At long last we’re finally having fibre to the premises installed in our road, our existing service being fibre to the cabinet.
Before I arrange for BT to install the FTTP I’d like to get clear in my mind what is possible.
Is it essential that the BT Home hub plugs directly into the Optical Network Terminator (ONT) or can the Homehub be plugged into the ONT via an existing Cat5e network that I have. I would like to leave the Homehub where it is and not relocate it to where the new optical cable will enter the house.
So the proposed layout would be:
ONT
Short patch lead to adjacent Ethernet wall socket.
Approx 10 metres of existing underfloor Cat5e cabling to a 16 way switch.
Approx 4 metres under the floor from switch to an Ethernet wall socket where the BT Hub would be plugged in.
Another cable would then run from the Homehub to feed the 16 way switch.
If this is technically possible, would there be losses in speed?
We have BT FTTP and have found that it is quite picky about the Ethernet connection from the ONT to the router (Ubiquiti Dream machine rather than Home Hub in our case). The BT supplied (short) cable works perfectly while other apparently good cables not so much. BT’s diagnostic equipment can pick up the differences. I am not at all a technical person but your proposal sounds like something that might give you a lot of problems (which translates to very significant throughput reductions). It’s not generally difficult to alter the point where BT’s cable enters the house and the position of the (very small) ONT, is that a possibility for you?
Thanks for the info Jonathan, that sounds like good advice, I thought there would be performance issues. It would be very difficult to reroute the entry point but I could place the Homehub at the existing entry point where I assume the ONT will be installed. It’s just that the wifi signal throughout the house with the hub in it’s current position is very good. It’ll all depend on the BT engineer on the day I think.
As you already have plenty of wired Ethernet infrastructure perhaps the answer will be to put the home hub at the existing entry point and add one or more wired WiFi access points. That’s what we do with Ubiquiti access points; it’s fast and robust with no complaints from the “user community”
Bear in mind they dig and bury some ducting in your driveway/ garden from the road and then mount a new box on the external wall. They come and survey first so you can pretty much request where you want it to go.
I’m with Zen and fairly happy with their FTTC offering as I get pretty near theoretical 80/20 speeds most of the time.
My concern going for FTTP is where the cable will come into the house.
Currently the FTTC old copper line still comes in close to a rear bedroom from a pole in the rear lane - the cabinet is maybe 50m away.
I probably don’t have quite official wiring as the copper line was extended to the front of the house through the attic some years ago and terminates in a socket in the study at the front of the house replacing an old star wired connection in that bedroom.
I’d want FTTP to come into the front of the house near the study but I’m not sure how feasible that would be if the current connection comes through the rear. Almost tempted to get a separate FTTP new install and keep the old FTTC until I’m satisfied with FTTP.
No it’s fine in the house with the help of an Apple AirPort Express running from a wired wall access point to fill in one area. As it all works so well I was hoping to leave the BT hub/router where it is at present, which isn’t at the BT master socket but an extension and has worked perfectly in this way for years. The ONT will I assume be installed where the master socket is which as explained is a good way from the hub/router in another room.
Yes we have existing ducting from the street connection pit, under our drive and into the house via the garage, so should be an easy task to pull through the new cabling……he says hopefully!
I think that’s what we’ll do, it would be the least intrusive solution as I really don’t want carpets and floorboards up. Think I’ll book the upgrade and see what the engineer can do. Exciting times!
So much simpler here out in the (French) countryside. Telegraph type poles carry the electricity supply, the old copper cable phone, and now the fibre. Booked in and man, a van, and a ladder arrived. Man asks where I want to fibre to come in, props the ladder up, climbs and a kango through 300 plus mm wall. Fits box on the inside. Checks for nearest telegraph pole. Junctions off to the new hole in the wall. Tidies up/fills/paints, plugs in router. 3 hours and we have 2Gb through the wall.
We had BT put fibre in recently, it was slung across from the nearest telephone pole parallel with the old copper which remains. They did ask us where we wanted it terminated. Don’t forget you will need a nearby power source for the internal box.
It does seem wasteful as City Fibre caused huge disruption across the town putting in underground fibre that noone appears to use.
We use Giagclear FTTP. The fibre connects to the junction box on the external wall which connects to the ONT on the other side of the wall.
This then connects with a copper Ethernet cable to the prime mesh node. Every else in the house connects to that.
Presently we have 200mbs up and down, but changing to 400mbs up and down at the end of the month. However, they do offer 900mbs up and down as well.
For information when they were installing the fibre they blew it down the conduit to the cabinet in the street about 300 metres away. Quite neat to see them do that.
We have Toob, and get 900 up and down for £29 a month. They put the ONT exactly where I wanted it and were great to deal with. The ONT is connected to our Netgear Nighthawk router with a 5 metre flat Cat 8 cable I bought on eBay.
That’s an excellent deal, upload speed very attractive! Toob have installed their network all around our area but avoided any “unadopted” roads, formerly referred to as “private” roads, never live on one, you end up being responsible for all maintenance, and when the utility companies need to replace their services it’s down to householders to negotiate with them.
SGN and their contractors have been a nightmare. Apologies for the rant, all still a bit raw!
Why is there such a difference between down and upload speeds with the Open Reach/BT fibre compared to other companies like Toob where the upload speed is as fast as the download? Is the technology so different?
It’s a little of different technology and a little on sales marketing. Broadband fibre in most parts of the world use something called Passive Optical Networking. This is a shared type service where many households and small businesses share the same fibre and infrastructure and then are time sliced… part of what your ONT does.
Now many infrastructure providers have installed GPON which is asymmetric. However some newer Altnet infrastructure providers are installing the relatively recent XGS-PON which can be symmetric (ie the same quoted uplink and downlink ‘speeds’ in your time slice). However the significant factor will be shared congestion loading as the fibre becomes more used up… because all PON is shared. Openreach will design it so there is minimal impact with typically good capacity on the OLT to ONU back haul links and traffic profiles for more typical broadband use. Other infrastructure providers may have more (or less) congestion or time sharing on these back hauls as well have greater contention from the OLTs so may exhibit slower throughput at peak times as it gets more utilised with connections. Your ONT is shared with your local community OLT. I believe Openreach design for a time sharing contention of typically around 32:1. (Remember this is not ‘speed’, but throughput over time… so marketing material can be potentially misleading for the non technical… and even web so called AI guides and help sites are inconsistent and confused on this… as fibre utilization increases we might see Ofcom better standardise ‘speed’ descriptions).
With broadband, usually, but not always, the less you pay the less speed regulation you will get under load and increased utilisation, this will likely become evident over time as infrastructure utilisation increases with your infrastructure provider.
To avoid contention you need to avoid broadband and PON altogether, and use dedicated/private/ leased line fibre, but that is significantly more expensive, and unless you are a relatively high capacity commercial or public sector user with specific service level requirements, it is unlikely to be beneficial.
Just took a look at their site and they also have a fantastic 1 month rolling contract with the same speeds for £37 and no installation cost - that seems fairly unique for those who don’t want to be tied in for 12-18 months or longer.