Well, the day I thought would never, ever come finally did last Monday afternoon. 2 blokes from Swish installed a 400/400 FTTP connection. Installation was very straightforward, took a couple of hours, would have been less if the engineer hadn't left his laptop at the previous job and had to go back for it.
Experience so far is a bit mixed. It mostly works and I do get the advertised speed - a little over, in fact. But I'm distinctly unimpressed with the Plume Pod router they've supplied.
1) It's basically a mesh network hub - they want you to buy several of the things. My network is predominately wired, so it's not a good fit. There is only one downstream port on the router, so I now have to connect everything through my switch. This is fairly old box, it still works fine, but its ports are only 100M. So I now have a 400M internet connection throttled through a 100M switch. Previously I could connect the important devices on my network - my desktop, my wife's desktop, and our main NAS box, directly to the router at 1G, and only had less important stuff on the switch.
2) It plugs directly into a power socket. It's footprint is such that you can't use the neighbouring outlet(s) on a ganged socket - in my case 2 others are not usable, and I don't have many spare. Also all my sockets are low down by the skirting board - this inhibits finding a good spot for best wifi coverage. I had my old router on a shelf fairly high up which seemed to be best. I suppose I could put a 4-way extension up there, but I'm not keen on running a 240v cable up my wall.
3) It doesn't have a browser management interface. You have to manage it using a horrid app on a phone. This is grey on grey, uses very small size fonts, and at my advanced age I have considerable trouble reading it. Frustratingly, Plume do have a web app which I could use on my desktop screen, and enlarge to be easier to read, but when I tried to login to this it told me my account was not authorised to use it. It seems Swish can't or won't make it available to their customers here.
4) All the router stats and info are stored in "the Plume cloud", aka Plume servers somewhere, likely outside the jurisdiction of any GDPR rules etc. Both Plume and and Swish seem less than forthcoming about precisely what is collected, why, where it is stored, for how long, and how it is divvied up between Plume and Swish. There are examples, but I've not found a definitive list. One link* I followed on the Plume website to their Privacy Policy gave me a 404 error. Aside from the major privacy implications, it also means that without an internet connection the router can't be managed, and there aren't any status leds on it.
5) It doesn't play nicely, or indeed at all, with one of my Raspberry Pi machines. DHCP doesn't seem to work, and it doesn't get assigned an IP address. This a bit of a bummer because the RPi runs headless, and without an IP address I can't SSH to it to see what's going on. I've put it back on my old Fritzbox 7530 router and it's perfectly OK. 3 other RPis (2 wired, one wifi) on the network are also all fine, and all four are running much the same Linux based OS, so why this one is being victimised I have no idea. Neither, at present, do Swish support, who are allegedly on the case, though to be fair it is still fairly early days.
I'm on a 6 month free trial right now. If I persist with Swish I will almost certainly junk this load of rubbish and buy a proper router. Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations, please? I'm not a power user, I don't game and I don't stream all that much. Wifi performance isn't that important, but I would like something with 4 genuine 1G ports on the back.
*
https://support.plume.com/hc/en-us/sections/36000630...
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