The day has arrived!!

So today is the day, after ordering a full-fibre connection from Sky the BT Openreach engineers are here installing the full-fibre broadband connection. I am like a kid at Christmas with excitement to almost quadruple my download and upload speeds. Fingers crossed everything goes to plan.

Current speeds 25.3 down 4.95 up, the upload speed is my main thing, trying to live stream, upload 4k youtube videos is painful to say the least. Hoping to have 145mb down and 25mb upload when the install is complete.

In reply to a post by ianhrp:

So today is the day, after ordering a full-fibre connection from Sky the BT Openreach engineers are here installing the full-fibre broadband connection. I am like a kid at Christmas with excitement to almost quadruple my download and upload speeds. Fingers crossed everything goes to plan.

Current speeds 25.3 down 4.95 up, the upload speed is my main thing, trying to live stream, upload 4k youtube videos is painful to say the least. Hoping to have 145mb down and 25mb upload when the install is complete.

Brilliant, I'm excited for you

I've got another 2 weeks to wait before I get full fibre installed. Mine is ordered through Sky as well.

I hope Sky will start offering some faster options in the near future. If you are lucky enough to live in the ROI, Sky have the Ultrafast Max service which is the 1Gb option.

I hope so as well, think they will roll out soon.

All done and installed. 3 OpenReach engineers needed for the install as they had to pull the cabling from the poll, all were very friendly and discussed where to put the box on the outside and inside. Very impressed took them about 3 hours to complete the installation.

All activated and working and now speeds of 148mb down and 27.5 up sure that will settle but so far all good.

One happy middle age man!

Congratulations!

There's no "settling time" for FTTP, as there's no dynamic line management. The speed you get is the speed you get now.

That's awesome! Here's to more people feeling the same!

In reply to a post by candlerb:

There's no "settling time" for FTTP,

Too true. I got 500/500Mb/s from the moment the router was turned on.

What isp and package are you on ? I ask because of your 500mbit upload, I’m with Zen and my setup was via OR and the max I got was 900mbit down and 120mbit up.

Was your install also done with bt openreach ?

There is also a City Fibre install going on in my city, digging up all the pavements and they offer 1000 up and down, but for the first 2 years vodaphone has exclusive access, to it.

I was just curious of your upload speed.

Openreach based FTTP is purely asymmetric (for now anyway). If you see folks posting symmetric FTTP speeds then its definitely not Openreach based FTTP but another FTTP altnet provider that does symmetric service. In the case of 69bertie above his service is from Lincs based Quantum Air Fibre.

Cool, there is fttp competition in my city, Open Reach and CityFibre, the later offers 1000 up and down.

The good thing is, the fttp capable pole is in my garden and I was the first to hook up, I just wished we had this 20+ years ago.

I'm with an altnet for an gigabit symmetrical service. Only £40/month. Great value!

Not sure why OR don't offer this.

In reply to a post by nofappingway:

I'm with an altnet for an gigabit symmetrical service. Only £40/month. Great value!

Not sure why OR don't offer this.

A number of reasons.

OpenReach FTTP is GPON, which is asymmetric.
It's 1.2Gb/s upstream split up to 32 ways.

OpenReach guarantee the upstream speed they sell to ISP's.
Allowing a single customer to take 1Gb/s of the 1.2Gb/s available to the up to 32 properties doesn't fit with that guarantee.

CityFibre is also GPON but they don't guarantee the upstream in the same way.

OpenReach also have very large leased line revenues which cheap symmetrical gigabit would likely eat in to.
They are also highly regulated unlike your Alt-Net.

Just an update on my install.

The Openreach engineer called to say he would be arriving at around 10:30 then called back 10 minutes later to say he had been called to help on another install and would arrive after lunch.

1:30 he turns up and we run through where the ONT will go and starts the work outside but has to go off and get a key for something to do with the duct box, so off he goes and gets back about 2:15 and gets down to business.

At around 4pm he's got it all connected up but it takes the router about 20 minutes to connect but finally does and a quick speed test on my phone and get a respectable 135 down and 27 up. Next connected the laptop with an ethernet cable to the router and get 148 down and 30.5 up.

Later on I had a look at the router syslog to see if there was anything that caused the 20 minute delay in connecting and noticed it was having problems resolving the TR069 hostname so it could load the SIP configuration for the phone.

In reply to a post by simon194:

Just an update on my install.

The Openreach engineer called to say he would be arriving at around 10:30 then called back 10 minutes later to say he had been called to help on another install and would arrive after lunch.

1:30 he turns up and we run through where the ONT will go and starts the work outside but has to go off and get a key for something to do with the duct box, so off he goes and gets back about 2:15 and gets down to business.

At around 4pm he's got it all connected up but it takes the router about 20 minutes to connect but finally does and a quick speed test on my phone and get a respectable 135 down and 27 up. Next connected the laptop with an ethernet cable to the router and get 148 down and 30.5 up.

Later on I had a look at the router syslog to see if there was anything that caused the 20 minute delay in connecting and noticed it was having problems resolving the TR069 hostname so it could load the SIP configuration for the phone.

Glad you got yours sorted in the end. My poor engineer was on site from 08:30 to 13:30 and couldn't get it sorted because of issues with the ducts. My issue is 100m of ducting to get through before it gets to the road

Which speedtest site did you use?

Try the BT one at: https://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ then Fast.com (also hit more info to see UPstream), TBB and Ookla at speedtest.net You will see some interesting variation ...

I went live with Zen last week.

The Openreach engineer was a bit peeved as he spent a while poking and prodding the router to try and bring the connection to life, only to find out on calling them that Zen don't actually provision the service at their end until the Openreach engineer closes off the job and it shows on Zen's systems as live. So you can be in a bit of a catch 22 of the engineer wanting to see it working before closing the job, and it not being enabled until they close the job!

After he closed the job down the router came up within about 10 minutes.

I wonder if you might have had something similar.

I used the TBB one.

In reply to a post by jimbof:

I went live with Zen last week.

The Openreach engineer was a bit peeved as he spent a while poking and prodding the router to try and bring the connection to life, only to find out on calling them that Zen don't actually provision the service at their end until the Openreach engineer closes off the job and it shows on Zen's systems as live.

Hi,

Did you find out if this is normal procedure for Zen or one off? My install is scheduled for early May, it would be good info to pass on to the installer.

Thanks.

The guy at Zen was very matter of fact, and said that until the engineer closed the job it wouldn't trigger provisioning at their side. (like "that's the way it is").
So I doubt it was a one off.

That is their usual modus operandi ......

Seems a little short sighted to me, folk just want to know that the install is a success, and I suspect they want to know this prior to the Openreach bod leaving.

In reply to a post by wtfnub:

What isp and package are you on ? I ask because of your 500mbit upload, I’m with Zen and my setup was via OR and the max I got was 900mbit down and 120mbit up.
Was your install also done with bt openreach ?

Sorry, missed your post. As Pheasant has already mentioned Quantum Air Fibre is the ISP. And not an Openreach van or person in sight.

Like others, I really cannot see why OR supplied services are not done the same. It doesn't seem to involve more kit in the home i.e. having the same up and down speeds. I've just got a very small white box (100mm) on the wall where the fibre comes in with the router attached to it. They also do 1000 up and down but £60 a month was just a bit too much for my pocket - I really couldn't justify spending that sort of money each month.

In reply to a post by 69bertie:

Like others, I really cannot see why OR supplied services are not done the same. It doesn't seem to involve more kit in the home i.e. having the same up and down speeds.

TL;DR: 2) the technology is asymmetric, Openreach don't want to saturate the PON so a ratio of 2:1 download:upload is a hard limit. 1) Openreach want to make more money so the ratio is more like 8:1 at the high end.


There are two reasons that make sense.

1) Protection of leased line revenue. 110Mbit upload is plenty for any home use, even with multiple residents on different video calls, streaming (out) and so on. It is also fine for small to medium offices, if there are no special needs such as engineering firms with large drawings, media production etc. 110 up is likely comfortable for 20 users at least. If there is a business need for more than 100Mbit then there is money to spend on a leased line. Openreach supply a lot of those and don't want to lose that income.

In some city centre business areas (Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, probably more) FTTC has not been widely deployed, some say as a ploy to sell leased lines. A typical small business (say 10 in the office) might take a 50/50 or 100/100 leased line. When FTTP comes along Openreach don't want them moving to a cheap 80/80 service, which would be fine for them. Keeping it asymmetric at 80/20 means they have to pay for 550/75 or 1000/115 to get the upload they need.

Alternative networks don't have that base so there is no harm in offering symmetric speeds especially in residential areas. ISP traffic is heavily inbound and their upstream transit and peering links will all be symmetric, so moving the traffic really does cost them nothing, and it's an easy way to differentiate their service from Openreach. On top of that, apart from the odd work-from-home engineer, graphic designer or photographer, nobody will make use of the upload. Making money by selling something you have sitting on the shelf (upstream capacity) and that nobody will really use is excellent business!

2) OR FTTP runs on GPON which shares ~2.5Gbit down and ~1.2Gbit up between up to 32 connections. I imagine they don't want to deal with situations where the PON gets saturated so they've set contention at a level they know won't cause problems for a while. By that argument they could, however, set upload bandwidth to 50% of download.

Seems a bit nuts really.

The guy doing my install said he thought Zen used to always provision initially at 300 down until the job got completed, and then would set the proper speed, so that a connection would be available at installation time. But it sounds like that has changed.

I'm sure there's a reason (probably not a very good one though!!!)

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Seems a little short sighted to me, folk just want to know that the install is a success, and I suspect they want to know this prior to the Openreach bod leaving.

I agree, I can't see a sensible motivation for this. Unless if on non-Zen backhaul, does provisioning trigger the start of backhaul charges?

I doubt it, and any in case it would be pennies per day.

More likely Zen don't want to trigger a whole bunch of provisioning until the line has gone live - in particular porting the phone number for a voice service. Otherwise lines could remain in a half-provisioned state for some time.

Perhaps it is also related to FTTC to FTTP migration: they can't give the user their static IPv4/IPv6 allocation on FTTP, until the FTTP has gone live.

Whatever it was, it sounded like it was particular to some Zen quirk to me, as the implication was that other ISPs didn't behave this way. So it sounds like it shouldn't be beyond them to do it a bit better.

It's certainly by no means how other ISP's do FTTP connections on Openreach/BTW.