Community Fibre 3 Gbps and 10 Gbps symmetric broadband

I see that London-centric Community Fibre are now offering some quite interesting Gig and higher (symmetric) residential broadband packages:

- 1 Gbps symmetric residential offering £38.50 pcm (2 year deal)
- 3 Gbps symmetric residential offering £99 pcm (2 year deal)

Business offerings are even more interesting;
- 1 Gbps symmetric @ 270+VAT pcm (3 year deal)
-10 Gbps symmetric @ £475+VAT pcm (3 year deal)

The gig business service seems aimed squarely at the gig on gig leased line market and looks to be undercutting the market by around 15-20% although being ‘shared’ it’s not quite an equivalent service from a contention perspective and the SLA / fix time isn’t as sharp.

Very interesting though, especially at the super high end.

@heathrow - will be interested to hear your thoughts on the resi service.

I've just had a letter from them saying they've started work in my area. I spoke to them on the phone and the best guess from the sales department was three months.

I've seen large (3 cover) footway boxes appear on main routes nearby - my guess would be aggregation nodes as the route feels like a sensible path for a spine.

What's confusing is that Openreach are building FTTP in the same exchange area, and I can't tell whether the draw ropes appearing on poles and blockage marks sprayed on the pavement are for the OR build or Community.

There are BT owned duct unblocking works 1km in one direction and Community Fibre owned unblocking works 1km in another. Time will tell who gets to me first.

What area area of London are you in? The nearest to us in N1 is about 0.6 miles away, which in London is like a whole other city full of people. There appears to be a large build concentration south of the river, south west, around Poplar in the east and also going north-west.

Is there anyone here with Community Fibre who can share their experiences? I'm interested in general impressions, but these would be my questions:

-how sticky is the IPv4 address (on the higher packages that don't use CGNAT)?
-is there any inbound/outbound filtering or blocking?
-what's the typical latency/jitter to London datacentres?
-install methods in overhead-served (from telephone pole) areas, do they require an external splice point, is the cable pre-connectorised - a picture of cable entry to ONT would be great.

It sounds like everything is 10G (XGS-PON) based so contention won't be much of an issue, is that accurate?

I've seen a few forum posts from people who use their own router, hopefully that is still possible on a no-support basis. I wonder if they'd provision the 1Gbps service on a 10GE interface (ideally the 602X with SFP+ cage, rather than the 621X on 10GBase-T) if you ask nicely.

The resi service seems fine,


I haven't yet run a further test with a Windows box plugged directly in to the ONT. I'm only get speeds of 300-600 over wifi which I think is a limitation of wifi rather than my CF.


CF provides a fixed ip address for their top 3 residential tarriffs.

I'm not clear on what the additional features of the business packages are - CF haven't said - presumably less contention deeper into the network? SLA?

I think the 3Gbp/s resi package is bonkers - you'd need to have 10 gig networking to take advantage.

Frankly, trying to get the 1 gig connection to break a sweat is hard.


I'm happy with resi - unlike the DSL service I had before we don't get line resets.

N1 is getting a bit of G.Network coverage, it may be worth dropping them an email to see if your road is on the plans.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

What area area of London are you in?

SW16, to the SE of the existing Community Fibre Furzedown coverage area.

The large footway boxes are both ~900m away from me, and 1200m from each other.

There was a roadworks permit issued for construction of a cabinet and footway box that would split the 1200m leg into a 400m and an 800m run, but that was two weeks ago and no cabinet/footway box has yet been built there.

1) Very sticky - had the same ip address.
2) No apparent filtering. To apply parental controls it's done in the supplied router. The ONT presents with a GigE interface - apparently unfiltered.
3) Using wifi (so worse case) a ping to www.bbc.co.uk gives this:
--- www.bbc.net.uk ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 3.446/4.154/5.156/0.638 ms

Note that I'm using a load-balanced edgerouter with Virgin as a back-up. This is on the CF circuit so is very much 'worse case'. Plugged in speedtest to CF direct to the ONT gives a ping of 1-2ms,
4) Overhead - flies into to a new board on the facia.frontwall. Install using fusion splicing to a white box on the wall. Then a connectorised length of fibre - say 0.6m to the ONT.

The fibre line is thick - I haven't tried to open the wallbox but I suspect there are multiple pairs.

I use my own router - Edgerouter X to support load balance to Virgin.


CF bundled two meshrouters which I haven't used.

Install uses Adtran 621i ONT.

621i has gigE - not 10G. I would imagine for the 3gig service they will use a different ONT. The ONT is zero touch.


See my comments in 'other ISPs' - install took 2 1/2 hours.

Keep an eye on public.londonworks.gov.uk

Their code on there is COM

The sequence in Brent was:

a) Aware of them duct unblocking before Xmas - major works.
b) First week of January they passed my house pulling fibre.
c) End of that first week fibre was slung between DP and sub-DP.
d) Service available for order following Monday
e) Installed Wednesday.

Nothing through the letterbox; I suspect as soon as a street is done they will be ready to order.

Edited by heathrow (Sun 24-Jan-21 19:12:51)

In reply to a post by heathrow:

CF provides a fixed ip address for their top 3 residential tarriffs.

I think the 3Gbp/s resi package is bonkers - you'd need to have 10 gig networking to take advantage.

Frankly, trying to get the 1 gig connection to break a sweat is hard.

Thanks, that's interesting, if it is fixed on the 1 gig package that is a huge plus for me. My needs are just under the 'will pay for static IP' threshold. I have a cheap backup FTTC line that has fixed IPs, so if anything ever goes wrong with dynamic DNS I can still get in.

Agree completely on the 3Gbps option - I do have some 10G networking but even at that there would be zero point for me. I'd be surprised if there are more than 50 people in their coverage area that actually make use of it, but it's a good PR exercise.

I wonder what PON split ratio they use, if it's the same 1:32 as Openreach there will be no congestion for a long time but I suspect they'd start at 1:64 or 1:128 and see how it goes.