New Year surprise

Had a nice New Year's Day surprise... chap from Quinn was here yesterday to install FTTP; he did the internal work but the externals weren't as simple as usual so he passed the buck back to OR.

So, come this morning, browsing away happily on the old 80/20 FTTC and there's funny noises from outside... there's a chap from OR investigating (on overtime ). An hour later I'm up and running on FTTP

Nothing outstanding, only 100-odd Mbps, but that's what I'm paying for; decided I don't need anything faster. Light level at the internal box (ONT?) is -17dBm, very happy with that.

Happy New Year all!!

Happy New Year

Nice one Bill, and yes, that’s the ONT.

Congrats on being ONT'd

OR will have people working today ... just in case of major faults or those which have a 4 hour response time. And I woud guess that if here are no faults to deal with they are given tasks such as yours.

Like you, I went for a 300Mbps service as it was plenty for our business and domestic needs and not much different to the lower tier. Moved to 500Mbps at a renewal - cheaper than I was paying before!

You're the first person Bill to report a brand new FTTP connection in 2026

Happy New year to all

In reply to a post by MHC:

Like you, I went for a 300Mbps service as it was plenty for our business and domestic needs

Yeah- the old FTTC usually ran at a bit over 70Mbps; it could handle 3 simultaneous 4K streams without breaking sweat (I tried it!) and I can only watch one at a time

Biggest d/l I ever have is when Apple issue a new OS... it takes around 6-8 minutes, depending. I could probably get that down to under a minute with a Gigabit connection, but it's still going to take the thick end of half an hour to install the damn thing so what's the point? I can always upgrade if needs change.

I'd expected some issues with the install- I'd had some fairly heavy hard landscaping done over the cable route resulting in the ducting being about 6" deeper than it used to be and going under a path of paving slabs leaving a gap of only about 3" from the house wall. The Quinn engineer simply couldn't reach it, he (and I) thought it likely some slabs would have to be lifted..

The OR engineer couldn't reach it either, but (with my agreement) took a different tack- the copper cable was moving freely enough so the duct was probably in reasonable nick, he disconnected it at the house and used it to pull a rope through; the idea being that if it got stuck he could pull it back and reconnect me.

But it didn't get stuck and everything went swimmingly after that, so it was completed quite a bit earlier than I was expecting- well done OpenReach

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Nice one Bill, and yes, that’s the ONT.

I was a bit surprised at the size of the ONT, the photos I'd seen didn't really give any scale and I assumed it would be about the same size as the HG612 modem.

But it's a diddy little thing, isn't it

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Nice one Bill, and yes, that’s the ONT.

I was a bit surprised at the size of the ONT, the photos I'd seen didn't really give any scale and I assumed it would be about the same size as the HG612 modem.

But it's a diddy little thing, isn't it

That they are …. so small as to be underwhelming IMO. I liked the original Huwawei ones that were installed, 4 ports, plenty of flashing lights, it looked like the future !