Completely agree.

The loops on poles are all over the show round here. And more often than not, copper joints in footway boxes have been moved from their fixings and dropped into the bottom of the box, often left in water.

Have spotted some rather cavalier techniques used when they do mount the DP up the stick too.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

The loops on poles are all over the show round here.
...
Have spotted some rather cavalier techniques used when they do mount the DP up the stick too.

Excess cable managed badly seems to be standard practice for subcontractors. The worst in my area was actually some OR CBTs with a good 150m cable lashed to a pole at barely 4' above ground level. With that much excess I doubt the other end was pulled very far at all.

The most impressively cavalier technique was a Community Fibre subcontractor. They were generally pretty good at leaving their coils tidy at ~2.5m above ground, which was fine until I saw how they were going about it. Once the microduct was pulled through the bend from footway box to pole and up the capping, the larger man would fold up the lightweight red barrier used to stop pedestrians falling in pits, brace it against the pole - and the smaller man would jump up it and secure the coil.

And then there was a pole where CF ran microduct up from the footway chamber but never blew any fibre, so months after they left the area the coil dropped lower and lower, getting to head height. That particular pole is beside a PCP and one day the coil was unceremoniously cut off - I'm guessing a passing OR tech took matters into their own snips.

This all confirms my suspicions about Trooli (thankfully its mostly bad installs) but given no one else is slated for my town I have little choice. It'll be interesting to see how they manage the circa 45 year old ducting in my estate to be honest. I suspect its a little worse for wear.

Personally I've not had a chance to check out what the local contractor is like but they seem to be hitting the whole town of 10000+ people very quickly (All the poles for half the town are marked for road works in the next fortnight). I do worry given my estates ancient ducting though we're not going to be a priority (or maybe even skipped) when the poles are so much easier.

Had my Trooli install day today, was meant to be before Xmas according to their original email but it was clear it was probably a month ahead of the network being ready from the off.

So today they ran a wire from the telephone pole, over a road, attached to my house and then down to a small box on the outside where they splice the steel/Kevlar l encased fibre to something easier to work with that links to another small box on the inside of the house. Then there is an ONT mounted next to it that has a fibre from the small box as well as the Ethernet to the supplied Billion router, I think this is standard for business customers.

Unfortunately the box at the top of the pole has a large fibre cable linked to it and is still coiled about halfway down it, awaiting someone to route it down the metal conduit into the BT/OpenReach underground chamber that is next to it, perhaps then linking all the other poles at the same time.

So who knows how long to wait after this will be? Personally I have no other options for fibre so I have to wait.

Apart from optimistic lead times, I have nothing bad to say about Trooli, had a fair few dealings and everyone seems very competent and capable.

I don’t plan on using the Billion router, hoping that once TR069 has provisioned to the Billion router that I will be able to extract the username and password as well as host-uniq, then I’ll be able to spoof the WAN MAC address of the Billion with my own pfSense box. £15 p/m +VAT to use my own hardware is frankly ridiculous, but they blame it on needing a near £900 Draytek that can “bridge” the connection. Will post back if successful in using my own equipment.

An old callflow document suggests you can get into the web gui on the Billion with admin/admin. I presume that the PPPoE password isn't in clear text though?

In reply to a post by Alibloke2:

An old callflow document suggests you can get into the web gui on the Billion with admin/admin. I presume that the PPPoE password isn't in clear text though?

If you're capturing the packet exchange, whether the PPPoE password is in cleartext depends on whether they're using PAP or CHAP.

If it's CHAP then you need to do an offline dictionary attack to crack it.

However you could try plugging it into a local PPPoE server that only offers PAP, and see if it falls back to using that.

Right now, as my connection isn't working and TR069 hasn't changed anything on the Billion, it is still admin/admin to login to the WebGUI, the password is not in plain text when you look at the settings, all asterisked out, but you can just inspect the page in Chrome and change the message to "text" and when you hit enter it's just written write there.

For now, the password is a default of acs@callflow, but I'm assuming once my connection is live then this will change to something else.

Glad to see my forum post is still getting interest. The install around here seems to be progressing. They've gone from works at several cabinet locations to individual street works. I think they've blown the cable up my street in the ducts as some guy and truck went at the end of the road but I've no real idea. They seem to be doing several roads a day based off one.network. Still no clue when they will be available to actually order but will be following your responses taytos with interest. We've got zero other options here but long line FTTC or 8mbps 4g so I have no other choice.

So this morning I managed to get activated, Swedish fibre splicing ninja guy that was working on behalf of Trooli went the extra mile to get me connected in the OpenReach underground chambers.

Quick call to Trooli activations and I was up and running. Extracted the username/password from the Billion router web interface, only takes a couple of seconds.

I didn't bother with spoofing MAC addresses or use the host-uniq, just works fine with the PPPoE username/password. Working great and very happy.

That's good to hear. It's all ancient 1970s ducts here so I'm worried. They are still laying the main cables up the street so at least a month or two before I can even order.