Wessex Internet comes to Town

I have been a follower of this forum for over a decade and have gained a great deal of valuable information in the process, so thanks to one and all for sharing your knowledge.
I now have the opportunity to add something back.
I live in rural Somerset and Wessex Internet are the only Alt Net in town, so I went with them.
My Openreach copper line is delivered overhead to the gable end, then directly into the loft via a ventilation slit. The loft is boarded, has power and light and is accessed via a pull-down ladder. Taking advice from this forum, I installed a 20mm conduit with a drawstring from the entry point to where I wanted the WI equipment sited.
Stage 1 install went smoothly, I told the team that I would like them to follow the OR line in and explained that the loft was ready to receive then. I also showed them the location of their connectorized distribution box (half way down the lane), as they had come prepared to run 300m of fibre cable from the far end of the lane from their manhole. Fibre installed in 20 minutes, and left me to pull it through the conduit.
Stage 2 again went like clockwork, showed the installer a large coil of fibre in the loft and left him to it. What felt like 15 minutes and we were all systems go.
The offer of coffee and biscuits may have helped sweeten the process.
Wessex Internet supplied a Nokia WS-240X ONT with a Nokia Wi-Fi Beacon G6 router. The ONT is wall mounted and has 2 telephone ports while the router is a large desktop mounted unit with 1 WAN port and 3 LAN ports. Access to the router to customise it to your network is either via a Web based GUI or the “Nokia Wi-Fi” App.
The GUI is heavily locked down, most of Nokia’s functionality has been removed and what remains has many features greyed out. Functionality is limited to setting the admin password and naming the 2.4 & 5 GHz Wi-Fi SSIDs (which must be different) and the Guest Wi-Fi (joint 2.4 & 5 GHz) and the associated Wi-Fi passwords.
The “Nokia App” required a newish tablet / phone with a large screen for ease of reading. This adds the capability to associate a static IP address to a devices MAC address.
Disappointingly – there is NO capability to SAVE the configuration changes to your main workstation for peace of mind. Also, there are two big red stickers on the router warning that pressing the reset button is a chargeable event.
All in all, it does what it says on the tin, - Faster Broadband – it works – but very locked down.

Might be worth asking them if you can use your own router. If that lockdown is annoying. Since you have an ONT with presumably Ethernet connection, you might find it just works, seems possible on their website faq: https://www.wessexinternet.com/help-and-support/can-...

I also live in rural Somerset and have had Wessex Internet for 3 years now. I am very surprised they installed the ONT in a loft, as they flatly refused to install in my loft (where the router, servers, UPS etc are located in a rack). So I got them to install the ONT in the garage and VLANed the connection up to my loft via the HP switch installed in a small data cabinet.. They supplied a nice ASUS router, although am not using this, instead using my existing Draytek router.

Connection on the whole has been reliable, apart from a few outages of long periods due to farmers chopping through the fibre. I keep a backup 4G connection operating at all times for these situations. The fibre runs across all of my land to the village, so I get a half-price connection as a result..

Thanks,

Dan