Swish Fibre - anyone using?

I preordered in January 2022. Since then I've had 1 visit from the sales team trying to sign me up and about three flyers through the letter box including one received today addressed to 'The Occupier'

We have 3 telegraph poles in our close and two of them have huge coils of fibre cellotaped to them.

Annoying all 3 also have the Fibre and Wireless boxes at the top cable up, but no sign of Hey Broadband! in my area.

In reply to a post by Chrispykreme:

Annoying all 3 also have the Fibre and Wireless boxes at the top cable up, but no sign of Hey Broadband! in my area.

F&W and Toob are coming around my estate, Swish are two towns over. Hey!B’s website says “coming soon” on my postcode.

Got an email yesterday from Openreach telling me my area is going to be full fibre enabled. With a tempting link to click on... clicked the link and it said they would enable full fibre between now and June 2025....

So either Swish are copying the Openreach playbook, or vice versa.

Another day another flyer from Swish addressed to 'The Occupier'. I presume they need a certain number of people to sign up before they finish the provisioning wortk.

e.g. say they are 30 people in my street, they need at least 5 to sign up before they will start the final laying of the fiibre.

I got a call today to arrange install. I booked for next Friday morning.

It has been a long wait.

My timeline:

Initial letter came through the door on 12th December last year saying the work would be starting in January.

Swish's contractors (OMJ) started civils as planned at the start of January 2023, taking about 5/6 weeks to complete works in our street. They installed various pits and lots of green plastic conduit with Toby boxes outside houses. They came back at the end of February to pull the purple fibre straws through and I got an email saying I was ready to be installed a day or two later. I ordered straight away via the website and it took about ten days before I got a call from a nice lady to book my install for tomorrow (17 March).

Assuming all goes well tomorrow, it will have taken just under 12 weeks from Swish's contractors putting up barriers to me getting my broadband.

I'm also hoping that they come around snagging at some point as my Toby box is about 1.5 inches below the pavement level and is going to be a constant puddle. An OMJ guy came around last week with a notebook so fingers crossed it won't be too long and that they can fix an active Toby box.

12 weeks that is great, i am now on 15 months and counting since they first starting digging up the street and i pre-ordered

After many many years of BTs BS, finally, Swish was surveying our road last week.

There was a long conversation with Swish and extended wayleave negotiations to get to this point, but hopefully we'll move off flakey mobile broadband, and I can take the antenna off the front of the house by summer.....

Fingers crossed

New thread branch

Finally got contacted by Swish for an install date after ordering in Jan 2022. Sadly I am not in the early months of a Shell Fibre 18m contract. I got fed up with waiting and NOW (who I was on a 1 month contract with) tried to jack up the prices.

Be interesting to see how many neighbours actually take them up.

Still no sign of Hey Broadband

In reply to a post by Chrispykreme:

....Be interesting to see how many neighbours actually take them up....

I don't think there are too many where I live and the network never shows any sign of slowdown or packet loss.

I would assume there is some friction from some less technical and older people who do not want to lose access to their BT number for example. Swish's VOIP was really easy to set up and it has worked without issue but I wish I could convince my wife to just get rid of it for the handful of people that still call it.

Has anyone experienced a delay between some properties in a small postcode going 'live', and the remainder?

Our postcode has about six properties in, along maybe a 40m road, of which two show as 'live' on the thinkbb maps + Swish website. Our property has been 'coming soon' for most of the year. I've emailed Swish but sadly they deny any available dates/plans to include our address. We're on a different overhead pole so suspect maybe this is it - but this is surely easier than a new duct?!

I'm desperate to get away from our 30mbps FTTC, but reading all the news about Altnets pulling back infra installs to focus on existing availability thinks we might get missed. So close.

In reply to a post by kpfttp:

Has anyone experienced a delay between some properties in a small postcode going 'live', and the remainder?

Yes. Despite cabling the road I live on a year and a half ago, and connecting neighbours a few yards up the road, Swish won't connect me (or my next door neighbour). I can get no sense out of them apart from a rumour that due to pipes in the road it's technically difficult, whatever that means. It would seem that Swish are only interested in connecting 'easy' customers, the rest of us - touch luck!

In reply to a post by kpfttp:

Has anyone experienced a delay between some properties in a small postcode going 'live', and the remainder?

Yes. I did a pre-order when it became possible to do so for my street (Nov 2021). Once they laid the main fibre in a new duct I started chasing to get connected, which was complicated by needing to sort out a wayleave for my property, re-use the openreach duct under it and uncover the openreach chamber at the bottom of the duct, just outside my front gate. Only then was it possible for a toby box to be installed and me to get connected (Oct 2022). So overall a decent amount of time and effort. Despite all that, no other toby boxes were installed on the rest of the street and the availability checker is back to saying 'coming soon'. Neighbours have inquired directly and been told there's no plans to provide coverage, except for ones further down that are fed via overhead pole.

I had this for a month or two. The ducts were blocked/collapsed so required additional work from the contractor. As soon as that was completed I was installed.

Service has been faultless so far.

I've had Swish Fibre for 8 months ish, no major issues. However, ever since moving to Swish for some reason my Steam downloads always get stuck, every single day. I have to reset the download cache every day for them to complete. Never happened with FTTC and only started the day after we got Swish. The PC is hardwired and otherwise the network is flawless so I'm not sure if there is some issue with Steam and Swish Fibre?