Surprise hole in the road - Netomnia?

Long story short: I live in a town with more or less full fibre coverage from both Openreach and Virgin...apart from the one estate where I live, which has been largely bypassed by both. In recent months, Openreach have been progressing very very slowly around the place, but it's really just doing the odd pole here and there with no seeming plan for doing the many streets that have still not been covered. Last month, however, fibre connection units appeared on the top of a couple of random poles near my house (not mine, sadly), so I was rather hoping that the ETA would now be measured in months rather than years...

And then, yesterday, out of the blue a couple of holes appeared more or less directly outside of my house which have barriers labelled up as "Netomnia", which a quick search showed is the wholesale bit of YouFibre. This is very surprising as, to the best of my knowledge, they don't have any deployments within 20 miles of here.

Any other possible explanations here? Could Openreach have outsourced to Netomnia for the install on our street? This seems unlikely as Netomnia / YouFibre appear to be pretty independent, albeit sometimes using Openreach ducts to simplify their deployments. It would be excellent if we did have Youfibre as I think their service is probably superior to OR's offerings (e.g. symmetric connections and cheaper too!) and I suspect we'll also get OR eventually, so it's always good to have options.

Interested in other people's thoughts and experience...and also if they have any idea how long it normally takes from holes in the road to being able to order?

Netomnia only install their own network. They don't do work for others.

Enter your address on the Netomnia availability checker

They made a lot of fuss about coming to my town, then very quietly dropped their plans.
When I posted a comment about this 1 of their senior staff members (guy called Jeremy) jumped in to defend them (twice) with excuses about the exchange being full, rolling out from a neighbouring exchange and that they were still coming.
Over a year later I emailed them and got a response...

"We are having to replan this area due to unforeseen issues to connect the surrounding properties.

This will need to be reviewed and replanned by our build team, unfortunately the area is on hold until we can do this.

Due to the scale of our build, we cannot place a timeline on when we will be able to review your area. Unfortunately, I do have to advise that it could be months or years."

Load of nonsense. Surrounding properties? They dropped plans for about 20,000 homes by the looks of it. No transparency at all.

Yes I'm bitter 😂

Haha, yes after years of dealing with OR, I can quite understand this!

The availability checker does report "coming soon", but for pretty much the whole town, so taking it with a pinch of salt. That said, they're outside fighting to clear Openreach conduits as we speak, so I think we've passed the point of being cancelled (I hope!)

Oddly, as far as fanfare it's the exact opposite here - the hole in the ground was the first time I'd heard of them or their plans!

In reply to a post by daern:

Haha, yes after years of dealing with OR, I can quite understand this!

The availability checker does report "coming soon", but for pretty much the whole town, so taking it with a pinch of salt. That said, they're outside fighting to clear Openreach conduits as we speak, so I think we've passed the point of being cancelled (I hope!)

Oddly, as far as fanfare it's the exact opposite here - the hole in the ground was the first time I'd heard of them or their plans!

If they have got as far as work on the ground and the site says coming soon, then it's coming soon.
They usually plan to do whole towns.

The thing with Netomnia is if there's an issue and it costs money to overcome it then they tend to skip the properties with an issue. They are being very sensible and keeping their cost per property passed low.
They will happily skip an entire street over spending thousands unlocking blockages in ducts etc.

...and sadly that may well prove to be the case here. I have my fingers crossed.

Popping your postcode into something like https://mastdatabase.co.uk/maps/streetworks should reveal more on what's happening

Thanks - very useful! There are a few other bits of work on adjacent streets for the same company, so it looks like they're pretty serious about it. I've just got to hope that our bit doesn't defeat them!

Ours took 12 months from initial letter/works to be live for ordering.

A few teething problems along the way but now on 2gb/2gb with static ip for £49 pcm

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Netomnia only install their own network. They don't do work for others.

Enter your address on the Netomnia availability checker

They made a lot of fuss about coming to my town, then very quietly dropped their plans.
When I posted a comment about this 1 of their senior staff members (guy called Jeremy) jumped in to defend them (twice) with excuses about the exchange being full, rolling out from a neighbouring exchange and that they were still coming.
Over a year later I emailed them and got a response...

"We are having to replan this area due to unforeseen issues to connect the surrounding properties.

This will need to be reviewed and replanned by our build team, unfortunately the area is on hold until we can do this.

Due to the scale of our build, we cannot place a timeline on when we will be able to review your area. Unfortunately, I do have to advise that it could be months or years."

Load of nonsense. Surrounding properties? They dropped plans for about 20,000 homes by the looks of it. No transparency at all.

Yes I'm bitter 😂

Their CEO Jeremy is extremely helpful at getting you installed in complex cases like mine where my address was added to the database but wasn't quite scoped for service shall we say (with unusual undocumented ducting on the OR maps) and we discussed the options and pulled 300M of of fibre to cover me from the closest CBT from another street.

He will get you covered, its just a matter of when.


EDIT:

On the plus side my uptime has been 100% from a Netomnia / YouFibre point with no documented outages, the only reason it is less than that on the tools is because of my configuration changes and rebooting of hardware on my end. Even then my total monthly outage is 0.02% (7 mins) (the occasional 8 mins and 56 seconds if I have a firmware upgrade bring down the average to 99.97 availability)



If I look at the last 3 months I have had 99.97% availability with 31 mins downtime which is excellent for residential and all self inflicted outages.

With Virgin Media I had the same volume of downtime (30 mins a month) caused by me with a total of 18 hours downtime over a 3 month period giving me 99.22% availability which is a lot worse, with multiple 8 hour outages since the start of that service.

So when comparing the two YouFibre is excellent and cannot be faulted Virgin Media is a load of expensive rubbish that just doesn't work, has loads of jitter, over 4 times the latency and more downtime to the point I would set two alarms for the morning because I didn't trust the service to keep the alexas on when i needed them to work most.

Edited by RR_The_IT_Guy (Sun 21-Jan-24 16:04:17)

Thanks! I guess it's "how long is a piece of string" really - I don't know how mature their network is round here, so there might be some long sections that need to be completed as prerequisites first.

If they're going back to the local telephone exchange though, that's only a couple of hundred yards from me.

Thanks. Good to hear some positive feedback on them. Technically, at least, they seem pretty much superior to anything that OR can offer too (I can't get Virgin here, which is probably a blessing in disguise!)

How consistent have you found the performance at whatever tier you've got? (they're offering 8Gbps here which might need some serious home infrastructure upgrades to support properly!)

In reply to a post by daern:

Thanks. Good to hear some positive feedback on them. Technically, at least, they seem pretty much superior to anything that OR can offer too (I can't get Virgin here, which is probably a blessing in disguise!)

How consistent have you found the performance at whatever tier you've got? (they're offering 8Gbps here which might need some serious home infrastructure upgrades to support properly!)

So I have Gigabit Symmetric from them, stability is good, around 4MS latency it does go up but the most is 10 and that is because I have high internal latency due to internal traffic.

I have a SamKnows (A Cisco Company) Whitebox and the average speed for the last month is 925 Down and 926 up which is excellent
I do have the odd bit of packet loss but that's me rebooting that caused it so don't look at that data and regardless its below 0.05%.
SamKnows says the average latency is 4.38ms so also very good.
That's some of the best latency I have seen even with a least line at an address down the road it exceeds all expectations.

Website load times are around (on average) 0.6 seconds but as low as 0.2

Put it this way, I host a Speedtest.net server as Ookla told me I meet the requirements.



My home network (LAN) has been on 10Gbps copper for a while now, as I have internal servers, the core switches have dual 10Gbps LACP (link aggregation) for failover and max speed.
The main servers are on Multimode optics and some of the core is on 10 Gig fibre, the main core links are copper as that was implemented first.

I could upgrade to 8 Gig but considering the cost for a firewall of that speed It's not viable (not to mention that there is no need for that level of speed when my gigabit line isn't getting fully utilized.

In comparison my 2gb/2gb runs at 8.9ms. It does shift higher at times but never seen 4ms...it usually sits at 10ms for me.

In reply to a post by choppersrock:

In comparison my 2gb/2gb runs at 8.9ms. It does shift higher at times but never seen 4ms...it usually sits at 10ms for me.

It's all about egress points, are you further North of Cambridge, I am quite close to London when looking at the overall picture so would expect fairly low, it's pointless looking at my BMQ as I don't have QOS for ICMP so it will always be spikey. Something I should probably sort to make the graph look nice

Well, things ended up moving much quicker than expected! From holes in the road on Thursday...

They returned on Monday, managed to get the rods through Openreach's dreadful ducts and, by the end of the day, had fibre dangling from a few poles down the street, including mine:

https://i.imgur.com/Sn2ae7N.png

Decent day's work for them, and the civil guys hinted that the connection team weren't far behind them so hopefully it won't be months and months before we're able to order (or actually get connected!).

One more generic question: As this will obviously end up being delivered from the same pole as my current copper connection, at install time will they leave the old copper up (being YouFibre it's really nothing to do with them) and end up having two cables strung over the road? From a technical point of view, I'd prefer a bit of overlap so I can get things configured with the new service before I shut off the old one, but I'm just pondering what would happen to the old copper cable once it finally gets terminated.

Left mine where it was. I also have an openreach based fttp service which is off at the moment. When openreach installed it pre yf I asked them to remove the copper line but they said no.

Edited by choppersrock (Tue 23-Jan-24 11:23:14)

Hi,

In reply to a post by daern:

[..]

One more generic question: As this will obviously end up being delivered from the same pole as my current copper connection, at install time will they leave the old copper up (being YouFibre it's really nothing to do with them) and end up having two cables strung over the road? From a technical point of view, I'd prefer a bit of overlap so I can get things configured with the new service before I shut off the old one, but I'm just pondering what would happen to the old copper cable once it finally gets terminated.

As you note, the existing copper is nothing to do with any altnet. If they remove it or damage it then I'm sure Openreach would be delighted to be paid compensation for the damage.

If you want Openreach's equipment / cabling removing then you'll have to ask Openreach to do so. If you don't ask for it to be removed then it will just remain there and will probably be used to pull across a fibre if Openreach ever install FTTP to the property.

In reply to a post by daern:

Well, things ended up moving much quicker than expected! From holes in the road on Thursday...

They returned on Monday, managed to get the rods through Openreach's dreadful ducts and, by the end of the day, had fibre dangling from a few poles down the street, including mine:

https://i.imgur.com/Sn2ae7N.png

Decent day's work for them, and the civil guys hinted that the connection team weren't far behind them so hopefully it won't be months and months before we're able to order (or actually get connected!).

One more generic question: As this will obviously end up being delivered from the same pole as my current copper connection, at install time will they leave the old copper up (being YouFibre it's really nothing to do with them) and end up having two cables strung over the road? From a technical point of view, I'd prefer a bit of overlap so I can get things configured with the new service before I shut off the old one, but I'm just pondering what would happen to the old copper cable once it finally gets terminated.

They can provide their own ducts if they see fit , to complain about the state of another company’s assets they use on a semi parasitic basis is a bit rich ,

They can provide their own ducts if they see fit , to complain about the state of another company’s assets they use on a semi parasitic basis is a bit rich ,

Honestly, the state of ducting on our road is a bit of a running joke for everyone that works on it, including Openreach. As I understand it, it's actually been the primary reason why, four years after receiving a "Fibre is coming to your home soon!" email from Openreach, I'm still watching and waiting. My understanding is that they know they are in a bad state, but are not willing to lift a finger to do anything about it across this whole estate. Indeed, the only houses that have been fibred to date are the ones around the edge where it can be brought in on poles, or the odd newer street with better quality ducting. Only very, very occasionally have they bothered to get out a shovel and do a bit of digging and, indeed, YouFibre have done more digging in two days than Openreach did in 4 years.

I only grabbed one pic while the hole was open, but it gives some idea: https://i.imgur.com/acakUoa.jpg (the remains of the "duct" can be seen in bits at the upper left of the picture)

There are almost no access points and everything runs in 3-4" piping (ceramic or cast iron - can't easily tell) which, over the years, has taken such a beating that very little of it is now contiguous so rodding will almost certainly keep hitting blockages before you get to any egress point. The access points that YouFibre used were all dug out of the road by them (and put back again afterwards). If they are paying OpenReach anything for the use of these, they're being overcharged...!

If you want Openreach's equipment / cabling removing then you'll have to ask Openreach to do so. If you don't ask for it to be removed then it will just remain there and will probably be used to pull across a fibre if Openreach ever install FTTP to the property.

Thanks, not overly bothered at this point - it can just sit there looking scruffy I guess.

Get a pre-order in

If you're using TBB ping monitors, the network the host uses, only peers at LINX London / LONAP, so bare that in mind.

If you're further north, pings to devices in Manchester / Edinburgh (if you're that far north) will be better.

Yeah, definitely going to order but right now it's still showing as "not available" on YouFibre, so I guess it'll going to take a bit longer yet before it's considered "ready".

Netomnia seem to work in big batches. They looped cable in my street like that and it was there for 6 months before it was pulled through to the ducts that feed the estate. Then another 3 months before they were round doing light tests and a month later (chrimbo got in the way) ordering began.

Install was fine, their ONT is next to my OR ONT. And the speeds are excellent.

The civils guys reckoned that there wasn't a great deal to do to connect the other end of the fibre on my pole (which is in a box at the end of the street) into the existing network, but experience tells me that this will happen when it happens and not one moment sooner!

Install was fine, their ONT is next to my OR ONT. And the speeds are excellent.

Actually, on that subject - do YouFibre deploy a combined ONT and router, or are they two separate boxes? The reason I ask is that I won't be using their supplied router so a standalone ONT makes life easier and cleaner for my setup. I read here that they are sometimes supplying an integrated router/ONT and was rather hoping that they would not do this for me if I asked nicely

(I'm doing the same on my current VDSL install, having ditched the dreadful combined modem/router from Vodafone for a standalone Openreach-branded Huawei HG612 which my OPNSense box can just PPPoE into).

In reply to a post by Iniltous:

They can provide their own ducts if they see fit , to complain about the state of another company’s assets they use on a semi parasitic basis is a bit rich ,

Was the poster's opinion, not Netomnia's.

Must reach out to the dictionaries to ask that they change the definition of 'leasing' to include 'semi-parasitic'.

Then ping my main ISP to inform them that their use of Openreach exchanges to colocate equipment and the cablelink product to get fibre out of it is 'semi-parasitic'.

Then ping my backup ISP to inform them that their use of wholesale and bitstream products from BT Enterprise and Openreach is 'semi-parasitic' so that they may update their website.

Thanks for the reminder.

What is the meaning of parasitic behavior?
Parasitism - Wikipedia
Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life.
I did caveat my point , ( semi parasitic ) but care to point out where PIA differs significantly.

If you had a spare bedroom in your private property ( happened to be an ex local authority home , but you paid market value when you purchased it ) , and the Government to address the problem of homelessness, decreed that your spare bedroom be made available to ‘lease’ , you have no choice , and not at a rate you set , but at a rate the Government decides as appropriate , that would not be an imposition, after all they are just leasing your unused space ,but what if the Government also can exercise ‘power’ over you in some other way , so officially they expect you to eat this £hit sandwich and say it tastes great,

Leasing suggests a freely entered into arrangement that benefits both party’s, PIA is an imposition , if there were compulsion it wouldn’t exist, can you give an example of a leasing arrangement where one party had no choice ?

Edited by Iniltous (Wed 24-Jan-24 11:20:18)

I don't think it's quite a fair comparison anyway as there are no other companies that were "created" with the free bonus of a nationwide infrastructure network to use for their services and it's probably only fair that they are not granted exclusive access to said infrastructure to foster competition and improve customer choice.

Or, to put it another way, if only Openreach could access my street's infrastructure, I'd still be waiting for them to grace us with some improved connectivity, so for this customer at least, the system is working.

In reply to a post by Iniltous:

What is the meaning of parasitic behavior?
Parasitism - Wikipedia
Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life.
I did caveat my point , ( semi parasitic ) but care to point out where PIA differs significantly.

If you had a spare bedroom in your private property ( happened to be an ex local authority home , but you paid market value when you purchased it ) , and the Government to address the problem of homelessness, decreed that your spare bedroom be made available to ‘lease’ , you have no choice , and not at a rate you set , but at a rate the Government decides as appropriate , that would not be an imposition, after all they are just leasing your unused space ,but what if the Government also can exercise ‘power’ over you in some other way , so officially they expect you to eat this £hit sandwich and say it tastes great,

Leasing suggests a freely entered into arrangement that benefits both party’s, PIA is an imposition , if there were compulsion it wouldn’t exist, can you give an example of a leasing arrangement where one party had no choice ?

I prefer to think of PIA as symbiotic. Without it Openreach wouldn't exist as part of BT Group we'd probably have an NBN by now.

BT Group could've made PIA redundant by providing dark fibre but the decision was made to try G.fast in the most absurd way possible, totally wasting the potential of the technology, to delay investment in FTTP and where FTTP was deployed to use PON. Some operational reasons to do that but I imagine the primary reason is that dark fibre would've been unbundled.

I appreciate that BT wish they were in the same position Deutsche Telekom were in, being able to sweat VDSL to death rather than invest, or the US telcos with a total, vertically integrated monopoly in a bunch of areas, they want to make as much money as possible for as little investment as possible therefore maximising profit but we are where we are.

I would indeed be unhappy with my private property having a bedroom taken away but, then, my property wasn't the result of compulsory purchase of private property by the state way back when so difficult to compare it with BT's history though I see what you were doing there. BT's history is one of private->nationalised->privatised I believe. On the leasing arrangement/compulsion the government of the day compulsorily purchased private telecomms networks. Compulsory but still a purchase.

Even though my property is private it comes with various obligations, you could call them regulations if you'd like, that don't benefit me directly. Like them or not I either comply or there are consequences, much as with the regulation of BT Group and especially Openreach. The regulations applied to a BT are obviously more onerous as their impact on the nation is far greater than mine.

If BT don't like PIA and other regulation applied to Openreach the option is always there to spin it off into a separate company and provide retail and wholesale services over that network, that's the choice. It's not a palatable one but it's a choice. We all have to eat poop sandwiches occasionally. None of us have to say they taste great and be sincere but we all absolutely have to take it.

I have an ONT with a 2.5gb port on the 1gb/1gb service and they supplied an Eero router, though it can hardly be called a router with 2 whole ports!

I guess this was the only bad part of the install, as they insisted they hook up the Eero and demonstrate it working (which requires you installing an app and creating an amazon account if you don't already have one). This then binds the Eeros mac address to the network. You can just clone the mac address with your own kit or contact youfibre to have the lease ended.

The eero box doesnt list the macs, and the ports arent labeled in the app/on the device so you're best getting a screenshot of the settings page if you're forced down this route. Then switch the ONT off, plug in your own kit with the cloned address and turn the ONT on. 30 seconds of flashy lights and it should work if you guessed the port right

BQM if you want to see how a relatively beefy PFSense box handles it: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Thanks - interesting to hear that your ONT has a 2.5Gb port on it, which is good. My plan is very similar to yours - do whatever is needed to get it installed and then ditch the stock box as fast as possible!

In reply to a post by daern:

Actually, on that subject - do YouFibre deploy a combined ONT and router, or are they two separate boxes? The reason I ask is that I won't be using their supplied router so a standalone ONT makes life easier and cleaner for my setup. I read here that they are sometimes supplying an integrated router/ONT and was rather hoping that they would not do this for me if I asked nicely

(I'm doing the same on my current VDSL install, having ditched the dreadful combined modem/router from Vodafone for a standalone Openreach-branded Huawei HG612 which my OPNSense box can just PPPoE into).

No such thing exists, so i'm not sure why they've put that, must have been confused.

You'll get an ONT, and an eero / arris depending on your package, the install engineer needs to report back proof of wired / wireless speeds to netomnia to complete the install which is why they need to hook these up on install.

What you do once they leave, is entirely up to you though

So you think a combined ONT and Router does not exist, you are totally wrong. Some altnets provide a router that is fed directly from the fibre.

Here is just one example, B4rn the rural FTTP supplier use the Zyxel VMG8825-B50B which has a normal phone line VDSL2 connection but also an SFP slot with a fibre interface which provides an FTTP connection. No ONT in sight.

Their CEO Jeremy is extremely helpful at getting you installed in complex cases like mine where my address was added to the database but wasn't quite scoped for service shall we say (with unusual undocumented ducting on the OR maps) and we discussed the options and pulled 300M of of fibre to cover me from the closest CBT from another street.

He will get you covered, its just a matter of when.

I found them the opposite, I queried my address before they started to build, they marked it as planned, then they surveyed and my area is literally the only area not covered at all at the moment.

Due to most being UG- They seem to favour easy poles.

Edited by BuckleZ (Thu 25-Jan-24 21:27:36)

In reply to a post by BuckleZ:

I found them the opposite, I queried my address before they started to build, they marked it as planned, then they surveyed and my area is literally the only area not covered at all at the moment.

Due to most being UG- They seem to favour easy poles.

That's an absolutely [censored]. My estate has been the same - we've been excluded from both the Virgin and Openreach rollouts of our town. Virgin said that "the houses were too far apart to be economical" which is true, to some extent, but the world isn't just made up of back to back terraces! Openreach declined to give any reason, but the poor condition of the ducts (or complete lack of them in some streets) making ground works unavoidable seems to have been the key decider. Certainly, any streets around the edge of the estate that could be reached by poles were completed over a year ago and all of the tricky streets have been neglected.

I had the same worry about YouFibre and, being completely honest, I did go and speak to the civils guys to make sure that they weren't going to give up at the first blocked duct. But to give them their due credit, while they may have moaned a bit about the state of the services, they got their shovels out, fixed the problems, and dragged the conduit through. They even asked which one was my pole and, an hour later, it had been dug out and had a neat coil of cable hanging from it

Technically, they tell me that our area is still in "planning", but as we now have "the tricky bit" completed, it's just a matter of time now.

I hope that you can get some progress at your side too. After 4 years of waiting with rubbish internet, I can truly appreciate the frustration.

Edited by daern (Thu 25-Jan-24 22:59:54)

In reply to a post by Realalemadrid:

So you think a combined ONT and Router does not exist, you are totally wrong. Some altnets provide a router that is fed directly from the fibre.

Here is just one example, B4rn the rural FTTP supplier use the Zyxel VMG8825-B50B which has a normal phone line VDSL2 connection but also an SFP slot with a fibre interface which provides an FTTP connection. No ONT in sight.

No such thing exists with YouFibre, the ISP the poster was discussing. I'm aware combo devices exist for other ISPs.

I did not consider your ... "no such thing exists" was specifically related to YouFibre and from the following link in the post by daern at 07:58 on 24th Jan it confirms that Youfibre have supplied combined ONT and Router devices. It would appear that you have not read this information.

In October 2023 ......A customer in Cheltenham had been supplied with a Commscope NVG578LX device, which is a combined ONT and WiFi6 router.

So your statement is incorrect.

youfibre-technical.php

In reply to a post by Realalemadrid:

I did not consider your ... "no such thing exists" was specifically related to YouFibre and from the following link in the post by daern at 07:58 on 24th Jan it confirms that Youfibre have supplied combined ONT and Router devices. It would appear that you have not read this information.

In October 2023 ......A customer in Cheltenham had been supplied with a Commscope NVG578LX device, which is a combined ONT and WiFi6 router.

So your statement is incorrect.

youfibre-technical.php

That kit is used as a router only. It isn't compatible with YouFibre's network as an ONT.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Tue 30-Jan-24 14:40:58)

In reply to a post by Realalemadrid:

I did not consider your ... "no such thing exists" was specifically related to YouFibre and from the following link in the post by daern at 07:58 on 24th Jan it confirms that Youfibre have supplied combined ONT and Router devices. It would appear that you have not read this information.

In October 2023 ......A customer in Cheltenham had been supplied with a Commscope NVG578LX device, which is a combined ONT and WiFi6 router.

So your statement is incorrect.

youfibre-technical.php

I'm afraid you are actually incorrect here, as XGS has pointed out, YouFibre do not use it in this way, an ONT is still needed with the NVG578LX.

I also wish people would stop referring to that article, it's out of date.

The NVG578LX is used network wide now, but it's not used as a combined unit.

All I was trying to point out was that combined ONT and router devices do exist

Why Netomania would chose to ship an incompatible GPON combined device with a separate XGS-PON ONT is to put it mildly beyond belief.

There's plenty Openreach based providers who ship routers with integrated xDSL modems for FTTP connections that will use a separate ONT.

GPON ONT's are ridiculously cheap now. Maybe Youfibre got a good deal bulk buying the combined ONT/routers. Who knows. It's not really beyond belief, there will be a reason for it.
That reason won't be that they bought the wrong thing though😂

Some Alt-Nets do the opposite and ship combined ONT/Routers with the router functionality disabled and used solely as an ONT. They do a stand alone router separately.

Well, things have moved along. A little slower than I would have liked (obviously!), but our area now has a tentative completion date of end of May, so after years of waiting it seems that the end really is nigh! The Netomnia fibre guys are very busy in an adjacent town, but the hope is that we're next for "switch on". One thing is for sure now - it's definitely coming!

Here's a question: Is it worth subscribing to a higher speed service for an initial period to get placed on a lower contention fibre during the initial commissioning, with the expectation to reduce to a lower speed service in the future if the faster one is not being utilised? Does anyone have any experience of this?

I've never heard of YouFibre doing physical network rearrangement based on the service tier ordered. They increase capacity by upgrading the PON technology being used, not changing splits on the physical side.

Thanks, that's good to know. Was going for the 1000/1000 service anyway as being more than enough internet (currently on 40/5!), for a half decent price. Just need to wait for them to switch it on now....

In reply to a post by daern:

Here's a question: Is it worth subscribing to a higher speed service for an initial period to get placed on a lower contention fibre during the initial commissioning, with the expectation to reduce to a lower speed service in the future if the faster one is not being utilised? Does anyone have any experience of this?

It isn't worth doing that no.

Those who deploy both GPON and XGS-PON for example can easily switch between XGS-PON and GPON depending on the size of package ordered. However it all runs on the same fibre and can be split to different OLT ports at the exchange end.

If the network used either or depending on the speed package chosen then it would be trivial to swap your OLT port when you downgrade later on.
XGS-PON line cards cost more than GPON.

I'm not aware of any UK provider that works quite like this though.

In reply to a post by daern:

Here's a question: Is it worth subscribing to a higher speed service for an initial period to get placed on a lower contention fibre during the initial commissioning, with the expectation to reduce to a lower speed service in the future if the faster one is not being utilised? Does anyone have any experience of this?

On 1 or 2 Gb you won't see any signs of contention. Even on 8000 I see 8000 virtually all the time. Folks don't use the Internet that much and even if it sells well you aren't sharing with enough people to see issues.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

On 1 or 2 Gb you won't see any signs of contention. Even on 8000 I see 8000 virtually all the time. Folks don't use the Internet that much and even if it sells well you aren't sharing with enough people to see issues.

Thanks! Side question - how do you find the 8Gbps service? How often do you actually manage to utilise it and will you keep at this level in the future?

A bit more time passes, but not much more to show, I'm afraid. They're still pottering around digging holes and fastening stuff to poles, but there's still an awful lot of coiled ducting around the town suggesting that things are far from complete as far as the local infrastructure goes.

One thing that I have just realised is that I don't think Netomnia will make any use of my local telephone exchange (about 100yds from my house). On their coverage map, it looks like they are planning to serve a much larger area (4 towns) from a single exchange located in one of those towns (not mine). They look to have installed new fibre spine connections linking these towns so they can run a much larger area from a smaller infrastructure footprint. I hadn't really pondered this before, but it makes sense and the "local exchange" really is an archaism from the copper ages that is no longer required with fibre. I've noticed that they've had a Netomnia branded van working at the "main" exchange over the last few days (all of the civils and fibre people have been unbranded / different brand vehicles), so if I had to make a guess, I would say that they are provisioning the core infrastructure in the exchange which, when done, will enable a much wider geographic area than just the town it's located in...including my street!

We're still not quite ready yet - there's apparently some fibre in ducts around here, but it's far from complete - but we're hopefully getting into the home straight now. The ETA still remains end of May for now, but I guess this is subject for change right up until the day it's ready to order.

I'll be honest, I'm looking forward to the day when I can remove "fibre stalker" from my list of daily activities...!

Sounds like a lot of progress has been going on, thought I would give you all an update, my connection is still solid with the usual self inflicted outages and firmware updates around 6 mins a month which is excellent.

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

Sounds like a lot of progress has been going on, thought I would give you all an update, my connection is still solid with the usual self inflicted outages and firmware updates around 6 mins a month which is excellent.

Thanks! Someone in another thread was talking about how dreadful these altnets could be compared to an OR connection (apparently preferring an OR FTTC service to an altnet FTTP connection!) so it's good to know that these horror stories probably aren't the reality in most cases.

In my own case, Vodafone score a solid 50/50 for me: service reliability has been absolutely excellent in the many years I've been with them and I've got relatively little to complain about, with the performance of the service largely being governed by the damp string connecting me to the exchange. I've only ever had one really serious reason to contact their support in the entire time I've been with them...and it was enough to make me consider cancelling them on the spot. Truly the worst support experience I've ever had with any technical service company ever. Astonishingly bad. I've only stayed with them because I now know that fibre is coming and because their service is good enough to keep their technical support a long way away...

Fortunately, we're past the "will it, won't it" stage now, and it's really just a matter of time. Whether it's next month or Christmas doesn't matter a great deal in the larger scheme of things. But next month would be better...

It's definitely true that there are stories, I manage 2 or 3 Virgin Media leased lines and around 7 Openreach and the odd Cityfibre and the Virgin Media lines have the most downtime.

One of VM leased lines have been done since last Wednesday and they only resolved it this morning, they said it was a "network fault" that suddenly occurred at 3AM after their weekly maintenance slot, they told me they would not fix the issue until the week after as they didn't want to cause downtime for other ethernet customers, it is totally unacceptable that they caused the fault and made us wait.

What's worse is that one of our other VM lines had downtime Friday afternoon which was resolved on Sunday and another VM outage at 6 AM today for a few seconds. I have never known a provider to be so rubbish, let's just say there's a reason Virgin have the lowest price for leased lines as they are as bad or worse than their coax.

Edited by RR_The_IT_Guy (Mon 22-Apr-24 17:56:40)

Yeah not every single alt net will have all these problems, some will be ahead of the game.

Things really are romping along now! Apparently, the exchange is now commissioned (although not live to order yet) and they are pushing hard for a go-live date of next Tuesday, so trying to get as many streets as possible completed by then.

Our pole is being spliced up literally as we speak and apparently they'll be round before Tuesday to complete the testing and validate that everything is ready to go.

They are also continuing with the civils work and digging further down the road to extend to the other half which was also bypassed by Openreach. They'll probably be a few weeks later, but it's good to know that the whole area looks to be getting done.

Can't bloody wait!

Update: Arrrgh!

Youfibre is now live on the next street over, who already had OR FTTP anyway, so largely won't care. Our street is done, fibred, tested and is, I think, ready to go but has just not been enabled for ordering. Youfibre say "End of July" which isn't very helpful at all.

I guess it's sit tight and wait in the hope that magic will happen over the coming days...

Oh well, looking like it might be a bit longer yet:

I have looked into the direct area for you and I can confirm that majority of the area requires a redesign of the network build, your address included. This is why few premises are ready for connection but most are not.

The connection point of the premise from 30 was ready to be used, however the connection points assigned to your household, as well as all the following numbers: 16-37 and 17-56 are not ready to be used yet.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused due to this delay.

Current ETA remains end of July because of this. I suspect that it might take a bit of sorting out...

In reply to a post by daern:

Oh well, looking like it might be a bit longer yet:

I have looked into the direct area for you and I can confirm that majority of the area requires a redesign of the network build, your address included. This is why few premises are ready for connection but most are not.

The connection point of the premise from 30 was ready to be used, however the connection points assigned to your household, as well as all the following numbers: 16-37 and 17-56 are not ready to be used yet.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused due to this delay.

Current ETA remains end of July because of this. I suspect that it might take a bit of sorting out...

It sounds it, if the team say they say they will sort it, chances are they will, I know I am on a different CBT due to unforseen ducting issues but at the end of the day, we got connected.

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

It sounds it, if the team say they say they will sort it, chances are they will, I know I am on a different CBT due to unforseen ducting issues but at the end of the day, we got connected.

I get the feeling that they might have mucked something up here as it was all installed and provisioned ready to go, and this only came up when they were testing on the last day of the month and not getting any light out.

If pressed, I suspect that assumptions were made about which end of the road the onward connection would be presented on and it's turned out to be the opposite end to the one they cabled it all up for. Nothing insurmountable, I hope, but just a bit more faff for the guys on the ground having to fix it.

Fingers crossed...

I haven't updated for a bit, but things definitely moving on now. My order is in for installation in two weeks (yey!) and Netomnia are continuing to work at the other end of the street to finish things off for the remaining houses that weren't covered last month. Obviously, nothing guaranteed until it's installed and I suspect mine will be one of the first on the street, so I get to find all of the snags when there's no light coming out of the fibre

Anyway, things moving on now so next update will hopefully be a "yey, fibre!" post. If it does get installed as planned then it will be just under 5 months from first hole in the road to working internet, which is a question that I've often seen asked here.

Well, it's been a long time without an update - almost exactly a month - and it's been an interesting time!

Youfibre installed my service on 12th June. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I was able to agree with the engineer that I would install my own cabling in the house as it had to go under a floor void, and he would return after his next job to finish things off. This worked spot-on and the installation was completed without further fuss. Unfortunately, it turns out that these early installs (mine was the first on the exchange) were a little premature and the exchange itself wasn't ready to go. As such my ONT couldn't be registered and the engineer had to leave the job part-finished.

To cut out a lot of noise, it's taken exactly two weeks for the exchange to be commissioned (apparently, they had a bit of a challenge with this one so it took far longer than the originally-estimated couple of days) and it was finally turned on at 8am this morning. I've been working today, so it wasn't until later this evening before I could test it.

Few things of note:

1. Once it came on earlier today, it worked out of the box with the supplier router, with no further fiddling. Out of the box performance was good.
2. If swapping to a third-party router, there is a 1 hour DHCP lease on the WAN interface, during which time you cannot connect a new MAC address. Either switch off the old router for an hour before you connect the new one, or be patient and wait it out! Swapping my OPNSense from Vodafone VDSL to Youfibre was little more than swapping PPPoE to DHCP and switching the cables.
3. Performance seems good and predictable: https://www.speedtest.net/result/16425264475.png - Steam has absolutely no issue maxing out the link
4. Static IP was ordered and worked without fuss

So far, I'm very happy. If, as others have reported, the service is good and reliable, then this is exactly what I want - fast, straightforward fibre for a good price.

In reply to a post by daern:

3. Performance seems good and predictable: https://www.speedtest.net/result/16425264475.png - Steam has absolutely no issue maxing out the link

Heads up. Look into settings for reducing bufferbloat. I managed to get my jitter and latency (during download and upload) down dramatically on YouFibre just by the settings in Opnsense.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/16429298229

Yellow, cyan, purple icons.

In reply to a post by Spudster:

Heads up. Look into settings for reducing bufferbloat. I managed to get my jitter and latency (during download and upload) down dramatically on YouFibre just by the settings in Opnsense.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/16429298229

Yellow, cyan, purple icons.

Thanks, care to share your config. I've added some shaping and this has definitely helped a bit:

https://www.speedtest.net/result/16431554309