My First FTTP Outage

After 27 months of continuous uptime, at 1:15am today my BT FTTP service went down for the first time. The LOS light is solid red, and rebooting the ONT didn’t help.

To BT’s credit, they immediately activated unlimited data on my two mobiles and shipped a mini hub. Sadly the mini hub doesn’t have Ethernet so I cannot use it as a drop-in replacement for my home’s structured wiring to feed the access points; so wifi will be limited to a small part of this three storey house.

An Openreach engineer is booked for tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

i had an fttp outage due to falling trees bringing down the overhead fibre cables that serve my part of the village. as you say bt shipped a minihub and as you said it doesnt have ethernet so couldnt, like you, feed the whole house. oh and when the minihub arrived it also needs charging before use. when i went to charge the minihub we also experienced a power cut!!!!! the minihub seems to be very insensitive to receving a 4/5g ? signal so it was a bit hit and miss as to whether it would connect.

Edited by threelegs (Tue 16-Feb-21 10:17:06)

If you use the BT smart hub it may be worth looking as their halo 3+ offer - this gives 4g back up linked into the smart hub - so all your Ethernet devices still work and the 4g kicks in Within 2 minutes of your fttp failing .

I’ve got it and it works pretty well . I simulated a fault by disconnecting the cable from ont to smart hub and it switched to 4g within 2 minutes and all my Wi-fi / Ethernet devices worked without having swap Wi-fi networks / cables etc .

Alternatively can one of your AP’s act as a Wi-fi-Ethernet bridge ?

As I've posted earlier, our village suffered two complete outages of FTTP within the first year, meanwhile FTTC carried on. I think it might well have been a poor quality install.

I'm running a Fritz!Box 7490 router instead of the Smart Hub because I need VPN and it acts as my VoIP SIP gateway bridging multiple DECT handsets.

http://www.andrewwhyman.com/blog/tech/bt-fttp-instal... reports that the hub presents a virtual Ethernet interface when connected to a PC over USB, so I'll try connecting it to the Fritz and see if it can use it for 4G failover.

Failing that, I can switch the APs over to repeater/mesh mode and bridge the hub wifi.

it would have been nice if the mini hub had been designed to just plug into the smart hub and take over if needed

Edited by threelegs (Tue 16-Feb-21 11:22:29)

Threelegs The newer version of ‘BT Halo’ does just that

In reply to a post by DougM:

After 27 months of continuous uptime, at 1:15am today my BT FTTP service went down for the first time. The LOS light is solid red, and rebooting the ONT didn’t help.

To BT’s credit, they immediately activated unlimited data on my two mobiles and shipped a mini hub. Sadly the mini hub doesn’t have Ethernet so I cannot use it as a drop-in replacement for my home’s structured wiring to feed the access points; so wifi will be limited to a small part of this three storey house.

An Openreach engineer is booked for tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

Our main outage was around 18 months ago, Openreach FTTP, but running a Cerberus (business based) package so better SLA's than a resi service.

We had a summer time local lightning strike which killed most of our LAN gear. Beside a host of other destruction, it entered the structured cabling system, and burn marked/spot welded two stacked switches, we lost a lot of gear that day. Some was outright blown off the wall, sooty, charred and black. No kidding.

The Openreach ONT seemed at first unaffected, however it wasn't (given it was connected to routers and switches all of which died). The copper port refused to link higher than 100M - not good on a > 100M service...

A late afternoon call to Cerberus, was met initially by some head scratching - as service from their end looked 100% operative, but took some convincing the issue was the ONT. By 9pm that evening we had confirmation that they had Openreach was booked in to replace the ONT, actually the next morning.

Next day Openreach engineer arrives (early) and swaps out the ONT. Service back to normal around 10:30am. Which I still think is pretty impressive.

I find it impressive that the ONT continued to do anything! Sounds like it didn't have much left to talk to either, Hope the insurance paid out!

just looked up the service with halo 3 and they want an extra £21 a month more than I pay now!!! yeah right!

The fault tracking shows that the engineer attended and fixed the problem.

No engineer showed-up at the house, and LOS remains red. Not exactly my definition of "fixed".

Currently on-hold in a queue (estimated 30 minute wait) to find out what's going-on. I guess I will not get automatic compensation for a missed appointment because BT's system records that it wasn't missed; I'll need to raise a complaint unless they get someone here today.

Ignore the online fault tracking... it’s not fit for purpose.

Engineers confirmed and arrived. Wish them luck!

The engineers confirmed there was no light at the ONT and found a nest inside the external CSP had caused physical damage. They cleaned-out the CSP, re-spliced the connection, confirmed connectivity was restored and re-sealed it to try and prevent a reoccurrence.

It took about 40 minutes from arrival and I'm happily back online an hour before the mini hub arrived. 26 hours from report to fix is pretty impressive for a residential service on a fault that needed a physical repair. They just need to fix the dodgy fault tracking.

I now have the mini hub already here should there be any future outage, and having free unlimited data enabled on the kids' phones was a godsend, particularly during half-term during lock-down!

In reply to a post by DougM:

The engineers confirmed there was no light at the ONT and found a nest inside the external CSP had caused physical damage. They cleaned-out the CSP, re-spliced the connection, confirmed connectivity was restored and re-sealed it to try and prevent a reoccurrence.

Perhaps you should "Tweet" the result!

Ah the joys of wildlife. Bird, insect or other nest?

I'm kind of glad I don't have a CSP because we already have too many issues with wasps and house martins setting up shop in all manner of weird and awkward places.

This was insect damage.

It's interesting to see the new houses nearby served by both Openreach FTTP and Virgin Media FTTP (RFoG). Like mine, Openreach has capping that seals around the duct that covers the tube into the CSP. Virgin Media has an exposed green duct with the smaller fibre tube emerging and going into their large external wall box without any capping or obvious attempts to seal anything. Makes me wonder how resilient they will be over the years.

Wow - what sort of insects, I assume ants?

I just tested the BT 4G Mini Hub on the Fritz!Box 7490 and it works perfectly as a WAN backup, subject to coverage.

- Connect the BT 4G Mini Hub to one of the USB ports and power it on
- Log into the Fritz!Box UI and navigate to Internet > Mobile Network (this menu only appears after a supported modem/dongle is connected)
- Check the box "Internet connection via mobile communications enabled" and submit

The online monitor page now shows the router is connected via the mobile network.

If using VDSL2 (FTTC), the Fritz can be configured to auto-failover to the connected 4G modem with the option: "Connect to the internet using the mobile communications network only when the DSL connection fails".

Sadly the coverage here is terrible, with no signal in my comms cupboard, but the above information may be useful to someone else using BT Halo with a Fritz!Box.

In reply to a post by DougM:

I now have the mini hub already here should there be any future outage, and having free unlimited data enabled on the kids' phones was a godsend, particularly during half-term during lock-down!

You don't have to send it back once the fault is cleared?

In reply to a post by candlerb:

You don't have to send it back once the fault is cleared?

The email says I get to keep it in-case of future outages:

When your broadband's up and running
We'll let you know when we've switched off your Mini Hub and Broadband Backup.

After we've switched off your Mini Hub, keep it somewhere safe. That way, if there's a problem with your broadband in the future, we'll be able to switch it on again straight away.

It gets automatically enabled anytime I raise a broadband outage fault via MyBT.

and they seem to leave it working for about ten days after the fault is cleared, then you get an e-mail saying that they are going to turn it off (well thats what happened to me anyway)