I've got my Hey Broadband install planned for 3 July 12pm to 4pm.

My hopeful plan is to get the fibre run all the way around from the front to the back of the house, then up to the first floor through an existing hole which is being taken up by a disconnected coax aerial cable at the moment.

Going by all the positive and finicky installs people have had so far successfully, I'm praying that this will also be ok without their "bespoke installation charge". If worst comes to worst, I could always ask them to run it to the ground floor and leave extra length for me to run it up the outdoor wall myself, but that's a last resort.

I requested bridge mode when I was called about my installation time slot, so that shouldn't be an issue when it comes to connecting it to my new Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE, and even better I got the SE since some are reporting > 1 Gbps on the WAN!

I'll try and come back with an update after the install.

So my install finally happened after about 10 weeks. There were two civils issues that needed sorting before install, and it also took a 1 star Trustpilot review to finally kick them into action after that was done too.

Hey/F&W now no longer bury any ducting run as part of an install, which is pretty shoddy in my opinion. They left a 20m black pipe running up my front garden, which I spent about 30 mins burying under the grass, and ran it straight over a paved path round the side of the house. I'm chasing them to work out if they will actually bury that for me or not.

For me, Hey uses DHCP to assign a WAN IP for my router with bridge mode, which had nothing like the PPPoE or VLAN tagging issues which others mentioned above. They seem to be using CGNAT for my connection, though, which is really frustrating. I'm hoping that they can add a static IP to my home plan without trouble.

Speeds are fine, but peering isn't fantastic for F&W's ASN. Ping to most services is ~5ms, so not quite as good as BT/OR FTTP, but still fantastic.

Bridge mode is gig Ethernet only. I haven't bothered trying to ask them if they have any plans for >1gig services in the future, but given it's all GPON and not XGS-PON (another downside), I doubt it.

Good you've got the install completed, but thanks for the detailed information. Looks as if I'm going to soon (maybe by end of year) be able to choose between Hey on F&W, or Toob. Both appear to be CGNAT, but Toob are using Adtran XGS-PON hardware and offer a static IP for quite a bit of money.

Does anybody have any idea on who is providing their backbone at all? They're available in my area but concerned about the future and routing. Tempted to wait it out and wait for CityFibre to deploy but I'm a phase 2 build area (Redhill)

If by backbone you mean peering/transit, they only have 2 peers, but one of the them in Cogent, which is good: https://ipinfo.io/AS207645#block-peers

They could use a lot more peers however, so probably have transit arrangements in place.

Cheers AndyPandy for your help. Gives me another option to think about

HB have just opened the order book in our area (Crawley), I have similar concerns, Cityfibre and Openreach are still 'planned' so have gone for it

Fingers crossed

In reply to a post by john_32:

HB have just opened the order book in our area (Crawley), I have similar concerns, Cityfibre and Openreach are still 'planned' so have gone for it

Fingers crossed

Have you ordered as a new connection or transfer of your existing XDSL service? If you have concerns it would be better to order as a new connection even though it means paying two monthly fees as you will have your XDSL connection as a fallback if HB does not perform adequately. You can cancel the XDSL once you are happy that HB is satisfactory (or vice versa).

Exactly the plan 👍 will keep our TalkTalk FTTC service until HB has proven its self

1st phase of the install went smoothly, we now have a coil of fibre by the front door.

One thing I found out anecdotally is a neighbour recently asked F&W to re-present the fibre elsewhere in their property. Like me they had the original TPLink Archer Router in Bridge using a PPPoE connection.

When F&W came along to reroute the fibre, seems they did a reprovision. Now the Archer is gone and an ONT has been used. The connection is no longer PPPoE but DHCP behind a CGNAT which I assume is the new default for HB connections.

They still offer a static IP so that can be overcome unless you want to use tools like Cloudfare Tunnels or Tailscale or similar to overcome.