Community Fibre London 1gbps TBQM

Hi there,

I'm not sure if this is the correct sub-forum to post this in, I hope it is. Just before lockdown back in April we see Community Fibre being deployed by 3rd party contractors in our street. A few days later a representative from Community Fibre posted a A5 promotional Flyer through the door. I Telephoned Community Fibre and spoke to a woman called Natalie, after hearing Natalie's sales pitch and taking into account the numerous faults and issues we have had with our current ISP VM 400mbps and Sky BB 76mb, I was instantly sold by the symmetrical upload and download of upto 1gbps with an average of 930mbps. Then came the BUT, I'm still under contract with my other 2x ISP's VM and SKY. I was pointed in the direction of a Termination of Contract document template on the CFL website, we printed it off and filled it in and sent it off. A few weeks later we received confirmation were leaving we then had to do a U turn as the PM announcement of National Lockdown and we could not be without Internet during Lockdown especially having 4 children all off school too and with the demand for Teams and Zoom and FM and WA we the internet was heavily used. After lockdown and the kids were back in school we decided to leave VM and SKY. Once we left we decided to go with the all new singing and dancing CFL 1gbps and as it happens as we was ordering it on Friday night we was offered an installation date of the coming Monday! We thought this is frickin awesome, BUT there was another BUT we was already near our max of 6 as we already had contractors in as we was having our kitchen and bathroom refurbished and it wasn't due for completion for another week or so. We decided to go with an installation for 2 weeks time on Monday 12-2pm as it allowed for any setbacks or snagging of the current ongoing of works. Fast forward to the Sunday afternoon the day before our installation date and we received an SMS text message from the engineer to check no one has any covid-19 symptoms and it is still convenient to install our future fibre broadband. The next day around 1pm the engineer MW telephoned me to let us know he would be arriving at our home within the next 40 minutes. Engineer arrived and Instalation was a breeze with the engineer cheering he got 18.3 on his meter reading and there was no obstacles or hiccups and completed by MW within a couple of hours including the ENGINEER MW setting up the Linksys Velop Tri Band Mesh WiFi routers. We then run a few speed tests and was thrilled with the results https://pasteboard.co/JvCFfRC.jpg

After a few days had passed I noticed that occasionally the internet connection would drop. I decided to visit my old trusted and beloved friend TBQM. I also went into my LinkSysVelop router settings page and Enabled WAN Ping by un-ticking the anonymous box at the top under the Security Settings on the router configuration page. https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-enable-wan... I then created a new BQM monitor and would monitor the connection over the coming days and WEEKS. I Know its only been a day so far since the graph was created, However, I couldn't help notice the CRAZY activity appearing on the graph and we are looking for an experienced second opinion as personally we think something is not quiet right here. Here is a shared link to our graph of our Community Fibre London 1gbps FTTH connection. We are new to Ftth and so we are inexperienced to try and fault diagnosis the graph, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be seeing that much red on the graph, please have a look at the graph from the shared link below.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Here is a copy of the Trace Route too

https://pasteboard.co/JvCULK0.jpg

Let us know your thoughts please,

Cheers

Edited by VastGsm (Wed 14-Oct-20 17:01:08)

Unless you only had connectivity for few hours in that BQM the large blocks of red suggest your router is ignoring the request for a response, or delaying so long that it is seen as lost.

Not that uncommon for a router to do this.

When things drop is it just wireless devices or something connected by Ethernet too?

Thanks for your reply @MrSaffron.

Do you know why the router would be ignoring the requests for a response or delaying it for so long to appear as a loss?

Next question;
How do we prevent the other possibilities as you pointed out above and configure the connection to monitor it efficiently and effectively like a vast majority of other stable heathy connections?

2x Linksys Velop routers Tri-Band routers
1x XBOX temporarily hardwired to primary velop router in front room until I get a new Gigabit switch. I was thinking of purchasing something simple like Netgear ProSafe Smart Switch 5 port for £25
1x base unit in front room living room
1x base unit in bedroom directly above

Occasionally it drops the fibre FTTH connection

Cheers

I suggest that you report your problem to community fibre. Your connection appears to have problems even in the middle of the night.

Update: Ticket logged and escalated to 2nd line network support team. They will keep us posted, and I'll mirror their responses here too.

Cheers,

“ After a few days had passed I noticed that occasionally the internet connection would drop.”

The WAN connection on FTTP shouldn’t drop...or so very rarely that you could count it on one finger over a 6 month period. Problem there obviously. Hope they sort it for you.

Good luck. If the problem is due to a dirty joint it may take a while to resolve.

Thanks
Hopefully that's not the case as it was only recently just installed, I can recall the engineer MW cheering to himself -18.3 which I assume to be very good as it's within the threshold of -14 upto -28 is deemed generally good within this range. Hopefully we're get it resolved soon, fingers X'ed
Cheers

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Good luck. If the problem is due to a dirty joint it may take a while to resolve.

Presumably you mean dirt / contamination on the connector faces?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Good luck. If the problem is due to a dirty joint it may take a while to resolve.

Presumably you mean dirt / contamination on the connector faces?

Yes, there must be half a dozen joints in the cable that comes to my house. If one of the joints was faulty it would be difficult to find the fault. The joints are all bound up in bandages. (Gigaclear not Openreach.)

Properly-made splices shouldn't be a problem: the glass is fused together, the losses are very low, and there's nowhere for dirt to get in.

However if there is a fault, an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer will locate it precisely.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Properly-made splices shouldn't be a problem: the glass is fused together, the losses are very low, and there's nowhere for dirt to get in.

However if there is a fault, an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer will locate it precisely.

I *think* what Michael is referring to are not splices per se (mechanical or fusion fibre joints - for all intents joining the fibre cores of two fibres never again to be parted) but rather a (probably SC/APC) connector to connector “cross connect”. Basically two connectors mated together and held in place through an external coupler.

Once correctly cleaned and (hopefully) properly prepared a splice should not be letting dirt or contamination in - in the case of a fusion splice it is pretty much impossible as the cores are fused together. A mechanical sleeve then protects the spice and it’s all covered in heat shrink. The loss should be barely perceptible on a good fusion splice.

On the other hand a cross connect (two mated connectors) has plenty of scope to get dirt and crud on the connector faces if they’re not cleaned initially or someone is having a sticky peek and touches or damages the connector faces. In any event their optical loss is a lot higher, quite possibly up to 10 times higher than a splice.

For clarity, this should not be taken in any way as a supposition of the OPs actual issue.

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 15-Oct-20 22:45:42)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Properly-made splices shouldn't be a problem: the glass is fused together, the losses are very low, and there's nowhere for dirt to get in.

However if there is a fault, an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer will locate it precisely.

Thank you. I did not see any testing that light would pass down the fibre OK before I was connected. It could be that the box at my (customer) end reports back something about the signal quality.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I *think* what Michael is referring to are not splices per se (mechanical or fusion fibre joints - for all intents joining the fibre cores of two fibres never again to be parted) but rather a (probably SC/APC) connector to connector “cross connect”. Basically two connectors mated together and held in place through an external coupler.

There are fewer plugin type connectors. One in the back of the box at my end, one in the pot on the edge of my property and one or maybe two at the cabinet end. It just occurred to me that that there was no light circuit testing before I was connected so if there was a problem with a fusion joint it would only be found when I was properly connected.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Properly-made splices shouldn't be a problem: the glass is fused together, the losses are very low, and there's nowhere for dirt to get in.

However if there is a fault, an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer will locate it precisely.

Best practise (at least from my experience) was to OTDR fibre in both directions as well as do a light loss test in both directions. All fibre faces on connectors in the link to be cleaned and inspected. All bases then (ought to be) covered.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I *think* what Michael is referring to are not splices per se (mechanical or fusion fibre joints - for all intents joining the fibre cores of two fibres never again to be parted) but rather a (probably SC/APC) connector to connector “cross connect”. Basically two connectors mated together and held in place through an external coupler.

There are fewer plugin type connectors. One in the back of the box at my end, one in the pot on the edge of my property and one or maybe two at the cabinet end. It just occurred to me that that there was no light circuit testing before I was connected so if there was a problem with a fusion joint it would only be found when I was properly connected.

Fusion splicing using a modern core aligning, automated splicer like a Sumitomo T72 (fairly commonly used in the industry) really makes it fast and accurate to splice. The splices are excellent repeatable quality with an extraordinarily low loss, minuscule really, less than 0.01 dB. It’s highly unlikely the problem will be with a fusion splice itself.