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Vans everywhere this morning reeling out huge amounts of cables under the paths in our street – a grunt from the workman confirms that we have ‘proper’ fibre now.
Anybody up to speed on how we go about getting signed up for it as it becomes available? Is it only BT that will offer it or will it be available for all providers? We’re with VF at the mo and no mention of it on their web checker.
We’ve two of us working from home and could use the upgrade! There appears to be a number of small rectangular boxes being put in as well rather than the larger cabinets for the existing supplies – are these for connection or just entry points or something for maintenance?
We’re about 500m away at the moment from a cabinet with wire from there.
Any guidance appreciated!
I suspect it’s YouFibre. Be careful if you contact them though, they won’t stop calling/knocking on your door once they have your details despite any requests to stop…. Use false details to see if they are rolling out in your area. They are offering 1Gb to the home though so it’s fast…..
CityFibre is currently only available via Vodafone broadband.
I pre-registered with them as soon as they started digging up Cambridge, all I got was a single email saying sign up with Vodafone...
city fibre (GCU) on behalf of vodafone have dug up all our streets here, not done the best job reinstating the paths to their former glory. After a couple of winters recon we'll be left with the pavement and road crossings in a shit state thanks city fibre 👍
Funnily enough I have just had my line upgraded today to full FTTP. I’m with Zen and Openreach came out to fit the cable. They’ve been digging up the pavements for the past e months or so and I’ve been waiting with baited breath to actually be able to order it.
I went for Zen’s 300Mb/s which gives an absolute bottom line minimum speed guarantee of 150Mb/s. I’ve speed tested it and it’s giving around 250-280Mb/s and in real use it’s quick. Very very quick. Web pages load instantly and a 9Gb game download took less than 5 mins.
Well worth it imo. The actual install took a fair while - 3 hours or so - but nice and tidy.
I had Sky Ultrafast Plus installed today. 445MB/s down, 55MB up. Openreach installed via the telephone poles, ran a fibre instead of the existing wire.
Edit, just run it again, 496 down, 64 up, 3ms ping. Very impressive.
Toob here in Southampton. Set up by ex VF guys.
900 up and down for £25 a month. Nice [people to deal with too, at least now while they are small
Uhmm, so is there an easy way of finding out which of these companies is in my street - a central database so soemthing?
Google? But I imagine they'll be telling you pretty soon! We had the name of our lot on the works barriers.
This was my similar thread from last week, might be worth a spin through, there were some interesting posts from a few industry types.
https://singletrackmag.com/forum/topic/fibre-broadband-present-future/
Great thanks - hadn't seen that thread
It seems mad to me that they'd go to all that trouble and then not stick a leaflet through your door to try and sell it to you when it was ready.
I had a word with the dog - he promised not to eat that leaflet...
We just went from Plusnet to a 'proper' FTTP connection with Zen, much faster and nmore stable, ideal for WFH.
Another bonus is that you can choose exactly where they put the cable so I got them to bring it in in my upstairs study/office so I can plug my gaming PC and work laptop straight into the router via a switch I've mounted underneath my desk.
The router Zen use has mesh built in as well so it's fairly easy to extend the range.
I enjoyed my time with Zen as an ISP. They were good to deal with and I was sorry to leave.
Web pages load instantly
I remember when they did that at 5MB/s. I'm on 70MB/s now and they take forever to load, maybe if they stopped optimising their search engine profiles (which just break search engines) and started optimising their actual UX (or stopped filling every ****ing page with trackers) we wouldn't need half as much grunt.
Yes, I know "progress".
CityFibre is currently only available via Vodafone broadband.
I pre-registered with them as soon as they started digging up Cambridge, all I got was a single email saying sign up with Vodafone…
City fibre is available through Zen on the South Coast. I have it, it was tricky to find out who was digging up the road, could have done with the hard sell!
Flawless 900mbps for £40 a month. Can't fault it to date.
CityFibre is currently only available via Vodafone broadband.
I pre-registered with them as soon as they started digging up Cambridge, all I got was a single email saying sign up with Vodafone…
City fibre is available through Zen on the South Coast. I have it, it was tricky to find out who was digging up the road, could have done with the hard sell!
Flawless 900mbps for £40 a month. Can't fault it to date.
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will
FTTPanything faster tham 0.5 mbps ever come to the countryside?
I enjoyed my time with Zen as an ISP. They were good to deal with and I was sorry to leave.
They came heartily recommended, they were certainly not the cheapest so hopefully that praise was well justified, all good so far.
Are you sure the external network is your problem?
We can both be on Teams video calls, plus a child on Fortnite and one on Roblox on 70Mb Openreach FTTC all running fine.
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
In West berks gigaclear had a contract to do every rural property with full fibre. As a result I get a steady 300Mbs up and down 😄 it's great! Google rural broadband and your local authority.
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
Our village association has been negotiating with Openreach and has agreement - should happen in the next year or so.
The broadband upgrade scheme CAN be fully funded for FREE*
In order for this to be free, we need 53% of properties formally commit to taking an upgraded package for a minimum 12 month contract period (which we will hit if those who expressed interest take up the offer).
To recap, this is funded by the government’s Gigabit voucher scheme. By signing up, OpenReach will claim on behalf of each property, a voucher worth £1500 (or £3500 for those running a business/charity from the home). (The top-up voucher by Bucks CC has now expired). This upgrade will refresh our entire fixed telephone network within the village and provide the ability to receive internet at up to 1000Mbps, for all residents, regardless of their distance from the cabinet.
After some back and forth (I won’t bore you with the detail), we have at last received a final quotation (an eye-watering £292,389) from Openreach to install Fibre Broadband!
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
Yes, there’s a big push for it some areas up here already have it. Meantime I’m still waiting on it reaching my urban area.
Damn you urban dwellers and your fancy broadband. Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
Gigaclear are busy digging up round Nailsworth / Horsley at the moment, and have dug up most of the villages from there to Chippenham and beyond...
In West berks gigaclear had a contract to do every rural property with full fibre
Yeah they had a contract for Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. Sadly they realised after being over two years late the last 2,400+ properties were no longer financially viable. So they were taken out of the rollout plan. Apparently Herefordshire council are really unhappy about it, so that's okay then 😉
We went SIM broadband 18 months ago. I'd still like full fibre but looks like we'll be waiting for the govt 'levelling up' cash due Feb 22. I feel about as confident as that as I do about Gigaclear meeting any promises!
AirBand here are very popular. They have lots of rural solutions and are moving away from microwave stuff to fibre to the property so we're hopeful they might get to us eventually.
Flawless 900mbps for £40 a month
dammit. Swish are pulling a fast one, then. £75 a month for 900, £45 for 400. 6 months free and free connection though, and hopefully they'll work on their pricing in the meantime.
I was going to try 400, but silly not to try 900 if it's free anyway, eh?
City fibre is available through Zen on the South Coast. I have it, it was tricky to find out who was digging up the road, could have done with the hard sell!
Flawless 900mbps for £40 a month. Can’t fault it to date.
CityFibre has been installed in the Harrogate area. Apparently, 900mbps for us is £62 at launch - maybe the prices will become more competitive when more people sign up.
But can't it yet. They dug the pavements up months ago but the Fibre cables remain dormant.
CityFibre in the Harrogate area is scheduled to go live for orders in mid-December. There are a few companies offering service, it's not just Vodafone at the moment.
If you sign up to Vodafone on one of their cheaper broadband contracts you'll get a free upgrade when CityFibre turn the network on. Not sure there's any benefit to going faster than 100mbit to be honest, though, unless your whole house has a wired network and everyone streams 4K.
Putting new cable down doesn't mean the rest of the work is getting done. Maybe that's why they're not advertising it, yet?
Putting new cable down doesn’t mean the rest of the work is getting done.
This. It won't show up until it's all connected up and ready to go.
If it's OpenReach FTTP then you can check the list of available unbundled (i.e. not BT) providers here.
CityFibre in the Harrogate area is scheduled to go live for orders in mid-December. There are a few companies offering service, it’s not just Vodafone at the moment.
I can't Vodafone to my house currently - CityFibre for me is offered by Boundless Networks.
The 150mbps package is £32/month so will probably go for that. As you say, looks like it's going live in December.
Will FTTP ever come to the countryside?
Are you in B4RN's catchment area?
Uhmm, so is there an easy way of finding out which of these companies is in my street – a central database so soemthing?
They'll put fliers through your letterbox when the services are available. When you sign up they should need to lay a new fibre cable from the pavement to your house.
My FTTP (with Zen through CityFibre) getting installed tomorrow 🙂 I think my Plusnet connection realised this and was playing up yesterday evening 🤣
Fastershire (upgrade plan for Herefordshire) went past our place a couple of years ago, we have FTTP and are 2 miles out of town (and 10+miles away from any city). 75mbps and pretty stable but BT had the monopoly on the line for the first two years. Was more than fast enough but we're getting to the limits now with streaming HD and above quality so might upgrade for the right price.
Openreach did the install, couple of hours to fit the boxes and test the line, but only once the infrastructure was in place. Ironically one of my mates who lives in Hereford still hasnt had his place connected to fibre yet.
we're only now seeing deals and any kind of competition for our money, since the cap has been lifted on suppliers who can use the network so this may be an issue. Google is your friend, search for FTTP in your postcode will give you a couple of starters, but you'll still probably get a run round the houses on phone calls, BT couldn't find us on the network to set up the contract even though they we're the ones dealing with Openreach.
Gigaclear are busy digging up round Nailsworth / Horsley at the moment, and have dug up most of the villages from there to Chippenham and beyond…
jon_n seen that, sadly no plans for doing this to Burleigh so we’re left with 2km of copper to the cabinet. Keep registering interest with gigaclear/fastershire and no progress. Spoke to the openreach chap a while back and he said that the fewer the houses in a settlement/greater the distance from existing trunking/geographical issues like Minch common means we are way down the list. FTTC has helped but the long copper slows it down and makes it unstable in a breeze. Got bored of telling OR about the trees on the line/fallen cable areas etc. Still we have 4G 👍
I got heavily involved with B4RN (under the name B4SH - Broadband for Surrey Hills). Did a lot of digging and cable laying. But now have 1G up and down. A damn site better than BT's 3.5Mb on a good day.
The problem with a lot of the big providers is they are legally allowed to advertise an average speed. So they only need to get half the households on a set speed, and they can go to town on selling that speed. Leaving half the network at a loss. Not to mention all this BS on TV about "WIFI reliability or guaranteed speed". Wifi speed has nothing to do with broadband.
@dickyhepburn : BT/Openreach have a massive project to get rid of all of the existing copper cable at some point as it's past it and they want the entire network running on fibre, but I think for most people it's way off 🙁
If you are on the side of the valley and have line of sight to someone that does have FTTP, then you can setup a point to point wireless connection fairly easily. Other than that, it's 4G or something like Starlink as that becomes more mainstream..
Not sure there’s any benefit to going faster than 100mbit to be honest, though, unless your whole house has a wired network and everyone streams 4K.
Depends what you do on it.
Pre-pandemic the people WFH were mostly just expecting to send Microsoft office type files back and forth. Suddenly everyone's working from home and that will include everything from TV production (a days footage for an episode could be 1TB without even trying) to engineers needing to access 3D modelling.
Might only be a single percent of the workforce, but it's gone from a single percent of the WFH minority to a single percent of everyone expecting to be able to do it at least occasionally.
Even if you just play games, Call of Duty was 200GB earlier this year before they shrunk/compressed it. Downloading that from scratch takes a while, a new game a month and that starts to become frustrating.
That and in the scheme of things it's not that expensive, so why not have fast downloads and ping times that compete with monitor refresh rates!
Not sure there’s any benefit to going faster than 100mbit to be honest, though,
(a days footage for an episode could be 1TB without even trying)
And bear in mind that the A in traditional ADSL means "asynchronous" - it might be 100Mbps download but it'll be an order of magnitude less for upload speeds. My Virgin cable internet is 200 down but only 20 up.
Fibre is still somewhat throttled on the upload side. My new FTTP is 300 down and 50 up. Still plenty though and substantially faster up than I had before.
The other major benefit to consider is that FTTP is by definition 1:1 contention whereas ADSL could have a contention ratio of 50:1 thus it could get laggy at peak times.
Only been in a couple of days for me but I am mighty impressed so far. Just got to finish off tidying up the wires and moving switches around as the main router now sits in the living room.
Next up - Sky Glass on Monday 🙂
Fibre is still somewhat throttled on the upload side. My new FTTP is 300 down and 50 up.
That's a BT / Openreach choice, not a limitation of a 'fibre' connection. For some reason they decided to have asynchronous speeds rather than synchronous. Most of the other FTTP infrastructures are the same up/down.
In reality, upload speeds are noticed much less than download - so unless you are uploading massive files it doesn't make a lot of difference - and 50Mbit upload is plenty quick enough for most people.
I think it took a year between it being installed in my street, and it being available to buy. When it finally arrived we upgraded, and it's far more reliable. The landline now runs through the router so no copper at all for us.
We sacked off nearly 10yrs with virgin media earlier this year. Went with them originally because they own their own hardware, but their gear just couldnt keep up with the massive increase in load of homeworking. It's common on our neighbourhood Whatsapp: "is VM down again?".
Went to BT fiber to the property (fttp) and its been faultless.
Weve got two of us simultaneously doing work with big datasets (crashing 10gb files together) as well as music streaming and haven't bottle necked a 100mb symmetrical so can't imagine what people are using the big boy deals for.
Fwiw. My understanding is BT is delivered off the pole (I know ours is) so if they are digging up the road it's virgin or some other new player.
The stuff in my street is / has been run in via man hole covers under the footpaths. Didn't see any major digging going on. There's not been any cable services like Virgin available at all so far. So it could be a year before its switched on!
The other major benefit to consider is that FTTP is by definition 1:1 contention whereas ADSL could have a contention ratio of 50:1 thus it could get laggy at peak times.
There'll still be contention on a fibre connection though? Backhaul can't be unlimited? Maybe I don't understand what you mean by the ratios!
Of course there is contention on the backhaul - https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/12/why-buying-gigabit-broadband-doesnt-always-deliver-1gbps.html
And although the fundamental technology is more reliable you are still dependent on your ISP. I moved to Sky FTTP last year and their reliability has been poor, 2 multi hour outages in the middle of the working day. A worse record than my previous copper connection.