FTTP upgrade

Sooo, 3 weeks after my contract ended, just as Openreach were clearing ducts and I renewed my Superfast, Ultrafast is now available. I am being offered 145MB and 500MB products not that I need them but I would like one of them. Sky did tell me I could upgrade any time in the contract, so time to see what I might be offered. Existing customers and new customer pricing seems to be quite close now, but new customers still take it, it all depends on if you want to pay the £19.99 activation cost!!

Thank you "Sharon". Offered Ultrafast 145 with free installation for £24pm over 18 months That will allow me to dip my feet in at not much more than my current Superfast.

Tempting fate, but our upgrade to FTTP has been a great success, whilst the increased speed has been welcome on the few times I download large files, it's been the reliability which has made the biggest differance.

This is good to hear The speed for me is only "because I can get it", the stability on my line is okay, but am hoping the full fibre will be bomb proof.

I think the service that you have picked (based on Openreach 160M down/30M up) is an excellent choice. Not only would most households not notice the difference with anything faster, but wifi limitations kick in above that speed anyway. If you can get it for barely any more than an 80/20 service then why not!

Line was installed by Openreach last Sunday. After 2 to 3 emails/ text messages a day on behalf of Sky from OR about the upcoming install, the engineer came to install ONT today. Apparently Sky are the only ISP at the moment to do this, I would have thought it would have been cheaper for OR to do it all in one hit, rather than send a second person.

Anyhow, consultation of where to put the hole. ONT was much smaller than I thought and the Sky bloke was given a ONT template with bult in spirit level by a OR engineer to make things easier. Nice clean installation until it came to setting up the router. I had already set it the same as my old one with my existing SSID. All my devices connected except the SkyQ box. After several failed connects, the engineer would only use WPS which I don't like and then decided to reset the router. Still wouldn't connect. He told me it was because the wireless setting were AES and not PSK, so I must have changed it (it defaults to AES on reset!). Eventually he rang a colleague who told him to disconnect the mini box upstairs. That did the trick and away we went. I bid farewell to the engineer and reset all my settings again. Result. 147 when hard wired. Wireless on this laptop is always rubbish, but still brought in 137 (link below).

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...

What I have noticed is the router doesn't report the line speed or any of the normal figures I was used to seeing on FTTC. I suppose that is because it is always at the speed subscribed to and the levels don't make much difference?

So far so good. 18 days from order to install and a relatively painless experience.

In reply to a post by Discus:

What I have noticed is the router doesn't report the line speed or any of the normal figures I was used to seeing on FTTC. I suppose that is because it is always at the speed subscribed to and the levels don't make much difference?

The router wouldn’t know, the ONT would know any stats, but its pretty much now a “it works” or a “its not working” connection. Enjoy !

Thanks for the clarification, i'd never have thought of that..

It's wrong in lots of ways but maybe think about GPON the way that ADSL worked before any rate adaptive services - if it couldn't sync at the provisioned rate then it didn't sync at all. Except GPON has a single rate of 2.5Gbps down and 1.2Gbps up.

Spoke too soon. All was going well until a connection drop and re- connect on Tuesday. Speeds have consistently been sub 100MB, below the speed guarantee, tonight is the worst so far (all completed on a wired connection) https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16747564386...

Came home to find there has been a 30 minute period of the connection down according to the TBB monitor (100% packet loss). Now the difficult bit, getting hold of them and convincing them that the 10 day training period doesn't apply to fibre connections.

Wish me luck!!