FTTPoD so far - How are you finding it?

Just a general poke about really to get users reviews/opinions so far of their FTTP experience.

How much has it improved your day to day browsing experience?

Has streaming been improved?

Are you able to get detailed line stats from the modem?

Any slowdowns in the evening?

Any issues with your provider/Openreach?

More to the point, no doubt many of you would have paid a considerable amount for it to be installed, so was it worth it?

I can't tell you how well it works because it's 14 months from order and still counting. But FTTPoD and FTTP are an identical service, so you could as well ask the question of any FTTP user.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Are you able to get detailed line stats from the modem?

There is no "modem" with FTTP(oD): OpenReach supply an Optical Network Termination device (ONT), with a fibre port on one side, and a gigabit ethernet port for you to connect your router to.

As an end-user you can't access the ONT, but there is no "sync speed" to check, because the modulation rate on the fibre is fixed: it's 2.4Gbps down, 1.2Gbps up. As long as you are within optical range it simply works, and if not, it fails.

However, this capacity is shared with other people connected to the same fibre via a passive optical splitter (this is the "P" in "GPON"). Up to 32 services will share the same fibre which goes to the exchange headend - Optical Line Termination, or OLT.

The OLT controls the link and limits the rate of packets sent and received from each ONT, so that the overall throughput you get is what you paid for (e.g. 330/30)

There is a degree of oversubscription, but you'd need 8 users caning the link at a full 330Mbps before they would notice any reduction in throughput. In practice, most lines are idle most of the time. As you rightly observe, contention in the ISP's backhaul network and Internet interconnections is more likely to be an issue.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

How much has it improved your day to day browsing experience?

Wrt web browsing, I wouldn't say there is a noticeable difference between FTTPoD 330/30 & FTTC 80/20. However when downloading files which are many GBs in size, downloading @ 40 MB/s makes a huge difference.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Has streaming been improved?

Definitely. We are now able to view more 4K Netflix/Amazon Prime/YouTube etc streams simultaneously online than before.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Are you able to get detailed line stats from the modem?

No, the ONT is locked down. Not a big deal though though because unlike xDSL lines, FTTP lines always 'sync' at the speed they've been provisioned at.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Any slowdowns in the evening?

Not at present. Though last year my peak time speeds were dropping to less than 100 Mb/s instead of the usual 300+ Mb/s. This was easily fixed by BT Wholesale moving me to a different (less congested) SVLAN path at the exchange and not had any slowdowns since.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Any issues with your provider/Openreach?

No.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

More to the point, no doubt many of you would have paid a considerable amount for it to be installed, so was it worth it?

100% worth it

given that "modem" is short for "Moduation/demoduation" the ONT is doing exactly that. So calling it an optical modem or ont would be fine.

Not sure I would have paid much more than the £10k it cost me after VAT and the grant.

But 330/30Mbps compared to the previous two services ADSL (4/1Mbps) and WISP (15/15Mbps) it has made a massive difference. We can have 40 people on site and that often means 70 odd guest devices + our domestic stuff. Sky UHD nows says ready to watch in circa 2secs whereas previously it would take 16-hours to download a film as I had throttle downloads at router to leave bandwidth for other stuff.

We were full over easter holidays and not a single complaint from guests about the 'WiFi' being poor (the WiFi never was as we have a unifi AP in each cottage, it was just the pipe was full).

Streaming now works, Sonos rock steady all day long, file sharing (I use a lot of dropbox for work) all awesome.

And once we have done our 12-months the price will drop to less than we were paying for two services. Cerberus were excellent throughout the entire process.

In reply to a post by Taras:

given that "modem" is short for "Moduation/demoduation" the ONT is doing exactly that. So calling it an optical modem or ont would be fine.

Maybe if you want to get that techie you should learn to spell the words .

Quite apart from your being completely wrong. The ONT does not modulate/demodulate. The signal is not analogue in the sine wave way of xDSLx. It is basically a square waveform.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 09-May-19 10:20:32)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I can't tell you how well it works because it's 14 months from order and still counting. But FTTPoD and FTTP are an identical service, so you could as well ask the question of any FTTP user.

Normal FTTP here: coming from 80/20 there isn't a great deal of difference, other than with big downloads. Principally that means usenet - at 2.3gb per minute, it just chomps through them.

However, for a lot of websites, they can't keep up. One atm is downloading at around 50-100, so there's not much difference compared to a good FTTC line.

Hi

Interesting to read how people are finding FTTP. I'm looking to move to FTTP (Native) soon from 80/20.

For me, I'll be glad to get away from telephone cable, since ADSL Max days and at two different properties it seems to want constant monitoring to keep on eye out for step changes or problems. I've seen ADSL2+ start of good than slow down for cross-talk, one time taking a considerable hit it never recovered from, and with VDSL I've always managed to just hang on to 80/20 but again at both properties SNR starts of good then slowly drops over time as more people join and now borderline keeping 80/20. Factor in intermittent telephone faults (crackles) that took a lot of effort to get fixed, and random drops due to bursts of noise and waiting several minutes to sync back up, it will be nice to say good bye to it all.

So whilst more speed is welcomed, especially upload, I see other benefits.

So those with FTTP already, are you finding it reliable?

Regards

Phil

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-May-19 11:50:47)

Yes, FTTP reliability has been 100% since I moved into this house in December.

At my last house, VDSL2 would retrain every 1-2 weeks, it dropped from 60Mbps to 35Mbps over time thanks to crosstalk, and I had a 2-month period of instability that was only resolved with an engineer visit.

I'm not too worried about throughput (my FTTP is 80/20), but reliability is key.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by Taras:

given that "modem" is short for "Moduation/demoduation" the ONT is doing exactly that. So calling it an optical modem or ont would be fine.

Quite apart from your being completely wrong. The ONT does not modulate/demodulate.

From one pedant to another...

Light has frequency and amplitude does it not? The ONT is converting a voltage to a presence of the light or not (in the same way as MSF turns an RF carrier on or off).

Sounds like 100% amplitude modulation to me

On the receive side, the ONT is converting the presence or absence of the analogue light 'carrier' into an electrical on/off signal. Sounds like demodulation going on then?

You have a point, though the light is not turned off. It has a binary state of high and low power, corresponding to 1 and 0. It is basically therefore a digital transmission, not an analogue one.

The signal travels end to end digitally, whereas on DSL it travels in an analogue manner.

Pulse Amplitude Modulation, (PAM), is being used for fibre optics at speeds above 50Gbps but I know little about that.

My point basically is that the "modem" function is only a part of what the Openreach ONT does with the signal. It is a heck of a lot different from the DSL frequency/bin system that underlies what we normally call a modem.

I was more concerned really by the unnecessary original quibble, given that "modem" is short for "Moduation/demoduation", where the mis-spelling isn't a typo as it is repeated. I think the post he was quibbling with was a lot more useful than his and in fact mine .

Thanks everyone.

Now ordered my survey but i'll update the other thread.

In reply to a post by DougM:

Yes, FTTP reliability has been 100% since I moved into this house in December.

Basically the same here - the router seems to auto-reboot every two weeks exactly in the middle of the night, but that's probably just housecleaning. No other downtime.

VDSL2 I was probably lucky, 100m to the cabinet so huge SNR buffer, only occasional short problems. Still, fttp is surely going to be more reliable longterm.

How much has it improved your day to day browsing experience?

I would say that given the improved reliability it has helped with that alone. During the summer one of my lines suffered with periodic retrains, sometimes to very low speeds for a temporary time, but getting the fault to be identified was near to impossible as it was intermittent. All I get now with FTTPoD is the rare overnight work done somewhere else in the country (e.g. datacenter), otherwise it's wonderful. Latency is also consistent, as I don't have to worry about DLM putting me on traditional interleaving which can increase latency by either 8/16ms, or worse if it's applied on both downstream and upstream.

Has streaming been improved?

I can't say I'm experiencing streaming issues except beyond the usual ones I and others I know generally have with ITV and sometimes Channel 4. BBC iPlayer seems reliable and consistent.

Are you able to get detailed line stats from the modem?

Well, the ONT is locked down. However I own a Firebrick 2900 which has detailed logs and graphs of what the connection is currently doing and how well it appears to be performing.

Any slowdowns in the evening?

I haven't noticed any yet. The connection I'm pretty sure is going via BT Wholesale's backhaul. I used to be on TalkTalk Business's backhaul, prior to FTTPoD. I was with AAISP but I'm currently with Cerberus Networks. I wish I was able to get 330/50 (instead of 330/30) in the first 12 months but from what I've observed and have been told this probably isn't possible without paying off the FTTPoD contract term first.

Any issues with your provider/Openreach?

None to mention currently. They were on top of matters regarding the order process with Openreach. I had to request an IPv6 /56 (at least) due to standards stating that assigning a /64 doesn't conform with standards and such. That was easy enough though.

More to the point, no doubt many of you would have paid a considerable amount for it to be installed, so was it worth it?

For the price I paid, yes (on the lower end of the range). I also pay a lower than average rent for the house and area I live in so it was worth it to me for sure. I don't anticipate having any issues with the landlady, which would force me to find another place, nor for the rent to suddenly shoot up. As I also tend to work remotely from home this is another good reason for having a reliable connection.

Edited by Ixel (Thu 09-May-19 17:32:51)

Thanks.

Does the Cerebus initial 12 month FTTPoD contract come with IPv6?

Didn't see it mentioned on their website.

I would like to find it in my living room..........I just don't fancy spending £17.5k + vat for my �delightful� neighbour to get native FTTP.

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Does the Cerebus initial 12 month FTTPoD contract come with IPv6?

Yes though I only received a /64 block and had to request a second /64 for the LAN side - I believe some have requested a /56 which should be provided as standard.

It should come with a /64 by default. However, I would try to put in a request for a /56 and if you get some trouble then there is a RIPE standard and one other standard (can't remember off hand, sorry, best Google for it) which will back up what I've said earlier regarding issuing a /64 not conforming to the accepted standards and may cause issues with your local network.

In reply to a post by brookheather:

In reply to a post by Alucidnation:

Does the Cerebus initial 12 month FTTPoD contract come with IPv6?

Yes though I only received a /64 block and had to request a second /64 for the LAN side - I believe some have requested a /56 which should be provided as standard.

Just received my Inventory Report from Cerberus and it has a /64 block noted. I have asked them to issue me a /56.

As yet I don't have a go live date as OR are apparently installing an extra cabinet in the exchange before they can do their OCR reccy. I'm told all external cabling and jointing is complete and the last pole looks quite ready, although no drop cable to the house as yet.

I'm hoping it will be ready to go in June....

They'll do the drop cable to the premises on the day of installation. Mine took around four hours before the installation was complete and live. Hopefully Cerberus will issue a /56 without much fuss, I know I managed to get mine easily although I did also quote a RIPE and some other standard which backed up my reasoning for wanting at least a /56.

In reply to a post by Taras:

given that "modem" is short for "Moduation/demoduation" the ONT is doing exactly that. So calling it an optical modem or ont would be fine.

Really. 30yrs of IT and i'd always though it was modulator-demodulator

In terms of the topic. I do find fttp more stable. I rarely dip below the max speed.

Edited by deleted (Sat 11-May-19 13:07:09)

4.2. Prefix assignment options

To keep addressing plans usable and understandable, and to align with DNS reverse zone delegations, the size of the delegated prefix should align with a nibble boundary. Each hexadecimal character in an IPv6 prefix represents one nibble, which is 4 bits. The length of a delegated prefix should therefore always be a multiple of 4.

A single network at a customer site will be a /64. At present, RIR policies permit assignment of a /48 per site, so the possible options when choosing a prefix size to delegate are /48, /52, /56, /60 and /64. However, /64 is not sustainable, it doesn't allow customer subnetting, and it doesn't follow IETF recommendations of �at least� multiple /64s per customer. Moreover, future work within the IETF and recommendations from RFC 7934 (section 6) allow the assignment of a /64 to a single interface (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-v6ops-unique-ipv6-prefix-per-host-07).

from https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-...

Anyone have a link to a good dummy's guide to IPv6? I have a good understanding of IPv4 but sadly not a clue of IPv6.

When I look at my single ethernet NIC on my PC I have the following in addition to IPv4 :-

2 x IPv6 addresses
2 x temporary IPv6 addresses
1 x link-local IPv6 address
1 x default gateway IPv6 address