KC connects first homes to its fibre network
Wednesday 21 September 2011 10:22:29 by Andrew Ferguson

For people who have only every used ADSL for broadband and never been exposed to faster business quality services, the step up to a full fibre to the home connection will be very surprising. The latest people to experience this joy appear to be residents who have signed up for the KC fibre trial in Woodmansey.

Kingston Communications has two forms of fibre roll-out, FTTK (Fibre to the Kerb akin to FTTC) and Fibre to the Home (FTTH), the former offering up to 40Mbps and the later up to 100Mbps speeds. The big advantage of FTTH being that the fibre will provide a stable connection speed with any throughput variation down to congestion rather than limits of the 'last mile' connection.

"I went on iPlayer last night and it seemed to load up a lot quicker and YouTube is a lot better.

Our internet was really slow before. When I was using iPlayer, I would wait for it to buffer then it would keep stopping through the programme.

It took a couple of hours to download a music album."

Comments from Abigail in Woodmansey on the new 100Mbps fibre service

The comments from Abigail on The Hull and East Riding website are interesting, since generally iPlayer and YouTube can already play HD content quickly and smoothly on a reasonable 6Mbps (Mega bits per second) connection. Therefore one can only assume if a connection was taking a couple of hours to download a music album, the ADSL line was one of the longest and thus slowest that KC provided. One minor correction is needed, a full HD movie on the XBox or PS3 movie rental services weighs in at some 8GB and would take a bit longer than 2 minutes to download, more like ten minutes, assuming no contention. Some HD movies from other sources may be faster to download due to a smaller file size, but that is because while they are at HD resolution, the quality of the picture may result in a picture that is barely better than Freeview picture quality.