My First FTTP Outage

After 27 months of continuous uptime, at 1:15am today my BT FTTP service went down for the first time. The LOS light is solid red, and rebooting the ONT didn’t help.

To BT’s credit, they immediately activated unlimited data on my two mobiles and shipped a mini hub. Sadly the mini hub doesn’t have Ethernet so I cannot use it as a drop-in replacement for my home’s structured wiring to feed the access points; so wifi will be limited to a small part of this three storey house.

An Openreach engineer is booked for tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

i had an fttp outage due to falling trees bringing down the overhead fibre cables that serve my part of the village. as you say bt shipped a minihub and as you said it doesnt have ethernet so couldnt, like you, feed the whole house. oh and when the minihub arrived it also needs charging before use. when i went to charge the minihub we also experienced a power cut!!!!! the minihub seems to be very insensitive to receving a 4/5g ? signal so it was a bit hit and miss as to whether it would connect.

Edited by threelegs (Tue 16-Feb-21 10:17:06)

If you use the BT smart hub it may be worth looking as their halo 3+ offer - this gives 4g back up linked into the smart hub - so all your Ethernet devices still work and the 4g kicks in Within 2 minutes of your fttp failing .

I’ve got it and it works pretty well . I simulated a fault by disconnecting the cable from ont to smart hub and it switched to 4g within 2 minutes and all my Wi-fi / Ethernet devices worked without having swap Wi-fi networks / cables etc .

Alternatively can one of your AP’s act as a Wi-fi-Ethernet bridge ?

As I've posted earlier, our village suffered two complete outages of FTTP within the first year, meanwhile FTTC carried on. I think it might well have been a poor quality install.

I'm running a Fritz!Box 7490 router instead of the Smart Hub because I need VPN and it acts as my VoIP SIP gateway bridging multiple DECT handsets.

http://www.andrewwhyman.com/blog/tech/bt-fttp-instal... reports that the hub presents a virtual Ethernet interface when connected to a PC over USB, so I'll try connecting it to the Fritz and see if it can use it for 4G failover.

Failing that, I can switch the APs over to repeater/mesh mode and bridge the hub wifi.

it would have been nice if the mini hub had been designed to just plug into the smart hub and take over if needed

Edited by threelegs (Tue 16-Feb-21 11:22:29)

Threelegs The newer version of ‘BT Halo’ does just that

In reply to a post by DougM:

After 27 months of continuous uptime, at 1:15am today my BT FTTP service went down for the first time. The LOS light is solid red, and rebooting the ONT didn’t help.

To BT’s credit, they immediately activated unlimited data on my two mobiles and shipped a mini hub. Sadly the mini hub doesn’t have Ethernet so I cannot use it as a drop-in replacement for my home’s structured wiring to feed the access points; so wifi will be limited to a small part of this three storey house.

An Openreach engineer is booked for tomorrow morning. Wish me luck!

Our main outage was around 18 months ago, Openreach FTTP, but running a Cerberus (business based) package so better SLA's than a resi service.

We had a summer time local lightning strike which killed most of our LAN gear. Beside a host of other destruction, it entered the structured cabling system, and burn marked/spot welded two stacked switches, we lost a lot of gear that day. Some was outright blown off the wall, sooty, charred and black. No kidding.

The Openreach ONT seemed at first unaffected, however it wasn't (given it was connected to routers and switches all of which died). The copper port refused to link higher than 100M - not good on a > 100M service...

A late afternoon call to Cerberus, was met initially by some head scratching - as service from their end looked 100% operative, but took some convincing the issue was the ONT. By 9pm that evening we had confirmation that they had Openreach was booked in to replace the ONT, actually the next morning.

Next day Openreach engineer arrives (early) and swaps out the ONT. Service back to normal around 10:30am. Which I still think is pretty impressive.

I find it impressive that the ONT continued to do anything! Sounds like it didn't have much left to talk to either, Hope the insurance paid out!

just looked up the service with halo 3 and they want an extra £21 a month more than I pay now!!! yeah right!