How Can I Extend Fibre ?

loobylou066

Hi everyone,

We have full fibre to our property, it comes into the property to an office room & is great, & can also be accessed by the room above. However due to the layout of the property (it is a granite barn conversion) we cannot access it anywhere else in the home. Up until now we have paid for 2 lines into the home, one for the office & one for the rest of the house. The one in the main house now being copper, & the office one full fibre. We would like to upgrade the copper one to full fibre but BT says we cannot, as we already have fibre to the property. So it seems we could have as many copper lines as we wanted, but only one fibre ?  
We have tried a mesh system (eero) but it wasn't working we think due to granite walls & the distance involved. Can anyone help with any suggestions, it seems crazy that we are paying for full fibre but cannot access it in the majority of the property.
Many thanks in advance.

QrizB

Is the office room part of the same structure as the rest of the house? If it is, it should be simple enough to run Cat 6 cables from the fibre hub to as many other places in your home as you want them, and attach wireless APs to the end of them.

If the office is detatched, it could get more complicated.

loobylou066

hi there, many thanks for coming back to me so quickly. it is all the same structure, sort of, it is two barns, at right angles to each other, joined together by a conservatory. The office being in one barn, & the rest of the house, the other. We did think about cables but I suppose ruled it out as it would involve quite a distance, up some stairs & through into the conservatory , it would have to go through a door as the walls are granite, & would also be rather in your face. It may be our only option. Will give it some thought, thank you.

400ixl

Are they all on the same electric consumer unit?

If so you could try Powerline adapters which have WIFI adapters in them. They can data at high speeds these days so you would get the benefit of full fibre as well.

Essentially you plug one into a socket near the router (doesn't need to be a wifi one for this part) and wire the router into it.

Then in each dead spot area you plug in another one with the wifi repeater to create the wireless network. If a device is close to the socket you plug the powerline adapter into you can hard wire to it as well if you want.

You could buy a couple and then plug one into the router and then try the other in different parts of the house to check it works. You can also then see how far the signal goes to find where you would want another one, move it to there and see how far it goes again. That will then tell you how many you need to mesh the whole house. Always good to have a spare one as they can fail over time and may not be made anymore.

QrizB

loobylou066 said:

hi there, many thanks for coming back to me so quickly. it is all the same structure, sort of, it is two barns, at right angles to each other, joined together by a conservatory. The office being in one barn, & the rest of the house, the other. We did think about cables but I suppose ruled it out as it would involve quite a distance, up some stairs & through into the conservatory , it would have to go through a door as the walls are granite, & would also be rather in your face. It may be our only option. Will give it some thought, thank you.

You could run the cable(s) outdoors, under the eaves where they won't be conspicuous. Or through the loft space (if you have one).
Unlike mesh networking or powerline adapters, it's pretty much guaranteed to work. The maximum segment length (longest single connection) for a gigabit Ethernet cable is 100 metres, which should be enough for most houses short of a stately home.

Eldi_Dos

@loobylou066
Have you spoke to BT Business rather than residential about getting another line to your office/house.

Veteransaver

Go with powerlines if it's on all on the same electricity supply/phase.
They are fairly reliable (though get the fastest ones you can afford). You can get ones with built in WiFi I believe, though you can also use any old router and configure it as an access point only (there's just a setting in the router admin page to disable DCHP).
Then you just connect one powerline to the fibre router, and the other powerline to the other router with the ethernet cable.
I'm surprised mesh didn't work though, was it a two unit or three unit version, and did you ensure they weren't spaced too far apart. The second unit needs to be close enough to pick up a decent signal from the first unit which will be plugged in to the router but not too close so that the signal doesn't stretch far enough into the second area of the house. So 3 units placed properly.should work ok even in a large house.

loobylou066

Thanks everyone for your help. Will speak to BT again I think. We had 3 eero units, connected the second one no issue, but the third just wouldn't connect, kept saying it was too far away, but it was pretty close, at that rate we would need one in every room ! lol. Will maybe try again with the power lines.

junglist_matty

Don't bother with powerline adapters, unless they are on the same circuit (which is usually not the case) they never work reliably.

What you want is a mesh network, get a Netgear orbi setup ... you can use one orbi as your router (in place of your BT home hub), and get a long ethernet cable to connect the satellite orbi.... I run an ethernet cable through the external wall (next to where the fibre cable enters the house), up outside of house, into loft, across to the other side of the house, back down the outside wall, and back into the house plugged into satellite.... Works perfect, never had to reconfigure and works fine between power cuts. Orbi is not cheap, but it's the best home solution.... And save cash buying the older gen equipment, you really don't need WiFi6 for domestic use.... I have orbi RBK50 with a fibre500 connection.

Vannaa

junglist_matty said:

Don't bother with powerline adapters, unless they are on the same circuit (which is usually not the case) they never work reliably.

What you want is a mesh network,

I second this, used powerline adapters in my last rented home. They weren't very good and I sold them for a big loss. Currently using a mesh network and that's much better

Chickereeeee

I use powerline (TP-Link) adapters, and they work fine. Even out to my detached garage, which has its own CU. So could we worth a shot trying a couple.

You will NOT get full fibre speeds though - a few hundred megs is good enough for impost purposes.