Trooli questions

Trooli marked my area for new rollout in Jan and have already put up a very aggressive roadwork schedule for the area on one.network. As someone who has been waiting for anything better than my long line FTTC connection this is obviously quite exciting but I just had a few questions for anyone with a Trooli connection?
1) After installing at cabinets how long until I can order roughly? They seem to be moving pretty quickly but I've no idea on the next stage - are they like openreach where the ordering takes a long time to open up sometimes (My current ISP is coming up for renewal in a couple of months)
2) How reliable is the actual connection? I've heard lots of horror stories about their installs (ispreview) so will be keeping my FTTC until they actually install but with 2 people WFH I cannot afford to take on an unreliable connection nor can I afford two connections long term.

Thanks

Can't help with 2) as not (yet?) a customer, but Trooli have been building in my area since last autumn. All very low key, hardly any digging, just a PIA install. Most of the vans seem to be subcontractors and don't even say Trooli. I registered interest when I became aware - like you I'm on a long line FTTC at present - and yesterday got a phone call out of the blue saying they're now accepting orders for installation in April. Don't know how successful they're going to be - they haven't done any publicity, mailshots etc here so far. Be surprised if more than a handful of folks locally know about them. In contrast to Swish, the other altnet building round here, who everybody knows about because they are digging up everywhere and being a right pain.

Any links to posts you found on ispreview? I couldn't find much...

The comments here:
Page 1
and here:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/01/full-f...

They seem to be rolling out at fair speed here (different contractor?) with it going from announcement (early Jan) to roadworks on every street in two months scheduled to complete by end of Feb. Personally I'm stuck on a 35Mb/8Mb line and I've been struggling to WFH at times (I need to copy TBs sometimes) so I'd take anything better right now (No VM and no openreach FTTP planned).

I have a Wifi mesh setup I wouldn't give up on so just hoping that is ok to use?

Its tough with these new providers getting any clue how good they are when there is so little feedback but not sure I have any choice.

"Better than you have" is probably a safe bet, for work purposes anyway.

There may be other things you need to check with altnets. For example, if you're a gamer then being behind a CGN may cause problems. I'm not saying Trooli use CGN - I have no idea if they do - but it's something to check with altnets in general. These days they'll find it very hard to get hold of IPv4 addresses, unlike the established players with existing large allocations.

Its a fair point. I do game but not really online.

The question of reliability is a tough one. While my line is slow it been rock solid. I've only had 1 real day of outages in about the 9 years since we moved in (FTTC became available the week we moved in). Trooli does have a few instances of outages on their site which given how small their rollout is so far, does leave me a little concerned. I've got visions of taking out the trooli service and using the FTTC one as a backup which is an expensive way of doing things (but still cheaper than FTTPoD I suppose).

Thanks for the links. I was too lazy to scroll down to the comments.

@FireBubble commented here

However the quality / safety of their FTTP build is very poor.

I'd be interested to know details behind this remark.

I'm in a similar situation to @BlueWave97890 here. Trooli are accepting orders now where I live. Swish are building but likely not ready till Q4.

I now need to decide whether to sign up to an 18 month contract with Trooli who are taking orders to go live in December, or wait for Swish..

Trooli/Callflow do not seem to be that well regarded and don't have great T&Cs. The idea of switching straight after the contract term does not appeal either, with the potential for the clutter of multiple fibre cables and boxes.

There are several things I don't like about Trooli. I don't like the router lock-in - offends my Net Neutrality principles, apart from anything else. I don't like the 18-month contract - why do they need to do this if their service is so good? I don't like that they want final say on where the equipment and holes are sited - it's my house and my wall. Their Ts and Cs generally seem heavily weighted in their favour - punters are penalised for the slightest non-payment and can't escape early, but they can change the terms, prices whenever they like, and terminate the Agreement if they decide it isn't commercially viable. Their website has incorrect information about their supplied routers. They claim 99.99+% network uptime, but couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me how this is calculated and over what timeframe.

Comments on Trustpilot seem to be polarised into love 'em or hate 'em. If the installation is smooth then folks seem happy, but if it's necessary to deal with CS then that's where the problems can start.

They use CGN. They told me that home users can get a static IP for £5/mo, but this isn't in the price guide - only 5 ips for £15 for business users.

However the quality / safety of their FTTP build is very poor.

You can see an indication of Trooli safety and quality on streetview. Stuff gets left like this for months on end.


https://goo.gl/maps/m9SNCANuJgQ7KwDFA

https://goo.gl/maps/qM7Eoc5PJY85TqrL6

https://goo.gl/maps/4gi82CknmqDH7t58A

Edited by FibreBubble (Mon 07-Feb-22 18:21:32)

It's similar round here too. As in your pics, many instances of easily accessible boxes only a couple of metres or so off the ground, with coils of fibre sometimes taped up around, sometimes not even that.

Today's yoof are no doubt more interested in doing drugs or setting fire to the kids' playground, but when I were a lad in more innocent times, we would have taken great delight in shinning up the poles to find out what was inside them.

In reply to a post by Thaumaturge:

Thanks for the links. I was too lazy to scroll down to the comments.

@FireBubble commented here

However the quality / safety of their FTTP build is very poor.

I'd be interested to know details behind this remark.

I'm in a similar situation to @BlueWave97890 here. Trooli are accepting orders now where I live. Swish are building but likely not ready till Q4.

I now need to decide whether to sign up to an 18 month contract with Trooli who are taking orders to go live in December, or wait for Swish..

Trooli/Callflow do not seem to be that well regarded and don't have great T&Cs. The idea of switching straight after the contract term does not appeal either, with the potential for the clutter of multiple fibre cables and boxes.

There are several things I don't like about Trooli. I don't like the router lock-in - offends my Net Neutrality principles, apart from anything else. I don't like the 18-month contract - why do they need to do this if their service is so good? I don't like that they want final say on where the equipment and holes are sited - it's my house and my wall. Their Ts and Cs generally seem heavily weighted in their favour - punters are penalised for the slightest non-payment and can't escape early, but they can change the terms, prices whenever they like, and terminate the Agreement if they decide it isn't commercially viable. Their website has incorrect information about their supplied routers. They claim 99.99+% network uptime, but couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me how this is calculated and over what timeframe.

Comments on Trustpilot seem to be polarised into love 'em or hate 'em. If the installation is smooth then folks seem happy, but if it's necessary to deal with CS then that's where the problems can start.

They use CGN. They told me that home users can get a static IP for £5/mo, but this isn't in the price guide - only 5 ips for £15 for business users.

I decided to wait for Swish - Both Trooli and Gigaclear are due before, but there is definitely a higher rate of complaints regarding network stability and poor customer service than I'd expect.

At least in my area, the install timelines provided by Trooli for pre-orders were completely wrong also, when I made my last post, according to Trooli I would get an install early December. That same postcode now says it'll be another 10 weeks.

The Dept of Transport Code of Practice for Street-works is clear on this.

Unattended plant should be secure, tidy and not be able to be tampered with. Trooli routinely leave their plant insecure, able to be tampered with and easily strewn into live traffic. It is a serious safety issue that could easily result in injury or worse.

If Trooli are happy to leave the plant you can see in such a state you can imagine how they are leaving it out of sight and what they are treading on in the underground chambers.

Edited by FibreBubble (Mon 07-Feb-22 23:03:12)

Completely agree.

The loops on poles are all over the show round here. And more often than not, copper joints in footway boxes have been moved from their fixings and dropped into the bottom of the box, often left in water.

Have spotted some rather cavalier techniques used when they do mount the DP up the stick too.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

The loops on poles are all over the show round here.
...
Have spotted some rather cavalier techniques used when they do mount the DP up the stick too.

Excess cable managed badly seems to be standard practice for subcontractors. The worst in my area was actually some OR CBTs with a good 150m cable lashed to a pole at barely 4' above ground level. With that much excess I doubt the other end was pulled very far at all.

The most impressively cavalier technique was a Community Fibre subcontractor. They were generally pretty good at leaving their coils tidy at ~2.5m above ground, which was fine until I saw how they were going about it. Once the microduct was pulled through the bend from footway box to pole and up the capping, the larger man would fold up the lightweight red barrier used to stop pedestrians falling in pits, brace it against the pole - and the smaller man would jump up it and secure the coil.

And then there was a pole where CF ran microduct up from the footway chamber but never blew any fibre, so months after they left the area the coil dropped lower and lower, getting to head height. That particular pole is beside a PCP and one day the coil was unceremoniously cut off - I'm guessing a passing OR tech took matters into their own snips.

This all confirms my suspicions about Trooli (thankfully its mostly bad installs) but given no one else is slated for my town I have little choice. It'll be interesting to see how they manage the circa 45 year old ducting in my estate to be honest. I suspect its a little worse for wear.

Personally I've not had a chance to check out what the local contractor is like but they seem to be hitting the whole town of 10000+ people very quickly (All the poles for half the town are marked for road works in the next fortnight). I do worry given my estates ancient ducting though we're not going to be a priority (or maybe even skipped) when the poles are so much easier.

Had my Trooli install day today, was meant to be before Xmas according to their original email but it was clear it was probably a month ahead of the network being ready from the off.

So today they ran a wire from the telephone pole, over a road, attached to my house and then down to a small box on the outside where they splice the steel/Kevlar l encased fibre to something easier to work with that links to another small box on the inside of the house. Then there is an ONT mounted next to it that has a fibre from the small box as well as the Ethernet to the supplied Billion router, I think this is standard for business customers.

Unfortunately the box at the top of the pole has a large fibre cable linked to it and is still coiled about halfway down it, awaiting someone to route it down the metal conduit into the BT/OpenReach underground chamber that is next to it, perhaps then linking all the other poles at the same time.

So who knows how long to wait after this will be? Personally I have no other options for fibre so I have to wait.

Apart from optimistic lead times, I have nothing bad to say about Trooli, had a fair few dealings and everyone seems very competent and capable.

I don’t plan on using the Billion router, hoping that once TR069 has provisioned to the Billion router that I will be able to extract the username and password as well as host-uniq, then I’ll be able to spoof the WAN MAC address of the Billion with my own pfSense box. £15 p/m +VAT to use my own hardware is frankly ridiculous, but they blame it on needing a near £900 Draytek that can “bridge” the connection. Will post back if successful in using my own equipment.

An old callflow document suggests you can get into the web gui on the Billion with admin/admin. I presume that the PPPoE password isn't in clear text though?

In reply to a post by Alibloke2:

An old callflow document suggests you can get into the web gui on the Billion with admin/admin. I presume that the PPPoE password isn't in clear text though?

If you're capturing the packet exchange, whether the PPPoE password is in cleartext depends on whether they're using PAP or CHAP.

If it's CHAP then you need to do an offline dictionary attack to crack it.

However you could try plugging it into a local PPPoE server that only offers PAP, and see if it falls back to using that.

Right now, as my connection isn't working and TR069 hasn't changed anything on the Billion, it is still admin/admin to login to the WebGUI, the password is not in plain text when you look at the settings, all asterisked out, but you can just inspect the page in Chrome and change the message to "text" and when you hit enter it's just written write there.

For now, the password is a default of acs@callflow, but I'm assuming once my connection is live then this will change to something else.

Glad to see my forum post is still getting interest. The install around here seems to be progressing. They've gone from works at several cabinet locations to individual street works. I think they've blown the cable up my street in the ducts as some guy and truck went at the end of the road but I've no real idea. They seem to be doing several roads a day based off one.network. Still no clue when they will be available to actually order but will be following your responses taytos with interest. We've got zero other options here but long line FTTC or 8mbps 4g so I have no other choice.

So this morning I managed to get activated, Swedish fibre splicing ninja guy that was working on behalf of Trooli went the extra mile to get me connected in the OpenReach underground chambers.

Quick call to Trooli activations and I was up and running. Extracted the username/password from the Billion router web interface, only takes a couple of seconds.

I didn't bother with spoofing MAC addresses or use the host-uniq, just works fine with the PPPoE username/password. Working great and very happy.

That's good to hear. It's all ancient 1970s ducts here so I'm worried. They are still laying the main cables up the street so at least a month or two before I can even order.

There is a lot of our area still using aluminium cables and they're very brittle, I believe Trooli are missing quite large sections off their route because the ducts are so silted up, any effort to clear them will definitely break the old aluminium stuff so not worth it for them to continue. Don't blame them to be honest.

Unfortunately around here, because Trooli are seen to be here already, Zzoomm who are going mad trenching in the rest of the area have decided against coming here, it is quite unfortunate for those that cannot be connected by Trooli as Zzoomm will go anywhere they can get a way leave for.

Even if Zzoomm was here, I'd probably still have chosen Trooli anyway.

Hi Taytos,

Looking on one.network and Trooli have some plans in the coming weeks on our street. Do you recall what was involved when they did the original work to lay the cables in OR ducts and how long from then to when you could actually order?

Also, did they only run the cable across the road to your house as part of the home installation once the main network was laid in the road and you'd actually signed up?

Was a road closure required when they ran the cable across the road to your house? If so that must be costly for them having road closures each time they hook up a house!

Lastly, are you happy with Trooli speeds and service so far?

Jonathan

The PPPoe details are NOT provided by trooli (even if you ask for them)

It didn’t take long to recover them however, I initially tried using inspect element after logging into the router as an admin however the password is starred out.

Best way of recovering it is using SSH to login to the router using 192.168.1.1 and the username as engineer, then the password which is on the back of the router.

Once you’ve done that run the command “top” and it’ll spit out a lot of information. Use the search search function and find “PPPod” yes that is a letter D and you’ll have your password.

Your username will also be there or you can simply take this from the router itself as that isn’t stared out!

I found this link useful in case you need it:

https://gist.github.com/chriscpritchard/db98167c0a13...

But overall VERY easy. Pulling 800mbps down and 350mbps on their top spec residential package.

Ps. This was using the technicolour router they provided

It was certainly a process... over many months. So don't get too excited when you see them working on the street.

So initially it was a lot of rope pulling by contractors (Total Fibre mainly), they'd discover no end of blockages in the BT underground ducts. Moving on a few weeks it was some jetting teams... luckily for me they were successful on all the blockages that led to me. It would seem that if the jetting teams couldn't sort it, anyone after the blockage in our area (Little Sandhurst) has been abandoned and addresses removed from the postcode checker.

Another bunch of weeks later the men in cherry pickers came around, these guys will do 1 of 2 things, either they will cable tie a coil of fibre with a distribution box half way up the pole (normally when there are no pre-orders for that pole) or they will actually mount the distribution box at the top of the pole and then only cable a coil of fibre halfway down that pole. There are still loads of these coils on the poles around here still half way up the poles, seems they only bother putting them underground and connect them to something if perhaps they get an order from someone that will use that pole, no idea on that process as some are wired in, some not after many months.

Moving on a lot more weeks I finally get a call from Trooli saying they're ready to install, so the team comes and does in the inside work within a week, this is basically installing the ONT on the wall next to a flat white box that bridges from inside to outside, the outside box is also mounted but currently had no fibre from the pole to it. The day after a man came with a cherry picker, he ran the cable from the top of the pole to my house, he didn't have to close the road, had his ladder setup ready on my house, ran across the road and straight up the ladder with it held above any passing cars, perhaps took him 20 seconds (I live in a quiet area, so no-one drove over it, he says it will tolerate that though with their tough cable, it's not armoured apparently, just "tough").

At the end of all this... the coil of fibre was still half way down the pole from the distribution box so I was fibre linked to the top of the pole and nothing else at this point. Lots of back and forth with Trooli, lots of separate guys to eventually get that coil of fibre into the OpenReach chamber next to the pole, run under the road with a handy blue pull string that was already in place and then it was left another couple of days for a splicing engineer to come back out and finally connect me into another distribution node thing in another OpenReach chamber.

From pre-order to installation working it was about 4.5 months.

I've had 2 outages since install a few weeks ago, neither lasting longer than 10 minutes, they tell me it's something to do with a cabinet chassis? Here is a paste from their email to me...

"the issue lies with the chassis at the main cabinet that you are fed from, and it needs to be replaced, the replacement chassis has arrived to us, and we are currently waiting for engineer availability to replace it. When we have a clearer timeframe, we will let you know"

So I'm assuming there will be a long downtime period due when that chassis thing is replaced in the future.

Speed wise... I always get 305-310 down and 318-320 up, I have the business 300 package for now, may upgrade later but I'm extremely happy with performance, just wish in the first month that there was no downtime to reassure me. The Zen DSL line will still be setup as my failover in pfSense for a little while longer until I can trust the Trooli teething troubles are gone.

Any other questions let me know, I talked to about 20 separate engineers working on the Trooli network around here over those months so might have other insights if you want them.

Do you know how often your dynamic IP changes? Trooli claim they don't use Carrier Grade NAT, is that the case?