Anyone have fibre broadband to the home?

It’s happening in our street finally, yesterday saw the workmen running cable to our actual house. Presumably the fibre cable will run into our house through the same hole the phone cable comes through, which means it’ll terminate at the master socket. So then what? Presumably I have to put my router in the hall like an old-school phone?

I don’t think you will have fibre to your house. You will get a copper coax connection.

That then goes into a hub via the coax.

I could be wrong but that’s how it works with Virgin to our house anyway.

Yeh is it FTTP (fibre to the property)

Or FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) which is the nearest street ‘junction box’ then traditional phone line to your house.

The former would require digging up your drive or garden to lay the cable, so the latter is generally preferable.

The virgin box connections are like Sky satellite cables … that them go into the hub …. the telephone port is next to it.

Son has FTTP at his house, no phone line just fibre with a large BTO box which connects to his router.

It’s all very neat and compact.

The former would require digging up your drive or garden to lay the cable

Our phone cable comes through a tube from the pavement box, the fibre cable is coming through that.

So it looks like the router has to be next to the box which will be in the hall – or we need to run some cabling in the house.

Seems FTTP will need an engineer to visit your house, and fit the connection. So you could ask them to fit the connection and modem somewhere else.

We have FTTP,  same setup as Drac’s pic.

Cable comes from the overhead line running up the road past our house. No driveways were harmed during installation.

Along the wall then into the house and into the bigger of the two boxes in Drac’s pic (RH box is a power supply, so will need mains nearby).

I’ve just poked a cat6 cable through a wall into a different room from that box to my router, job jobbed.

That’s going to be a PITA in our house. Three floors, so router ought to be in the middle. Cable could come up the wall outside to the middle floor but that’s the bathroom, and there’s not really a neat way to route it to somewhere decent. Hmm.

I wonder if you can use powerline to connect the box to the router?

We have fibre to the house – fortunate that we live next to a ginnel where the fibre runs so they just took a spur off and routed it around the side of the house. The only bit that’s copper is the bit from the box mounted in the house to the router.

Parents have just got FTTP installed, junction box takes a Cat5/6 cable so just run one of the to where you need the router. My dad ran some piping raround the house, though the new BT router has a lot of power, singal all over the house which ain’t normal for a 120+ year old stone house.

New build house so FTTP comes as standard. White Huawei box under window plugged in then Bt hub connected to it.
330 down and 60 up.
Ridiculously fast £59.99 a month though.

I’m getting it on the 5th of march – I’m so existed after two years of 1.7mb internet I’ll be zooming up to 76mb 🙂 – and its actually £2 a month cheaper.

I think cable around the outside.of the house to the living room might be the best option.

On whose behalf are they installing? Have you ordered fibre from BT?

If so, be aware that if you end up on the BT Superfast network, it may limit your choice of other ISPs if you ever want to switch. I had FTTH installed by them in 2016, and there are only a couple of specialist companies (Zen, Andrews and Arnold) who I would be able to switch to. So you may not be able to go for the best-priced deals at renewal time. In fact, BT has a specific renewals team attached to FTTH installations, and I found that even the BT FTTC deals were unavailable to me at renewal. Basically, you can’t ring up BT, threaten to leave, and get a decent deal, as they know full well that you can’t just bugger off to TalkTalk or Sky.

I think cable around the outside.of the house to the living room might be the best option.

We had this issue, because we wanted to run an ethernet cable from the router to a Sky box. The engineers will run cable to your chosen router location, but not to any other devices, so we said the router was going to be next to the telly, and they ran a cable from the Openreach modem in the hall to the living room via the outside wall. When they left, we just swapped the connections around.

White Huawei box under window plugged in

At least Chinese military intelligence will be kept abreast of your browsing habits…

we have fttp here which was integrated into our apartment block.

We use hyperoptic as our supplier, they are pretty cheap compared to all the others and great service. We pay £27 pm for 200mbps up / down

I have FTTP with BT currently, 330 download 60 upload. We’re moving in a few weeks and the new house only supports FTTC which they reckon is 20mb download. 🙁

That’s going to be a PITA in our house. Three floors, so router ought to be in the middle. Cable could come up the wall outside to the middle floor but that’s the bathroom, and there’s not really a neat way to route it to somewhere decent. Hmm.

I wonder if you can use powerline to connect the box to the router?

You could just run it into the house wherever, then use a mesh wifi network to cover the house rather than running cables- We got the Google wifi and works great though not cheap.

Slight thread hijack – we’re getting fibre to the exchange apparently, only problem it’s still 8km from the exchange to my house! (I live out in the sticks)

Will fibre to the exchange speed things up any?

I assume the next stage will be to run cables from the exchange out to cabinets, is there a typical amount of properties a cabinet will serve i.e. how close to my property does a cabinet have to be sited to give reasonable speeds?

If so, be aware that if you end up on the BT Superfast network, it may limit your choice of other ISPs if you ever want to switch.

Arse.. I recently renewed my contract with EE. However, they supposedly offer 300Mbps in general, so I’m thinking they should support it.

Slight thread hijack – we’re getting fibre to the exchange apparently, only problem it’s still 8km from the exchange to my house!

Depends what the existing connection is like. There’s only so much bandwidth from the exchange, so you may have been having to share it out regardless of how fast the connection to your house is. FTTC is going to help as generally cabinets are much closer to homes than the exchange is. FTTC is usually 30ish Mbps isn’t it?

Arse.. I recently renewed my contract with EE. However, they supposedly offer 300Mbps in general, so I’m thinking they should support it.

Sounds like you are OK. In my case only BT were prepared to provide fibre speeds when I typed my details into a broadband checker. I naively assumed that once FTTH was in place, I could then switch to another provider when the contract ended.

So if other main players are offering you 300mbps already that seems OK.

EE is BT so it’s quite possible.

They aren’t offering me 300 yet, but they offer it in general. We’ll have to see.

EE is BT so it’s quite possible.

Not in my case – EE and Plusnet are both currently offering me a massive 17mbps on ADSL, even though I have FTTH running with BT.

What does the Openreach site say for your landline and address?

https://www.homeandbusiness.openreach.co.uk/fibre-broadband/when-can-i-get-fibre

I would hope that, if it’s a streetwide install in your case, then it should be available to all the ISPs, but it’s something to be mindful of, particularly if BT are the only ones offering to sell you fibre services when it goes live.

The Openreach site says they are ‘exploring solutions’ which a) was a lie before we started the community process, and b) is out of date because there is an Openreach van in the street right now finishing off cabling to the last few houses.

Blokes in said van reckoned it would be next week sometime before it was signed off and we could order. Seems optimistic…

@connect2 – if you’ve still got 8km of copper to the exchange I can’t see that having FTTC is going to transform your service. Performance degrades significantly with distance between the home and cabinet.

Slight thread hijack – we’re getting fibre to the exchange apparently, only problem it’s still 8km from the exchange to my house! (I live out in the sticks)

Will fibre to the exchange speed things up any?

I assume the next stage will be to run cables from the exchange out to cabinets, is there a typical amount of properties a cabinet will serve i.e. how close to my property does a cabinet have to be sited to give reasonable speeds?

Our exchange (6 miles away was upgraded to fibre. As you say for the next year or so openreach extended the fibre to lots of the cabinets in surrounding villages. we are in a very small hamlet so i was surprised we were in scope. Our cabinet is about 2kn away and we went from 1bm to a shade under 30mb when it was upgraded to fibre. I believe they have plans to install more cabinets as the next step, including one in our hamlet which should see our speed go up to 70mb which i believe is about the max for FTTC.

Keep the faith….i used to curse every time i saw an openreach van. Now i bless them like the heros they are 🙂

I wonder if you can use powerline to connect the box to the router?

If it’s Ethernet you can, but I really wouldn’t – not for the main ‘link’. You will get drop out, disconnection and speed limitation … it’s fine for a PC in a distant room, office or an Echo somewhere but not for the main link.

Run a bit of Cat 6A somehow to where you need to put the router.

Just bumped up to FTTC, and 35Mbps is proving more than adequate to be honest, multiple HD streams and gaming, though I guess a march to 4/8K will kill it someday. Best bit is going from 1MbpsUP to 10 plus, when you have a bunch of devices sync’ing photos etc back to the cloud, really clears the link up overall.