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)