FTTC and FTTP

Does anyone keeping their FTTC (SoGEA) as a backup along with FTTP? How reliable is Openreach FTTP?

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Does anyone keeping their FTTC (SoGEA) as a backup along with FTTP? How reliable is Openreach FTTP?

FTTP will intrinsically be far more reliable than FTTC.

They both go back to the same place but FTTP has far less [censored] in the middle to (a) lose power (b) get hit by a vehicle (c) generally misbehave.

Therefore keeping FTTC as a backup for FTTP is a completely pointless exercise. Because it offers little to no diversity and far less resilience.

Fore backup you'd be better off looking at (a) another terrestrial fibre network (b) another medium such as 4G/5G or even dare I say something like Starlink.

We have copper for the phone, FTTP for t'internet, coppers going at end of contract. At times the phone is barely usable.

I did keep FTTC in parallel with FTTP for a year.

My problem was the other way round - I lost the FTTC for about 3 weeks due to slamming.

It is *possible* for FTTP to fail independently of FTTC - e.g. if the ONT dies - but this is very rare. FTTC is more likely to fail or degrade due to bad copper connections or more complex DSLAM circuitry in the cabinet. Or you may have a power cut at home.

So as others have said, if you want the maximum availability, find an independent backup: Virgin Media, an Altnet, 4G/5G, or Starlink. If you could live with tethering off your phone for a few days in emergency, do that.

Thanks all.

Yeah, 4G/5G is the only option backup if FTTP was down as I know FTTP will take longer to get back online than FTTC because of difference techology as for FTTP duct repair or clear will take longer for underground wayleave premission from council.

I don't know if I just got somewhat unlucky with my FTTP build, but in 2 years I've had 2 major issues where it has knocked our entire village of 30-40 odd houses offline for over a week.

The FTTP line follows the same route as the FTTC line to the FTTC cabinet, however in 2 stretches they installed poles for the FTTP instead of using the ducting all the way like the FTTC. I guess it was at capacity or blocked. The FTTP line then zig zags across each side of the road several times.

The first time, a car hit the pole and knocked it out. The 2nd time apparently rats chewed the line. Although you'd get the same even if that was the route of the FTTC.

I don't know if it's standard practice or technical reasons, but they used the same cable underground, then up overhead instead of having each section isolation with a track node on the pole where it exits the ground. That then meant when the cable was damaged, they had to organise traffic management etc instead of just being able to replace the underground part. That then meant it took ages to get fixed. There's track nodes there, just they are 1 pole further along, after it's hopped the road from underground.

I do wonder if there's an economic point where OR will redesign a portion of the network to save future costs, but who knows.

Edited by zebb_edi (Thu 02-Jan-25 10:15:38)

NO.

FTTP should be way more relaible and is now mature. I had one four hour outage - power cut but could not be bothered to move it to the battery back supply I have for the short time.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

as for FTTP duct repair or clear will take longer for underground wayleave premission from council.

Unless your FTTC and FTTP go through the same ducts, as is often the case.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

I know FTTP will take longer to get back online than FTTC

I don't think anybody has said this, and there's no reason why it should.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Yeah, 4G/5G is the only option backup if FTTP was down as I know FTTP will take longer to get back online than FTTC because of difference techology as for FTTP duct repair or clear will take longer for underground wayleave premission from council.

No, once built, wayleaves are in place, no need to get them again for repairs.

A failure and repair is just that, restoring something approved that has stopped working.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Yeah, 4G/5G is the only option backup if FTTP was down as I know FTTP will take longer to get back online than FTTC because of difference techology as for FTTP duct repair or clear will take longer for underground wayleave premission from council.

No, once built, wayleaves are in place, no need to get them again for repairs.

A failure and repair is just that, restoring something approved that has stopped working.

Correct for repairs - may however require a streetworks permit - same for copper though. Perhaps what he meant by 'permission'

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Correct for repairs - may however require a streetworks permit - same for copper though. Perhaps what he meant by 'permission'

Could be, but he did have wayleave there too. Streetworks permits are often relatively easy for repairs but can take time if others are digging the same road. The reason for https://one.network which is a silly name for a website.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The reason for https://one.network which is a silly name for a website.

yup!!!!!!!!! most silly...........

also its now causeway .............. ,my brain is not computing this verry well .

roadworks.org worked fine yet someone decided it wasn't enough of a brand or whatever goes through people's heads

In reply to a post by MHC:

NO.

FTTP should be way more relaible and is now mature. I had one four hour outage - power cut but could not be bothered to move it to the battery back supply I have for the short time.

As I've posted before, the FTTP to out village went down twice before we had it. The first time I believe it took a couple of hours to sort out, second time took most of a day, these where teething problems, seems to have been very reliable since (firmly grasping a piece of wood). We've had a couple of power cuts, during one the copper phone line went dead as well! This is a vast improvement over our old FTTC.

It now includes Greater London - previously there was a separate website http://public.londonworks.gov.uk/roadworks/home which was TfL owned/run

Had Openreach FTTP for nearly 14 months. Within 2 months we had a 27 day outage, and last month an 8 hour outage.

FTTP certainly *does* have outages: no-one disputes that.

But statistically, FTTP has a much lower fault rate than FTTC. Hence a single example of a bad FTTP fault doesn't really have much relevance to the OP, unless perhaps it's in exactly the same neighbourhood as them.

The original question was: is it worth keeping FTTC as a backup to FTTP? I would say probably not for most people, bearing in mind that an event which causes Openreach FTTP to fail could also cause Openreach FTTC to fail.

If you're going to spend the extra on a backup, you'd be better off choosing an independent provider, e.g. VM, an Altnet, 4G/5G, or Starlink. Correlated faults are still possible even with those (with the possible exception of Starlink).

I'd choose 4G/5G if it were available, given that it's least likely to share infrastructure, is low cost, and is only going to be used rarely (hence connection quality is not a primary concern).

But in practice, I don't have a permanent backup. If FTTP were to fail (and it hasn't in nearly 5 years), I'd tether off my phone for a day or two and buy an add-on data bundle if required.

Edited by candlerb (Fri 03-Jan-25 09:45:16)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

FTTP certainly *does* have outages: no-one disputes that.

But statistically, FTTP has a much lower fault rate than FTTC. Hence a single example of a bad FTTP fault doesn't really have much relevance to the OP, unless perhaps it's in exactly the same neighbourhood as them.

sadly other faults are quite often conflated with the fttp infrastructure.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The original question was: is it worth keeping FTTC as a backup to FTTP? I would say probably not for most people, bearing in mind that an event which causes Openreach FTTP to fail could also cause Openreach FTTC to fail.

If you're going to spend the extra on a backup, you'd be better off choosing an independent provider, e.g. VM, an Altnet, 4G/5G, or Starlink. Correlated faults are still possible even with those (with the possible exception of Starlink).

One thing, oneweb over 31/12/24 and 1/1/25 failed because of the software at the hq forgetting that 2024 was a leap year. OPPS. also satellite can be disrupted by solar storms .

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I'd choose 4G/5G if it were available, given that it's least likely to share infrastructure, is low cost, and is only going to be used rarely (hence connection quality is not a primary concern).

But in practice, I don't have a permanent backup. If FTTP were to fail (and it hasn't in nearly 5 years), I'd tether off my phone for a day or two and buy an add-on data bundle if required.

I went this route, mainly because of the £6.26 pm data only sim i have which has a two year contract on it. I keep it on backup wan and thats fine. The only downer is if we have a power cut (queue 3 on the 1/1/25 LOL)

In reply to a post by Taras:

One thing, oneweb over 31/12/24 and 1/1/25 failed

I didn't say satellite couldn't fail - only that it wouldn't be correlated with failure of your main FTTP connection. (e.g. a fibre cut in your local vicinity isn't going to affect the satellite).

In reply to a post by Taras:

The only downer is if we have a power cut (queue 3 on the 1/1/25 LOL)

Easy: solar PV with battery, and an emergency output from the inverter powering the router

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by Taras:

One thing, oneweb over 31/12/24 and 1/1/25 failed

I didn't say satellite couldn't fail - only that it wouldn't be correlated with failure of your main FTTP connection. (e.g. a fibre cut in your local vicinity isn't going to affect the satellite).

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/01/oneweb...

so it wasn't the satellite in this case but certainly solar winds can disrupt!

In reply to a post by BranH:

Had Openreach FTTP for nearly 14 months. Within 2 months we had a 27 day outage, and last month an 8 hour outage.

That would have been a serious issue somewhere. But it happens to both ... My neighbour had FTTC and his outage was around 6 weeks - BT supplied a 4G modem as a stopgap. My FTTP - same pole and same head end exchange suffered no issues.

In reply to a post by BranH:

Had Openreach FTTP for nearly 14 months. Within 2 months we had a 27 day outage, and last month an 8 hour outage.

Are you quite rural by any chance there in Dumfries & Galloway…I’ll explain my thinking…

Pretty rural, yes.

It's also gone down again 2 hours ago.

No PON light on the ONT, or something else ?

I'm having a stab that effectively your service in D&G is via a Subtended Head End (SHE), like this...

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/08/openre...

The normal red LOS , and the PON off

In reply to a post by BranH:

The normal red LOS , and the PON off

OK, was just asking for clarity, thank you.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Does anyone keeping their FTTC (SoGEA) as a backup along with FTTP? How reliable is Openreach FTTP?

Could of sworn you got FTTP this time last year, after complaining about G.Fast etc, etc anyway that's in the past.

My personal FTTP experience with my ALTNET, is the line and speed is stable, we've had one major outage in the 14 months I've been a customer, and that outage lasted a day, possibly two due to a fibre cut in a field caused by vandals thinking it was copper.

If your main provider is a ALTNET I can't see having a Openreach FTTC connection as a bad idea, especially if your router/setup allows dual WAN and can set the FTTC connection to be used a back up.

If you're with Openreach for FTTP, I don't honestly think having a FTTC back up would be worthwhile as stated above due to the fact that they all kind of go the same way back to the internet.

Best to have 2 connections (if it's really important to remain connected) on two different platforms/providers.

Just for completeness, it came back on this morning around 11am. Would love to know the reason for the faults, prior to failure the upload speed fell away, making me wonder about a mechanical fault.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Does anyone keeping their FTTC (SoGEA) as a backup along with FTTP?

Not in your circumstances but for people who work and have a dependency on an internet connection to earn a living then it may be worth considering (there would be many factors to decide if it was the right decisions). I would connect my laptop to my mobile phone if things went wrong but so far 100% reliable since FTTP was installed.

In reply to a post by BranH:

Just for completeness, it came back on this morning around 11am. Would love to know the reason for the faults, prior to failure the upload speed fell away, making me wonder about a mechanical fault.

Who is your ISP? Presume you have you logged all the faults with them, and asked them what the cause of the fault(s) is?

Its 1pbroadband, all faults logged, not very good to get information out of them, when my minimum term comes to an end I will be switching.

How much are you paying /on what tier?

Still the basic FTTP infrastructure should not be going up and down like a yo yo. I'd write to them to formally complain, and ask for a proper follow up and explanation.

My area do not have FTTP, not available yet. Only got SoGfast or SoGEA available from Openreach but FTTPoD is available (330/50).

At present I have SoGEA with Aquiss sync 80/20 for a week now with no issues, left UnchainedISP SoGfast 330/50 for a year as it seem more expensive now as I have to cut down on my budget list. Don't get me wrong, Sogfast was brilliant, stable and reliable for 12 months getting sync of 265/35 with Openreach G.fast modem but was down to 230/40 with Zyxel G.fast router (because of two different hardware, different broadcom chipset.

Its £23 for 80/20.
Put a formal complaint in for the last January's outage, covering lack of information and long time to repair. Got very little out of them, very much felt like banging my head against the wall.
Even though it will be the same infrastructure, hoping at least to improve support.

In reply to a post by BranH:

Had Openreach FTTP for nearly 14 months. Within 2 months we had a 27 day outage, and last month an 8 hour outage.

I wonder if this is some variant of the common-mode JCB fault.

In reply to a post by BranH:

Its £23 for 80/20.

Aquiss selling £18 a month for 80/20 (first 6 months @ £18 then thereafter @ £36 for the remaining 6 months)

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Does anyone keeping their FTTC (SoGEA) as a backup along with FTTP? How reliable is Openreach FTTP?

I don't know about Openreach, there is a town not far from me that seems to be having a few problems with it. But the FTTP I am using is reliable, apart from the first couple of weeks when they had problems, it has been 100% reliable.

The problem with some people is that they expect it to be perfect on Wi-Fi and it is not going to be

In reply to a post by BranH:

Its £23 for 80/20.
Put a formal complaint in for the last January's outage, covering lack of information and long time to repair. Got very little out of them, very much felt like banging my head against the wall.
Even though it will be the same infrastructure, hoping at least to improve support.

Any neighbours using the same Openreach FTTP service having similar loss of service?

I know my area had a few days of faults on OR FTTP last year, I was assisting with diagnostics on the fault with head of engineering Cambridgeshire.

I was 3000 miles away but had information that over 300 properties were affected across multiple line cards as a result I had a gut feeling it was an OLT side issue with the chassis or line card, after a phone call to someone senior I mentioning what I thought and they sent a diagnostics test engineer to the local primary exchange and an hour later got a call back saying I was right and the Adran was fapping. Apparently the local properties had not reported the issue so it looked like a few isolated incidents rather than a "problem" I just happen to know a few people across the postcodes and sent them door knocking to their neighbours.

Cor blimey R, forget the IT_Guy you’re an IT legend. 3000 miles away and still sorting problems deep within Openreach 🙇🙇🙇

Usual problem. People don’t report issues to help desks anymore. 🙄

In this case they should have been proactively monitoring the OLT: seeing hundreds of connections flapping should have given them a clue.

Yep!

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In this case they should have been proactively monitoring the OLT: seeing hundreds of connections flapping should have given them a clue.

Must be extraordinarily unlucky to have an entire OLT chassis go down or start flapping... that's not hundreds of customers, that's several 1000's potentially. A card or port yes. Who knows...

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Cor blimey R, forget the IT_Guy you’re an IT legend. 3000 miles away and still sorting problems deep within Openreach 🙇🙇🙇

Was on the beach with a cocktail in hand and noticed lots of beeping from ping monitoring alerts that was just non stop across a few premises locally so knew something was up.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In this case they should have been proactively monitoring the OLT: seeing hundreds of connections flapping should have given them a clue.

Must be extraordinarily unlucky to have an entire OLT chassis go down or start flapping... that's not hundreds of customers, that's several 1000's potentially. A card or port yes. Who knows...

You would think they had monitoring but who knows, all I know is our area is relatively new to Adtran GPON FTTP so its still build in progress so they probably thought it was related to that, I know the OR team I was communicating with was "rural build cambridgeshire" so I can guess it was self inflicted in some way.

The local Town facebook groups were full of people moaning saying they had intermittent broadband sending pictures of RED PON's on ONTs

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Usual problem. People don’t report issues to help desks anymore. 🙄

Tell me about it, "we assume you knew", how do we know, we're not telepathic.

It's like the case of the unsolved power cut, how will it ever be fixed if no one ever calls (unfortunately my area has this issue and we get power cuts weekly at the moment as there's a tree rubbing the power line and UKPN say your the only caller so it must be isolated and it gets deprioritised)

I would imagine that is closer to the reality

If someone was at the headend in a hour then they must have already been aware of it. 300 people going offline would be a major service incident. Even a dozen would get urgent attention.

We have no close neighbours. The ones two miles further up the road that we share postcode with don't appear to have changed to FTTP as the postcode average is too low.

Further outage 6th into 7th Jan. Unfortunately had come on for Openreach visit this morning, so no fault found. It would appear the head end exchange is about 30km away.

In reply to a post by BranH:

Further outage 6th into 7th Jan. Unfortunately had come on for Openreach visit this morning, so no fault found. It would appear the head end exchange is about 30km away.

Are you the only property on your PON having these issues?

That’s a very annoying and persistent fault.

I wondered earlier if you were actually on an SHE (subtended headend) rather than running directly into the headend exchange.

Either way for you it’s completely academic and the main thing is they find the fault pronto and remedy it for good. Fingers crossed. 🤞

I asked that earlier…

In reply to a post by BranH:

We have no close neighbours. The ones two miles further up the road that we share postcode with don't appear to have changed to FTTP as the postcode average is too low.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I asked that earlier…

Thanks, I missed that.

No aware of anywhere else having these problems. Though engineer mentioned a property a few miles away that had had a self clearing fault.