Switching to full fibre

DietIrnBru

What has been the experience of those making a switch to full fibre?

I'm currently with Plusnet - when looking at the offers I was content with one of their offerings for full fibre - I'm currently with them for a broadband package.

My eyebrow has been raised firstly by their charging £7 for a new route to be sent - then a need to have an openreach engineer attend to install the new wires requried - when they mention drilling etc - I get worrried.

Has anyone had fibre installed and how much destruction we talking?

diystarter7

Hi

no destruction whatsoever. one of our kids lives on our road and got fiber - as our bt wires are on telegraph poles it was run along that -  his internet is much faster than our bb.  At times they run the cable over the drive against a wall but as ours are on t/poles run overhead and inside -

Thanks

littleboo

You need to consider that sooner or later, you will be going to full fibre anyway, there is a choice now, but there wont always be.

brewerdave

Bear in mind that Plusnet are not offering a phone service currently with full fibre - and offer no way of keeping your phone number if it's important (other than switching you to the parent company as in BT Retail). You can't port the number to a VOIP provider.

matelodave

Vodafone can offer a phone connection with their full fibre offering, or they could and do where I live as that's what I've got because we find it convenient, however it's likely that when my renewal come up in a years time, I'll probably not bother and just take the broadband option without a phone.

I guess that whether an ISP decides to offer a phone is really a commercial decision based on the general uptake of phone services. If the vast majority of people are happy to give up their home phone in favour of using a mobile, then ISP's aren't going to set up the infrastructure for the relatively few people who do want to retain a fixed phone and it seems that Plusnet aren't going to.

Regarding the installation of fibre, the amount of disruption if any will depend on whether it comes overhead or under ground and how demanding you are regarding siting of the fibre entry point and location of the ONT.

Whichever way it comes, the fibre has to enter the house and be terminated into a mains powered optical network terminal which has to be fixed to the wall and the router is connected to the ONT using an ethernet cable. 

Mine come via an overhead line, is stapled to the outside wall and the fibre comes through the wall directly into the ONT. It took the engineer about an hour an a half and most of that was shinning up the pole to run the cable.

AFAIK, if it has to be run underground, then a optical splice box has to be fixed to the outside wall so they can splice the internal fibre to the external cable and then the internal fibre will enter through a small hole in the wall and be run to the ONT.

Installing and splicing optical fibres isn't a DIY job and needs to be done by someone with specialised equipment and the knowledge and training to use it.

TBH £7 for a new router is cheap compared to the cost and amount of work involved to install the fibre cable and ONT

PennyForThem_2

Concurr with #matelodave  -  I am with plusnet and interupted an existing FTTC contract to install FTTP as soon as it became available.  Telegraph poles supply my property too - so OR engineer has to skinny up it to install and string the fibreglass cable to your property.

On arrival OR Engineer discusses with you options for installation.  Fibreglass cannot do corners in same way as copper - it has to curve.  So you may need to think how it comes into your house - and yes, drilling a hole is what it takes - and then how the cable copes with any sharp corners within your house.

It took a morning to install - so not quick, but the result was a neat ingress box on external wall, and a neat little round white plastic hub where I wanted the modem/hub to be.  And yes you definitely need a double plug or I suppose a 4 plug extension lead.

No extra charges from Plusnet but make sure they send you the correct, latest hub - old ones do not work (as well - limited download).

Wellard_Mann

I recently switched from Virgin to BT FTTP.  The physical process has been described by others and took about 90 minutes with a tiny hole drilled through the wall – connecting from a telegraph pole. There is no destruction, which was one of the OP's concerns. The ONT and BT hub are downstairs in the corner of the front room. You need to ensure you have power points nearby; I have a four-point board connected to the socket. I took a landline option, because I have a personal alarm unit, which plugs into the hub, and was able to port my number. Included in the BT package was a digital VOIP phone handset which I’ll probably never use but which I have connected.

My Virgin hub was upstairs. Many years ago the Virgin guy drilled through the wall upstairs and did a cable run to the back bedroom/home office. Openreach aims to minimise the time their people work at height, very reasonably, so their default is to connect from the pole to the house at the shortest point and let gravity do its thing to drop the fibre to ground level. If you particularly want the hub upstairs you could of course ask the engineer.

The process for switching between a non Openreach supplier (Virgin) and Openreach is inherently more complicated, compounded by Virgin’s awful (IMO) customer service but that’s another subject.

It all worked well in the end and I’m very happy with the product so far.

armith

My current (copper) line is underground - presumably from the BT "manhole" cover on the pavement just outside my house. It emerges in the hall, on an inside wall. This is great because it's the middle of the house (long thin bungalow). Do Openreach feed the new fibre cables down these existing ducts - or is it always a new line in a new trench/overhead?

The other thing is that I've got an option to go with either Openreach or a local company (Quantum/Upp) that has been digging up the road and laying miles of pink cable. They (Quantum/Upp) say they can't supply my house yet because they don't have permission from National Grid to use the pole. Do local suppliers generally have to go overhead to feed into people's houses then?

Ideally I'd like the connection to use the existing duct so there's no disruption at all.

iniltous

Chances are your existing cable , not least because it first appears inside the property ( rather than on the outside wall ) will be a buried armoured cable ( no duct ) .
If this is the case , OR would excavate from the ‘jointbox’ that houses the fibre CBT to your home , or intercept an existing duct or new duct that runs between boxes and ‘spur’ off it the curtilage of your home , then dig a cable to your house wall.
If Alt Net wants to use the power company poles, that’s upto them , but the DNO ( distribution network operator ) isn’t like Openreach who have to make access to their poles available to the competition, the DNO can say No if they want. 

peteh1

matelodave said:

Vodafone can offer a phone connection with their full fibre offering, or they could and do where I live as that's what I've got because we find it convenient, however it's likely that when my renewal come up in a years time, I'll probably not bother and just take the broadband option without a phone.

I guess that whether an ISP decides to offer a phone is really a commercial decision based on the general uptake of phone services. If the vast majority of people are happy to give up their home phone in favour of using a mobile, then ISP's aren't going to set up the infrastructure for the relatively few people who do want to retain a fixed phone and it seems that Plusnet aren't going to.

Regarding the installation of fibre, the amount of disruption if any will depend on whether it comes overhead or under ground and how demanding you are regarding siting of the fibre entry point and location of the ONT.

Whichever way it comes, the fibre has to enter the house and be terminated into a mains powered optical network terminal which has to be fixed to the wall and the router is connected to the ONT using an ethernet cable. 

Mine come via an overhead line, is stapled to the outside wall and the fibre comes through the wall directly into the ONT. It took the engineer about an hour an a half and most of that was shinning up the pole to run the cable.

AFAIK, if it has to be run underground, then a optical splice box has to be fixed to the outside wall so they can splice the internal fibre to the external cable and then the internal fibre will enter through a small hole in the wall and be run to the ONT.

Installing and splicing optical fibres isn't a DIY job and needs to be done by someone with specialised equipment and the knowledge and training to use it.

TBH £7 for a new router is cheap compared to the cost and amount of work involved to install the fibre cable and ONT

Hi, Thinking of joining VF FTTP but want to keep my existing phone number, is that what you did andif so did it go as expected (no delays or comms issues)

thanks

matelodave

Yes, I've still got my existing phone number.

I previously had BT FTTP with BT's Digital Voice but the cost was getting silly - they wanted me to renew for around £60 for 76 Mbit/s and 700 phone minutes a month and wouldn't haggle.

Whereas with VF I get around 95Mbit/s plus unlimited calls for £32.80, soon to go up with the CPI increase in April.

The VF router arrived a couple of days before switchover date and I plugged it in and changed the SSID and Password to be the same as the BT router.

On the appointed day (which I chose when I placed the order with VF) the BT service had been switched off sometime before I woke up (router showing orange, instead of blue).

I pulled all the plugs out of the BT router and poked them into the appropriate sockets on the VF router (including the phone) and everything just started working.

No faffing with swapping SSID or passwords on any of my devices and the phone made phone calls. I even get Calling Line Identification, which the BT Digital Voice couldn't provide although the BT service did allow two simultaneous phone calls on the one number which was handy sometimes.

That was 12 months ago and it's been rock solid ever since. I dont know how good, bad or indifferent VF customer service is coz I've never had to contact them.

That was my experience, others may have a different opinion.