Possible problem from FTTP Upgrade due to house layout

I live in a rural location which is likely to be near the bottom of the list for FTTP provision. However, I am thinking about the possible complications when it arrives because of the nature of my broadband set-up. The point of entry is in my integral garage. I have a study above where I have my router plugged into a phone line extension. I run 2 computers hard-wired to the router. I would not want a router in the garage because it is dusty and inconvenient for access, and I would then have to run the computers on WIFI. Would the Openreach installer provide a connection to a router in my first floor study? Or is there another possibly solution?.

As long as they can route the cable (probably around the outside of the building) then they usually are quite flexible. Installing into a first floor room is not that unusual.

Thanks Ian72. That is reassuring!

I had a similar situation, where the fibre would need to be run through my loft which they were reluctant to do. So the ONT and router ended up in a bedroom that was poor for wifi. I solved the problem by running an ethernet cable from the ONT though the loft and so I now have the router where I wanted it.

The router and the ONT do not have to be near each other, you could run an ethernet cable from the ONT to the router even if the router is the other side of the house. So you could have the ONT in the garage and the router in the study above.

My ONT is behind the TV and the router is on the other side of the room, a 20 meter Ethernet cable connects them and it is fine.

In reply to a post by threelegs:

The router and the ONT do not have to be near each other, you could run an ethernet cable from the ONT to the router even if the router is the other side of the house. So you could have the ONT in the garage and the router in the study above.

Since I may be faced with a similar problem, is it possible to hardwire the ethernet cable to the ONT similar to what can be done with the current ADSL NTE5 boxes? The less neat alternative is to have an ethernet socket adjacent to the ONT and use a short patch cable.

For my setup, the easiest would be to hardwire a length of external Cat5e to the back of the ONT and route the cable round the outside to a convenient bedroom. It's a bungalow so no real problems doing it that way since the roof space is not that easy to move about in.

Why use an ethernet socket and patch lead? I've a bungalow and I just used an ethernet lead straight into the ONT and it runs through the roofspace (very limited space as well) to the other end of the property and down to the router, maybe 20Mtrs or so. I've had no issues with this setup.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

is it possible to hardwire the ethernet cable to the ONT similar to what can be done with the current ADSL NTE5 boxes?

No.

The ONT only has a standard ethernet port on it that any cable must plug into.

You can either put an ethernet socket next to where you want the ont to go and hardwire your cat5e cable into that, or get a premade lead and then plug into the ont when it arrives.

In reply to a post by Adduxi:

Why use an ethernet socket and patch lead? I've a bungalow and I just used an ethernet lead straight into the ONT and it runs through the roofspace (very limited space as well) to the other end of the property and down to the router, maybe 20Mtrs or so. I've had no issues with this setup.

Yes you're perfectly right. But my real question is, are you able to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT or does it have to plug in?

My ideal would be to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT and take that through the back of the ONT to the wall outside, round the side wall and into a spare bedroom where the router is. It's there because it's about the best place to give decent WiFi across the bungalow.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

But my real question is, are you able to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT or does it have to plug in?

No, its an active (powered) device that whilst people think of it as similar to the old OR NTE, what you get can be very different depending on the network provider. OR, CF, VM or one of the AltNets. Some providers don't even wall mount.

You don't open the ONT in the same way you don't open the router ("hub") thing the ISP sends you.

My ideal would be to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT and take that through the back of the ONT to the wall outside, round the side wall and into a spare bedroom where the router is. It's there because it's about the best place to give decent WiFi across the bungalow.

Then you're looking for exterior grade Cat5 and youd probably need to add the RJ45 connector yourself to make the hole through the wall smaller.

In reply to a post by TheInstaller:

No.
The ONT only has a standard ethernet port on it that any cable must plug into.
You can either put an ethernet socket next to where you want the ont to go and hardwire your cat5e cable into that, or get a premade lead and then plug into the ont when it arrives.

Thanks. That's told me what I wanted to know. The only external Cat5 that I have seen was very stiff, no doubt due to the weather proof covering. This wouldn't make it the easiest to fit a plug on the end, so it looks as though I shall have to go through the roof space with internal quality cable. Not as easy but there we are.

I think this would be OR but the ISP would be iDNet. Virgin is available round here but I don't think any of the alt nets are in this area.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

I think this would be OR but the ISP would be iDNet.

Quite a few pictures of the OR ONT around, there are a few makes, Sky's website has colour pics:
https://www.sky.com/help/articles/optical-network-te...

As with copper the network operator is important at this point, your ISP (IDnet) doesn't matter at the physical connection point.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 25-Jun-23 12:41:13)

But my real question is, are you able to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT or does it have to plug in?

A second reply of ‘no you cannot hardwire the cable direct into the ONT’.

Thanks for the link. Looking at the pic, even though the one fitted won't be Sky, it should be possible to do a neat enough job. However If I have to run the cable up throough the roof space it will probably mean cutting a chase in the wall near the ONT and having to re-plaster. The other end in the spare bedroom can be tacked to the wall. Unsightly, but provided there's enough slack I can cut a channel in the plaster and put in a flush ethernet socket at redecoration time.

The BT ONTs don't look a lot different so I've now got a better idea of how to do the job.

Thanks to all.

Sky use Openreach to supply FTTP so all the possible Openreach ONTs are shown in the link provided by jchamier, All ISPs supplied by Openreach use the same range of ONTs.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

In reply to a post by Adduxi:

Why use an ethernet socket and patch lead? I've a bungalow and I just used an ethernet lead straight into the ONT and it runs through the roofspace (very limited space as well) to the other end of the property and down to the router, maybe 20Mtrs or so. I've had no issues with this setup.

Yes you're perfectly right. But my real question is, are you able to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT or does it have to plug in?

My ideal would be to hardwire the Cat5 into the ONT and take that through the back of the ONT to the wall outside, round the side wall and into a spare bedroom where the router is. It's there because it's about the best place to give decent WiFi across the bungalow.

The internal ethernet cable has to plug in to the RJ45 Outlet Port on the ONT. - (It is not an issue as RJ45 faceplates are cheap and can look neat).

At the end of the day the ONT is not really yours; it is equipment that is supplied and maintained by openreach and/or your ISP and in the event of a fault on the line outside of your house that is where the house side of any fault investigation by Openreach needs to start and end as up to the ONT is Openreach/your ISPs responsibility/problem and after the ONT it is yours.

Personally, if I was planning to install a long run of new ethernet cable, I would internally wire the whole house with CAT 6a Cable, (behind the plaster), and via the attic which is what we did around five years ago with RJ45 sockets in every room behind each TV point. - Run a cable from the ONT to your preferred router location and distribute it from there.

In the event of a fault it is always best to be able to move the router next to the ONT for testing purposes and an ethernet port on the ONT is handy so you can eliminate any internal cables.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

Thanks for the link. Looking at the pic, even though the one fitted won't be Sky, it should be possible to do a neat enough job. However If I have to run the cable up throough the roof space it will probably mean cutting a chase in the wall near the ONT and having to re-plaster. The other end in the spare bedroom can be tacked to the wall. Unsightly, but provided there's enough slack I can cut a channel in the plaster and put in a flush ethernet socket at redecoration time.

The BT ONTs don't look a lot different so I've now got a better idea of how to do the job.

Thanks to all.

Remember you have three cables into the ONT - the fibre cable, your own network cable (Cat5e etc) and a power cable from a 12v plug pack.

In reply to a post by Fido:

Personally, if I was planning to install a long run of new ethernet cable, I would internally wire the whole house with CAT 6a Cable, (behind the plaster), and via the attic which is what we did around five years ago with RJ45 sockets in every room behind each TV point. - Run a cable from the ONT to your preferred router location and distribute it from there.

The cable run wouldn't be particularly long - around 20/25m to the spare bedroom,. The other internal runs from the router's central location would not be any longer. The place is partially wired internally with Cat5e and given the short length of the cable runs I doubt whether there would be any significant speed difference using 6a. Nonetheless it would be relatively simple to perform an upgrade.

In reply to a post by Fido:

In the event of a fault it is always best to be able to move the router next to the ONT for testing purposes and an ethernet port on the ONT is handy so you can eliminate any internal cables.

Must admit that is one thing I'd not thought about

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

<snip> round the side wall and into a spare bedroom where the router is. It's there because it's about the best place to give decent WiFi across the bungalow.

My router is a non wifi unit, and as the property is also a bungalow, I chose to use PoE ceiling mounted wifi access points. So the position of the router is sort of irrelevant in my case. It might be something to think about if you are already in the roof space with cables?

In reply to a post by Adduxi:

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

<snip> round the side wall and into a spare bedroom where the router is. It's there because it's about the best place to give decent WiFi across the bungalow.

My router is a non wifi unit, and as the property is also a bungalow, I chose to use PoE ceiling mounted wifi access points. So the position of the router is sort of irrelevant in my case. It might be something to think about if you are already in the roof space with cables?

It had crossed my mind to do that and in fact it wouldn't be that difficult. Some of the ceiling mounted units are quite neat and the WiFi access points tend to be better all round than the all-in-one-units. I would still need to have the main router in the bedroom since that's where the Cat5 wiring converges.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

I would still need to have the main router in the bedroom since that's where the Cat5 wiring converges.

If you do go with the WiFi access points you would then have the flexibility to put a switch where the connections converge and the router at the other end of one of the converging connections?

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

I would still need to have the main router in the bedroom since that's where the Cat5 wiring converges.

If you do go with the WiFi access points you would then have the flexibility to put a switch where the connections converge and the router at the other end of one of the converging connections?

That's another possibility. Plenty of cheap Gigabit switches around and I don't doubt reasonably priced 2.5/10Gig ones will soon be available. To be fair though, I've not looked that hard to find any.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

That's another possibility. Plenty of cheap Gigabit switches around and I don't doubt reasonably priced 2.5/10Gig ones will soon be available. To be fair though, I've not looked that hard to find any.

2.5 GigE with 5 ports are reasonably priced, but more ports are expensive, and 10GigE is still expensive (for home use).

10Gbe is still a pain to do on mainstream mobos, theres only one 1x pcie 4.0 10gbe nic out there.

2.5gb is becoming common place on mobos, and unmanaged 2.5gb switches are as you said are now reasonable in price..

In reply to a post by Taras:

10Gbe is still a pain to do on mainstream mobos, theres only one 1x pcie 4.0 10gbe nic out there. .5gb is becoming common place on mobos, and unmanaged 2.5gb switches are as you said are now reasonable in price..

None of my desktops have Thunderbolt, but laptops are appearing with Thunderbolt 4 that can connected to 10GigE but its not cheap.

In reply to a post by Taras:

10Gbe is still a pain to do on mainstream mobos, theres only one 1x pcie 4.0 10gbe nic out there.

The new Mac Mini offers 10GbE as an addtional option for £100 extra. Not looked, but I would guess others in the current Mac range also do so, or will at the next revision.

My 3 years old Intel version has 2.5GbE but everything else on the network is still only 1GbE. Perhaps in three years or so when I replace the current one with an Apple Silicon Mini, it may be worth going for the 10GbE option, but as others have said for home use there doesn't appear to be much in the way of switches and NAS that currently offers it.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

much in the way of switches and NAS that currently offers it.

Synology offer an add-on card for some of the modern range that is 10 & 2.5 compatible. My corporate and personal laptops that support WiFi 6/6E with 160MHz wide, one has a 1GigE port, the other no Ethernet - so the rest of the consumer and pro-sumer space is not keeping up with the Mac Mini offering

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Synology offer an add-on card for some of the modern range that is 10 & 2.5 compatible.

That's worth knowing next time I need a new modem.

Hehehe. The Synology is a NAS box rather than a modem, but in any event well worth slotting in a 10 GbE card if you’re in the habit of shifting large amounts of data in and out of one and the rest of your network is suitably wide.

I upgraded mine and it was a ton less headaches and more performant than bonding it’s on board 4 x GbE ports.

I’m assuming if you want 2.5GigE or 10GigE, you have large data to move around. Apple includes 10GigE option on the Mac Mini because many of the use cases that people buy Mac hardware (and macOS) for is video editing of 4K or 8K footage. Before the Mini had 10GigE options, there were Thunderbolt adaptors to direct attach storage arrays (think an external array of 5 to 10 disks exclusively attached to one computer) for the speed.

This is the lowest product that supports the upgrade card, it has 2 x 1GigE ports on the back: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS723+

The network upgrade card is here: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/E10G22-T1-Mini - US import around £110 on Amazon, EU import around £130 on amazon. May be cheaper elsewhere (e.g. Broadbandbuyer). Stock levels vary.

I’ve not bought the card yet as I’ve not bought a fast enough switch, and my WAN may get to the 900/900 speeds if FTTP arrives this year…

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The network upgrade card is here: https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/E10G22-T1-Mini - US import around £110 on Amazon, EU import around £130 on amazon. May be cheaper elsewhere (e.g. Broadbandbuyer). Stock levels vary.

This is the one I put in mine last year. I paid £137 at the time. Bit more now with inflation etc.

https://www.ballicom.co.uk//synology-e10g18-t1-.p142...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

This is the one I put in mine last year. I paid £137 at the time. Bit more now with inflation etc.

Bigger Synology unit! That looks like a normal full size PCIe card.

Aye, to extend the life of my almost 6 year old DS1817+

My old 209+ was moved on (given to elderly relative) when it wouldn't get the next DSM, and I went for the 723, its nothing like the rack mount ones we had in the old office... (long since demolished).

its half height and half length.... Nearly most single port nics are..

the pcie 4.0 x1 10gbe nic is called OWC 10G Ethernet PCIe - you do need an open ended pcie slot though

I have one of these Intel X540-T2 NICs (dual port 10GBaseT) running in a Lenovo M720q mini PC and it seems to be working fine.

Not bad for now £90. I paid more last year.

In reply to a post by Taras:

its half height and half length.... Nearly most single port nics are..

but most NAS boxes are not the same size as a 1U or 2U server, or a desktop PC. (which was my point).

In the data centre we've installed 40gigabit networking, which is serious cost, but when you have clustered hardware running virtual machines it gets complicated...

Edited by jchamier (Wed 28-Jun-23 08:44:22)

yup an pcie 2.1 x 8 slot required. Fine if you don't want to use multiple gfx cards or even game on a modern system.. And that was my point . Luckily networking just like storage is bursty in nature so some of the pcie lane issues aren't so much of an issue, but space is.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In the data centre we've installed 40gigabit networking, which is serious cost, but when you have clustered hardware running virtual machines it gets complicated...

Yup, I've only seen little bits of stuff on youtube, but understand the complexity of deploying 40gbe plus networking, and the even the requirements of having decent hardware to chuck 40gbe around a network.

long term i need to look at ssd speeds over a network (only two or 3 machines) so 10gbe i think would be a good half way house between spending too much money and having decent speeds. I'm tempted to try 2.5gbe first though.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Hehehe. The Synology is a NAS box rather than a modem, but in any event well worth slotting in a 10 GbE card if you’re in the habit of shifting large amounts of data in and out of one and the rest of your network is suitably wide.

I know Synology are mainly NAS boxes (I have one), but they also do modems and I assumed (perhaps wrongly) the OP was referring to the possibility of being able to upgrade those to 10GbE.

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

I know Synology are mainly NAS boxes (I have one), but they also do modems

I don't think any of their router products have a built in DSL modem, as outside the UK most telcos supply a DSL modem or cable modem, as in the UK we have ONT's for FTTP. I also think they're still entry level kit.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/compare/routers

In reply to a post by Tacitus:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Hehehe. The Synology is a NAS box rather than a modem, but in any event well worth slotting in a 10 GbE card if you’re in the habit of shifting large amounts of data in and out of one and the rest of your network is suitably wide.

I know Synology are mainly NAS boxes (I have one), but they also do modems and I assumed (perhaps wrongly) the OP was referring to the possibility of being able to upgrade those to 10GbE.

As noted above, they do a line of WiFi routers, some of the have 2.5 GbE WAN/LAN ports. No modems that I'm aware of and no path to 10GbE on these devices.

Have you come across these M.2 based 10GBaseT adapters from InnoDisk?

https://youtu.be/vt6VrjY2BfY

https://www.innodisk.com/en/products/embedded-periph...

Neat little things!

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Neat little things!

Nice way to get the PCIe lanes when main slots are full.

Doesn’t look as power hungry or hot either. Unfortunately not cheap.

i did see these yesterday - an interesting product

I'm looking to add some secondary network connections to a bunch of Lenovo M80q Gen 3 mini PC's I'm putting into a new Proxmox cluster for iSCSI support.

Unfortunately both the M.2 slots on these little boxes are otherwise occupied for storage duties and these is no PCIe riser slot as there is with the earlier M720q boxes I have 🙁

However I discovered that this series of "M Tiny series 8" machines have 2 of these so called "BTB" ports on the rear which are PCIe4 capable and on these particular boxes they are used for additional ports on the rear fascia; currently sporting an extra DisplayPort and a 9-pin serial port. Both of which aren't required, and which can be swapped out for these....

...compatible 2.5 GbE cards on AliExpress for £40 which will fit the bill nicely.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004893899524.html