The Fibre Man Cometh

Well, there should be someone coming along this afternoon to install FTTC service at a good friend's house. The DSL there has been very intermittent for years with numerous disconnections daily.

The FTTC service will be installed on a different telephone line and the ADSL will only be ceased when the FTTC has had all the faults ironed out. At the moment ADSL is limited to about 8Mbps to help with stability.

The cabinet is probably 600-700 metres away so FTTC won't achieve great speeds. The estimate is 30.9Mbps down and 5.8Mbps up.

My suspicion is that there will be similar problems on the VDSL as the two phone lines come into the house in the same cable which was severed a number of years ago some distance from the house during a burglary attempt.

I'm quite looking forward to this as it's my first experience of a fibre install even though I'm not expecting things to go smoothly!

I'll post an update and some stats later.

the two phone lines come into the house in the same cable which was severed a number of years ago some distance from the house during a burglary attempt

Make sure they are aware of that, and tell the engineer/installer when he arrives. If you keep mentioning it there is more chance that the relevant wire will be suspected and replaced if/when there is a problem that might be down to line quality between the cab and the house.

Though that is probably what was done at the time of the incident, rather than splicing the wires back together, in which case it shouldn't be the cause of problems now.

Good luck with your new install.

The engineer's just arrived and has popped off to the cabinet.

I mentioned the lines being cut and also the frequent disconnects so he's going to have a poke around.

Unfortunately the lines were severed some way from the house and although the joint was spliced and waterproofed that's now underneath concrete which has been laid since then

I don't think inspecting the join's going to be easy!

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

I don't think inspecting the join's going to be easy!

Why did I just get a vision of Eric Morecambe inspecting Ernie Wise's hairline...?

In reply to a post by TMCR:

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

I don't think inspecting the join's going to be easy!

Why did I just get a vision of Eric Morecambe inspecting Ernie Wise's hairline...?

Well, it all seems to be working. The predicted rates were 30.9 down and 5.8 up. At the moment it's getting about 36 down and 7.5 up. That's actual file transfer speeds. That's definitely an improvement on the DSL which syncs at 8064kbps down and 575kbps up.

Stability so far seems to be better. There were times when the DSL line dropped and the fibre was unaffected so it's looking good so far.

The BT engineer had nothing he could plug into the master socket to get line measurements!

I have hacked the modem (and given the BT engineer instructions how to as he didn't know it was possible) and attainable line speed shown was about 39 down.

The modem isn't going to last long though as it will be replaced (unofficially!) with a Cisco 887VA router - probably next week some time.

Someone else who has a Cisco 887VA router! I thought I may have been the only one here lol. Due to my recent stability problems I'm temporarily using the BT supplied equipment, but think I've found the fault (faulty master socket filter) so hopefully soon can change back to the Cisco 887VA. You'll enjoy setting that up for working on Infinity (direct VDSL connection, not via the OR modem), took me a good hour before I finally got it authenticated though I could get it to sync without hassle. The only thing I still haven't figured out is how to assign my static IP's from BT to my devices on the network. That's for another day though.

When you do get it setup I'd be interested to hear what your router's CPU usage is like when heavy downloading.

Edited by Ixel (Sat 16-Jun-12 15:55:05)

I currently run two Cisco 857 routers on ADSL which each have a static range of IP addresses on the LAN side with internet accessible servers. I wouldn't imagine the setup is going to be hugely different on the 887VA but will let you know how I get on!

I shall be ordering the router on Monday so perhaps everything will be doing what it's supposed to by about Wednesday

I'll then let you know how things are going.