Anyone used Communityfibre for broadband?

Serenajoy

Looking for a new broadband provider and used MSE as always, and was going to go for the Virgin ultrafast offer. However when I was trying to find out about out Wi-Fi extenders I saw an advert for communityfibre. The speed seem extraordinary and it is cheaper than other providers and claims to be London's fastest fibre provider.

I'm confused as I've never heard of them before and they are not on the MSE website so any feedback comments or reviews would be very gratefully received. Thank you!

JJ_Egan

Limited areas covered so far .Check your post code on the site .

seatbeltnoob

Just joined today. £22.50 for 150megs, can't go wrong with that. Speed is a little above what I paid for. Normally with copper wires there is a loss. You pay for 80/20 but you get about 76/17 if you're lucky.

I got above 150/150 on my line.

There's things I like and dislike about this company.
Likes, cheap, quick install within 5 days of ordering, good equipment, no need for phone and it works out cheaper than the fastest fttc fibre.

Dislikes
London centric, they just concentrating on the capital where their investment goes furthest.
Poor support, there is no customer login section to review your billing. Everything is done over email which I find astonishing for a tech company.

Caveat emptor, the trust pilot page has glowing reviews but it's posted by users who are encouraged to post after the engineer just installed the Internet. If they mess up an install, the customer isn't going to be invited to share their experience on trust pilot. 

Sefi

I started using them recently.
Main plus points over the VirginMedia connections in this area are speed (especially upload speed)

Main drawback is probably their TV services - but I do more and more over the Internet, iPlayer, etc. so I don't think I will miss the Virgin TIVO much.

My other big reason for going with them is cost, and because I want competition to Virgin and the other providers - who tend to try and lock-in their customers and then ramp up the prices.

The Community Fibre engineers came and fitted the equipment only a few days after I contracted with them - though it could perhaps have been run more tidily, instead of separately from the BT copper line from the telegraph pole... and for HSE reasons they drilled an additional hole to anchor their ladder. They plugged that hole afterwards, but if everyone who wants to put a ladder up a house is going to do that then our houses are going to end up like Swiss cheese.

The installation is working well - I haven't needed to get any support from them, so I can't vouch for how good their support may or may not be.

I went with only the 300Mbps service.  Their router has just one free Ethernet port.

I am getting very fast speeds if I plug my (old Win7) laptop Ethernet direct into their router:

DSL speedreports test graphs rise to above 250 Mbps up and down and the digital readout is 310/327 Mbps Down/Up.

Slightly slower speeds using WiFi.. An iPad Mini 4 clocking over 200 Mbps up and down.

But being a perfectionist I wanted something faster than WiFi (to an old laptop) so I tried my Devolo 1200 Powerline gear to feed Ethernet to the laptop and that is when I ran into a problem. The inter-Devolo speed in this small semi-detached house is over 700 Mbps. Connecting to the Devolo WiFi is about as fast as connecting directly to the Community Fibre router. But connecting my Win7 laptop to the Devolo, using the same Ethernet cable as the direct connection to router, the laptop shows a regular interruption with the Ethernet connection every 10 seconds. Looks like an incompatibility between old laptop and Devolo, or some software problem on the laptop.

So in short - it works well but if you are obsessive then it may cause you to find problems in your own equipment that you didn't know you had!

The real benefit of high speed comes when you have multiple users all sharing the bandwidth at once, and it is only then that their even faster services (e.g. 1Gbps) would be required.