Map of broadband coverage

Please, anyone, where can I get a map of the UK showing broadband
coverage? BT will tell you whether a particular postcode has coverage
but what I seek is a map showing broadband coverage.

--
Alasdair.

"Alasdair" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Please, anyone, where can I get a map of the UK showing broadband
> coverage? BT will tell you whether a particular postcode has coverage
> but what I seek is a map showing broadband coverage.


If one exists, it might be difficult to interparate as I would expect areas
without xDSL
coverage that would be of intrest would be be ribbons on the outskirts of
telephone
exchanges, rather than homogenious clumps which would be largly uninhabited

--
Graham.
%Profound_observation%

On 12/09/2007 12:49, Alasdair wrote:

> Please, anyone, where can I get a map of the UK showing broadband
> coverage?

Doubt it's got the detail you want, but try
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/maps.php

Alasdair wrote:
> Please, anyone, where can I get a map of the UK showing broadband
> coverage? BT will tell you whether a particular postcode has coverage
> but what I seek is a map showing broadband coverage.
>
Something like this? LLU only though...

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ds...ovider=easynet

--
Abo

In article <fc8nan$799$(E-Mail Removed)>,
"Graham." <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
>
> "Alasdair" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> Please, anyone, where can I get a map of the UK showing broadband
>> coverage? BT will tell you whether a particular postcode has coverage
>> but what I seek is a map showing broadband coverage.
>
> If one exists, it might be difficult to interparate as I would expect areas
> without xDSL
> coverage that would be of intrest would be be ribbons on the outskirts of
> telephone
> exchanges, rather than homogenious clumps which would be largly uninhabited

BT certainly did have maps about 3 to 4 years ago, when they were going
through the process of improving the equipment and also relaxing the
specs for the line parameters over which they were prepared to offer
ADSL. Unfortunately they weren't prepared to release the maps. I suspect
the situation is still the same.

At the time I had made some crude maps for Warwickshire based on some
simple assumptions. I had the boundaries for the all the exchanges
serving the county, and knew the locations of all 86 exchanges. The
most difficult thing to assume was the line length based on
as-the-crow-flies distance. At the time a line length of 7 km was
thought about the limit. For no particularly good reason my map used a
4.8 km as the corresponding as-the-crow-flies estimate. I then coloured
areas green if they were served by an enabled exchange, and were within
4.8 km of it, yellow if similarly within distance of a not then enabled
exchange (remember, at the start of 2004 BT had only ADSL enabled about
half the exchanges). They were coloured red if beyond the 4.8 km.

Not long after making the map, I was shown BT's map based on the (then)
recent estimate they would be able to serve lines with
charactersitics which typically meant up to about 10km of line. Since
they had the line characteristics for just about every line in a
database, and usually some idea of location of the customer end of the
line, they had plotted a detailed map. The one I saw was for the West
Midlands region. As I recall points were green for an end point they
thought within spec, and red for end points beyond it.

The first thing which struck me about BT's map was how much of the area
was neither green nor red. It is, of course, only meaningful to talk
about ADSL coverage for points where there is a BT landline. If there
isn't one there, estimating what characteristics some hypothetical line
might have, were it there, is too far-fetched. I suppose each pixel
covered an area about 100m x 100m. Even in urban areas it it surprising
how often one can be more than 100m from a landline end-point. In the
countryside, it'll be the norm. The other surprising thing is that I,
like Graham, expected to see ribbons of red on the periphery of the
telephone exchange areas, but they weren't there. I expected my map to
be a very crude approximation, but it was nothing like it. What the BT
map showed was almost no pattern at all. There were very tiny splotches
of red all over the place.

Although BT may still have such maps, the real lesson the maps taught me
was that such maps aren't that useful! Whilst I was aware that each line
ought to be treated as an individual case, I wasn't really prepared for
how true that is.

--
Tim Clark

At our last company monthley engineers meeting our office
network administrator came in to give us help on problem
solving, including ADSL.
Most of what he had to say was standard stuff, but one "concept"
he mentioned I hadn't encountered before.

Apparently telephone lines follow a spiral path from the exchange
to the subscriber.

I can sort of see where he got this idea from; lines hardly ever
follow a crows' flightpath, and the further out the subscriber
is the more the extra line-length will be. I didn't find the spiral
concept particularly helpful even as an analogy.

--
Graham.
%Profound_observation%

"Graham." <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:fcc179$o11$(E-Mail Removed)...
>
> At our last company monthley engineers meeting our office
> network administrator came in to give us help on problem
> solving, including ADSL.
> Most of what he had to say was standard stuff, but one "concept"
> he mentioned I hadn't encountered before.
>
> Apparently telephone lines follow a spiral path from the exchange
> to the subscriber.
>
> I can sort of see where he got this idea from; lines hardly ever
> follow a crows' flightpath, and the further out the subscriber
> is the more the extra line-length will be. I didn't find the spiral
> concept particularly helpful even as an analogy.

I can perhaps see where he was coming from but "spiral" is perhaps an odd
description.
Main cables from the exchange tend to follow roads until they reach a
convenient "splitting point" like a nearby village or housing estate, where
they terminate in a cross-connection cabinet - "green box" or Primary
Connection Point (PCP). Local cables will then fan out from the PCP, either
overhead or underground, to Distribution points or poles (DPs) in local
streets.
Individual subscriber lines then fan out from DPs - again overhead or
underground - direct into customers' premises or via subsidiary poles if the
premises are a distance away from the DP.
He's right in a couple of things. The link from exchange to customer is
almost certainly nothing like "how the crow flies", and of course, the more
the cable route bends and twists on its way to the subscriber, following the
geography and demography, the longer the overall line length will be. And
the greater the line loss, of course.

George