time) free Smoothwall firewall installed on to an old desktop PC that runs in the cupboard under the stairs.
After a year or so, Telewest upgrades their packages and we are treated to a stonkingly-fast 1Mbps connection.
As a slight aside, after tasting the good life of an always-on connection at university, I also upgrade my parents' old dial-up connection first to a 512Kbps BT ADSL service with an Alcatel Speedtouch USB330 modem - the one that looks like a green squid. Later I upgrade the connection to 2Mbps ADSL service from Nildram (now TalkTalk) using a Netgear DG834 WiFi router.
The Graduate Life
It's now the early naughties and I graduate from university, get a job and move into a house in London with some fellow graduates from work. In a lot of ways it is like being at uni still: living with friends, partying quite a lot, only we have more money, which naturally I spend mainly on technology.
Internet now comes through a BT landline and Bulldog DSL's (now also TalkTalk) Primetime 2000 service. This is first-generation ADSL in the UK, most ISPs are offering a constant bandwidth service, but Bulldog DSL have the clever idea of of throttling during the day (leaving bandwidth in their network for business customers) and lifting the throttling in the evenings and at weekends. So in off-peak hours we have 2Mbps. I use a Netgear DG814 router and separate WiFi WG602 access point.
It's about 2005 now and an upstart arrives on the scene: Be Unlimited (now part of Sky). They are one of the first ISPs to unbundle (install their own kit) at the BT exchanges and so are able to offer an ADSL2+ service (at this time BT only offers ADSL) that runs 'as fast as your line can take'. I have a new BT phone line installed for this exciting adventure and, satisfyingly, my Be connection comes online at about 14Mbps downstream - finally faster than my old JANET connection from uni halls days. Let's not mention the upload, however. The modem/router is a Be-provided Speedtouch model.
Early Adulthood
We all grow up eventually, and after a while I get tired of the graduate lifestyle and I move away from London, now living with my now-wife in a rental house. I stick with Be Unlimited, which now manages 18Mbps download thanks to a shorter phone line to the exchange than I had in London.
Adulthood++; Property Ownership
Renting gets boring and thanks to a usefully-timed minor skirmish in the global credit markets, house prices take a bit of a nosedive meaning it's a good time to get onto the property ladder. My wife and I move into a property further out of town than our rental.. which totally does for our Internet.
Our BT phone line and Be Unlimited connection can now only manage a paltry 5.5Mbps - but it's all we can get. I still use the Be-provided Speedtouch router, but put it into bridge mode and run my own firewall, firstly an OpenBSD PC with a pf-based firewall and later an Astaro Security Gateway (now Sophos UTM).
Fibre to the Cabinet - and a new ISP
In about 2010 I am involved in getting Internet connections to seasonal events so I'm searching for an ISP that offers month-long contracts. This search leads me to Andrews & Arnold. They are just about the only ISP to offer month-long contracts so I use them for some events accordingly. And boy, do I like what I see: Internet for techies, an IRC-based support line, a website that explains things in actual technical detail! THESE ARE MY PEOPLE.
At about the same time, BT rolls out 'fibre' broadband in the guise of its 'Fibre to the Cabinet' VDSL2 service. It takes a while to be available but in early 2012 I make the switch from Be's ADSL2+ service to FTTC from Andrews & Arnold (still on the same BT landline.)
My phone line is on the long side (c. 750m from the FTTC cabinet), but my shiny new FTTC connection still manages a whopping 52Mbps downstream and about 8Mbps upstream. I use the A&A-provided Speedtouch router for simplicity.
And that's how things stay for over a decade.
Being in a suburb equipped with FTTC, new developments in technology such as G.Fast or fibre to the premises pass our area by, they're understandably deployed to places that don't have anything near the 50Mbps that I can get. I believe there's a Virgin Media cable in the street but I'm not interested after hearing accounts of reliability issues from friends and family. I am happy enough with my 52Mbps, which, after all, isn't too bad, and I assume that someone will install fibre into the street eventually.
I do move from the A&A-provided Speedtouch router to a separate Draytek Vigor130 VDSL modem and a Mikrotik RB3011 router/firewall. WiFi kit goes from Mikrotik to UniFi.
Fibre to the Future
One day in early 2022 some roadwork signs appear on the street - it looks like my wait is soon to be over because CityFibre are in the area! True enough, they dig up the place and install toby boxes outside everyone's house.
Just as I'm waiting for CityFibre's service to be available to order, surprisingly, I spot an OpenReach crew in the street. CityFibre have only just finished their build, but for some reason OpenReach have decided to overbuild my street with their own fibre. I mean, I wait a decade for a fibre and two come along at once!? What's more, A&A start to offer CityFibre lines as well as OpenReach lines, so I have a free choice between the two networks.
I choose OpenReach, because they're first to make their service available for ordering. I also conclude they are more likely to use the existing BT duct from the street to my property - my house is set back from the road with an underground phone line.
As it happens, my OpenReach installation is very, very slow and involves such things as blocked ducts, multiple civils visits to dig a new duct up my driveway and finally a long delay when they find that, ironically, CityFibre has installed their ducts in the street on top of the OpenReach ones, making it very hard to connect up my new driveway duct. But, six months after I place the order (and thanks to some helpful chasing by the team at A&A) I am finally connected.
My FTTP speed? 1000Mbps down, 115Mbps up - the highest OpenReach offer.
That'll do nicely.
Of course, CityFibre offers a 1000Mbps duplex package and, because they've deployed their network on XG-PON technology (compared to OpenReach's GPON), can run up to 2.5Gbps symmetrical. That's all a lot faster than my OpenReach connection can do. So I wonder, did I make the right choice? CityFibre's toby box is sitting there ready.. maybe one day..
State of Play
With my house now literally seeing the light (fibre optically speaking), for the first time in my life I no longer have a BT landline... almost.
I have retained a 40Mbps FTTC service from Plusnet as a backup to the fibre, which is delivered over an OpenReach copper connection - yup, a landline. For now anyway. Maybe one day I'll swap this for a CityFibre connection.
Finally, a nice bit of circumstance: Thanks to the way OpenReach happened to have installed the fibre in the street, and thanks to their installation of the new duct up the driveway, my fibre and copper connections go different directions up the street away from my property. Except for a c. 20m stretch of pavement where they share a duct (sigh), I have lucked out on physically diverse routes for my main and backup connections.
How I do the failover between the main (fibre) and backup (copper, FTTC) connections will be the subject of another blog post.
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