“Many non-techie people don’t understand how phone line-based broadband works”
At the CST Group office, we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to connectivity. The building sits midway between two BT telephone exchanges and so we had fibre installed to both of them, entering our building at different points for proper resilience and redundancy. In addition, there’s also fibre from Virgin and other providers either entering into our building or passing right by it. The local infrastructure maps look like knitted spaghetti.
The result of this plethora of connectivity options is that we’re able to get internet connections from several different providers and telcos, chopping and changing to work around planned maintenance windows and unplanned outages. It’s wonderful.
Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for me at home. Until recently, my only options were a fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) service via Openreach and the various ISPs that use its infrastructure, or alternatively Virgin Media, which uses its own infrastructure. In other parts of the country you’ll have different providers, but it usually boils down to a couple of providers at most, with the most common being Openreach. However, having said that, many non-techie people don’t understand the way that telephone line-based broadband works, assuming that Sky, TalkTalk or whoever is responsible for the wires that come into their house, and so they think they have lots of separate options – but unfortunately broadband infrastructure doesn’t work like that.
Back to my choices. You probably won’t remember this, but about ten years ago I wrote in an RWC column about
