Been with Virgin since they were Nynex. Different houses. Various packages. Always (DOCSIS) cable broadband.

We currently have 1Gbps down and 50Mbps up. It is fairly consistent and robust.

Seems a new player may be in my street one day: BRSK. And they offer up to 1Gbps both ways on their FFTTH.

What are folks’ experiences with them like?

Interesting, where are you?

I spoke with Brsk just this week, they’re “in build” here right now and I’d registered interest a couple of weeks ago. One of their sales types rang me, a chap by the name of Ahmed. Sounded like a local accent rather than some cheap labour call centre in the arse end of nowhere. Really pleasant, not pushy in the slightest. I had a couple of techie questions so asked to be put through to Support; answered within three rings, fielded everything I threw at them immediately.

I don’t have any idea what the actual service is like, but from my interactions with them thus far I cannot fault them. I’m almost certainly going to jump ship from Virgin Media next month unless VM can somehow get the TV service into the back room.

Oh, and,

The fibre cabinet is about 20m from my house. I spoke with the guys laying cable (quack) and they seemed to be top blokes who knew what they were doing. They said the build here had been “challenging” – lots of stuff like cobblestoned roads – but they were happy with where they’d got to now.

It looked like the contractor’s solution had been “throw bodies at the problem,” there was easily a dozen of them or more outside at one point. I thought we’d been invaded by French terrorists.

We’ve had BRSK since February. There was a long delay with the build to our area (original service date was October).

Service has been faultless. Constant 930Mbps up and down. WiFi is also excellent – great coverage and speeds.
Downloading a 50Gb game from Steam in a couple of minutes is nuts.

@cougar leafy south manchester. Virgin have been good. Just comparatively expensive despite regular renegotiation. Cobbles, or setts? 😀

@entonox thanks. Our down speed at our router is typically >800Mbps. But up is a fairly constant 50Mbps. I’d like faster.

Ping usually ~9-12ms with minimal jitter.

If you have any kind of external access requirements into your home network make sure they are not using CGNAT otherwise you will need a static IP which will obviously put the price up.

Nice point oceanskipper.

Seems they might, or might not.

9.2 You will be allocated a dynamic IPv4 address free of charge. We may change the IPv4 address allocation at any time. It may also be placed behind a Network Address Translation (CGNAT) system at our discretion. If you want a public static IPv4 address, you can place an order and pay a monthly fee for it, subject to availability.

DynDNS?

Realistically, what ‘external access’ are you likely to require?

It’s not the fact that the public IP changes that is the issue. The problem is that the public IP is shared with other customers. What the CGNAT does is translate that public IP back to the IP address of your fibre modem which is then connected to your internal network (gateway address of your router). With CGNAT anything that requires port forwarding won’t work but obviously if you don’t need any of that then it’s not an issue. When you buy a static IP from them they give you your own public IP and your fibre modem address is the same as your public IP so all your port forwards work correctly.

Picking this back up.

In the past couple of months BRSK (well, L3 optics) have been digging up various pavements, putting up extra ‘telegraph’ poles, cutting trenches across roads, and installing an occasional cabinet.

2 weeks ago I got an email: ‘our service is now live in your area and we’ll be in touch about an installation date’.

Last week I got a call: ‘does 2022-10-11 work for you’?

Sure did. Installation between 13:00 and 15:00.

Chap was very helpful. Though my 2 preferred modem/router locations were either aesthetically or accessibly tricky and we agreed to reject them. One meant having the cable cross in front of windows – he recommended against this, sound thinking. The other meant routing cable around door frames – just no.

My fallback location in the cellar was rejected because of the need to route cable through a crawl space – confined space working and I wasn’t in a position to say ‘how about if I crawl in’.

We went for the corner of the house nearest the pole with the ONT box mounted behind a bookcase.

All done very cleanly, neatly, and in about 2 hours.

Sadly at switch on the ONT showed an alarm signal – seems the connector box on top of the pole is faulty. Should be fixed by the weekend.

Now, just the fun of popping an Ethernet socket into the wall to connect the BRSK box to my MESH router.

@cougar – noting your recommendation in another thread to use Cat 5e for the inter-socket cabling. Agreed. I used some Cat 6 for a stretch upstairs – not as easy to wrangle. What’s the allowable bend radius for Cat 5e?

What kind of prices are you being quoted for those download speeds?

On the Welsh boarders here and having fibre put in in our village. We are being quoted £25pm for a max possible of 300 mbps.

Oh hi!

What’s the allowable bend radius for Cat 5e?

Off the top of my head I don’t think it’s specified. I’d have to look it up to be certain.

AIUI the bend radius restriction on Cat6 won’t stop it working per se, just that you’re exceeding the specification in the same way as say running a single length of Cat5e at 110m would. This is one of my gripes with Cat6, there’s so many gotchas which will take it out of spec that, whilst it will almost certainly still work, if it’s out of spec then it’s no longer Cat6 compliant so what’s the point?

I Am Not A Network Engineer.

As for me,

I signed up to Brsk a while ago. The last communication I had was about four weeks ago in reply to me chasing it:

“Thank you for reaching out to the Brsk Support Team.

Currently, we are busy with the certification process, which can take anything from 2 to 3 weeks, depending on the area.

This is when we check on all of the build work that has been completed, to ensure the standards are met and there is no outstanding work to be done.

Once this process is approved, the area will be marked as live.

We will start scheduling connections to homes in this area in the weeks following the completion.

During this time our install coordinators will contact you to arrange a convenient date for installation with you.”

So I’m expecting connection imminently. Fingers crossed.

What kind of prices are you being quoted for those download speeds?

100Mbps is £25, 500Mbps is £33, 1Gbps £45. I’ve gone for the middle one, they’re doing the first five(!) months for free.

At least prices are comparable then. We must be in the out reaches though the absolute max we are being offered is 300mpbs. Does Fibre suffer from the more people sign up, then the lower that speed will become?

@cougar NP. I was just thinking of how to easily get a dual cable run of the right length by stuffing a folded piece down the conduit and pulling the resulting loop to the destination. Clearly this is an extreme kink and maybe I’ll pull it back up and cut beyond the fold to avoid both too short and broken strands. Easier than getting in and out of the crawl space twice – I’m not as limber as I used to be.

Prices – answered already, but I went for 18 months of 500Mbps at £33/month with free installation and the first 3 months free. There are incentive codes (happy to share) and introductory offers.

Edit
I was tempted by 1Gbps – what we have now. But +£12/month and there are now only 2 of us. Plus the 500Mbps upload is better than the 50Mbps I get with VM which was one of my reasons for keeping their high-priced 1Gbps.

Edit edit

@cougar envious of your free 5 months

Does Fibre suffer from the more people sign up, then the lower that speed will become?

Domestic broadband I suppose is always contended – there’s only so much bandwidth per street box. However I’ve not seen much variability in my VM service over the years.

My guess is that any limit for fibre would be related to exchange capacity and subsequent street box bandwidth minima.

Distance I imagine is a lesser issue for fibre than wires. Though we know that undersea fibre connectors do have boosters along the way.

Almost hate to say it, but maybe 300Mbps vs 1Gbps is a trade-off of country vs city living? 300Mbps still seems substantial though.

A few years back on a visit to Venice they were installing Gb fibre throughout the city at a real pace. Made me reflect on the variable infrastructure here and the difference in installation complications.

No real bend radius for cat5e I’ve deliberately hammered it 180deg for testing with some posh equipment. don’t do that though obviously. Safe for me 60mm bends and don’t bash the clips in to much.
Yes you get “loss” in bends but for home networking it’s fine . your connection or how well you put the ends on is the thing most diy types get loss on.

Loss is not the right tech term but where not writing training manuals

I’ve deliberately hammered it 180deg for testing with some posh equipment. don’t do that though obviously

Thanks @pk13 – I’ll likely play it safe and either do two lengths independently or chop out the initial cable fold.

BRSK got my connection working today.
As before, the home install worked well. Seems the problem was outside. Their engineers have opened up access covers, dug up various bits previously buried, and fettled in their green road cupboard over the past week.

After some up and down to begin with the 500Mbps up and down connection seems pretty stable.

I now just need to figure out whether I have to plug my router/LAN into their router or whether I can just plug into the ONT box. Through their router works, it just seems inelegant. When I plugged into the ONT box with my router it was not happy.

Thanks for the cable info. Saturday’s under-the-floor efforts left me with a couple of handy sockets near the ONT box that function perfectly.

@cougar envious of your free 5 months

Be envious when it’s live, I’m still being taken dry by Virgin.

Ah. Virgin’s retention folks called yesterday. Too late! They asked what it would take to keep me as a customer. They rang off when I told them.

Domestic broadband I suppose is always contended

Not if you talk to PlusNet who say they use traffic shaping and got snippy when I pointed out that is different words for the same thing.

BRSK’s email support is very fast!

Seems connecting my router/LAN to the BRSK network is very easy: plug it into the ONT box and put their router away.

I was too impatient with the DHCP assignment at first. A couple of minutes and it’s all running nicely. 530Mbps up and down according to the ASUS QoS Speedtest.

@Sandwich ‘traffic shaping’ 🙄

I’m reading this all rather enviously, on my allegedly 10Mbps connection, which is currently running at about 2Mbps. It’s making working from home somewhat challenging.

At least I have Shell Broadband’s outstanding customer service to rely on to sort out whatever the issue is…

BRSK’s email support is very fast!

I emailed them last night for an update. They replied at 8am saying that there was a problem with a broken manhole cover, it was Openreach’s property so they couldn’t touch it. Gave me OR’s scheduled repair date (bloody November!) and actually sent me a photo of the broken cover!

Update.

@cougar @oceanskipper ‘s CGNAT point is pertinent.

DDNS doesn’t work for my Synology NAS. Quickconnect does though, I suppose that is some kind of VPN-like affair.

Nslookup gives me the external IP of the DDNS domain – the CGNAT IP I suppose. My WAN IP is different. I suppose DDNS fails because there’s no forwarding rule from the CGNAT to my ONT/router?

Since quickconnect works, not so bad. Just pesky. I haven’t asked what an external IP address would cost.

One advantage I suppose is that my WAN IP could be more shielded from the frequent login attempts I got while with Virgin.

Had a missed call from Brsk yesterday, (finally) wibbling about booking an install. I’ve just called them back, they said “how does tomorrow afternoon sound?” I was tempted to reply “terrible, can you not do it any sooner?”

What Could Possibly Go Wrong now. Place your bets.

While burying the fibre on your property a sink hole opens and your car is never seen again!

@couger
Let us know how you get on fitting experience wise.

Is that tv bluetacked onto the wall?
Good numbers what’s the quality of the installation like?

Unusual place to put a telly!

Unusual place to put a telly!

What, on the wall?

The radiator is switched off, there’s two in that room. I should take it out really.

What, on the wall?

I meant directly above a radiator 🙂

It does look it it’s just balanced on the rad 😁

Good numbers what’s the quality of the installation like?

Latency is kinda high, that’s the lowest I’ve seen it. It’s mostly been around 40.

Can’t fault the installation. They were scheduled for 1pm, I got a phone call about 11, “we’re ahead of schedule, we can be with you in half an hour if it’s convenient.”

They talked out exactly where I wanted the presentation, explained what everything was. Waited till I tested everything before leaving site. Did a clean job, had covers for their boots when coming into the house.

The router is mediocre in functionality but I don’t really care because I’ll be using my own anyway. No idea what the Wi-Fi is like, I haven’t used it.

I had to contact Support to ask for connection details for using my own router because it didn’t seem to want to allocate a DHCP IP. After initially being Front-Lined I got through to an actual Tech who suggested rebooting the ONT (the fibre <-> Ethernet converter on the wall) to release the old address. That worked, though it might just have been me being impatient in the first place because renewing the lease takes ages.

It does look it it’s just balanced on the rad 😁

Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

It was supposed to be about 6″ higher. I measured it all out, drilled it, then realised I’d forgotten to add in the clearance figure. After that I figured I’d see how it goes and then move it if needs be but honestly, much higher and we’ll all be getting stiff necks.

Oh, and the speed figures are off the Xbox, hard-wired into the Brsk router.

Only real downside of fibre is equipment placement ont needing a plug socket ect.
Pre cut cable length don’t help either.