Moving to FACTCO

I am looking forward to my move, on Friday, from Vodafone/CityFibre to FACTCO. (1Gb symmetrical FTTP) My move is prompted by the wish to escape Vodafone's constant change of maximum latency as they struggle to manage load balance across their national network. I have lost count of the number of times my Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) has been changed from my nearest to more distant ones. At times my latency has been nearly 40ms. My gaming sons bring laggy game play to my attention more often than I would like. VF is not keeping its promise of low latency for gamers.

FACTCO use CityFibre's local network and CF's 'purpose-built' and 'future-proofed' national network. They expect my typical latency to be 7ms. We shall see. At least my monthly bill will fall from £48 to £29.99, but without a landline or VF's mobile broadband backup dongle.

Is anyone in these forums with FACTCO? Their overall review score is 4.3 star, but it would be good to get some anecdotal viewpoints - pros and cons etc.

Edited by KilgoreTrout (Wed 15-Nov-23 21:09:07)

What a terrible start!

I awoke this morning at 6.00 am. Vodafone had already disconnected me. No problem I thought. All I need is my new username and password. Meanwhile I tethered my phone to the router so I had some internet, albeit slow.

Two phone calls and emails later- no username or password available yet. Another series of emails produces my network credentials, which I copy and paste into my router. Did I connect to FACTCO? Of course not. Another email reveals that my credentials haven't been added to the FACTCO server yet. I'm asked to give it an hour, which I do.

One hour later, no connection. A phone call reveals that I have been added to the server, but sometimes previous ISPs take a long time to properly disconnect and this sometimes takes a while because it is an automated process.

The time is now 3.50 pm, with no FACTCO connection in sight.

I let customer services know that I was not best pleased and suggested that if they had warned me that the migration might take a whole day, I might have planned my day differently and not cancelled my gym class.

EDIT. It's now 5.20 pm. Still not connected to FACTCO.

Edited by KilgoreTrout (Fri 17-Nov-23 17:20:06)

Never heard of facto, are they on a different network than what Vodafone is on? when i changed from Plusnet FTTC using Openreach network to ZZoomm FTTP using their own network, I made sure ZZoomm was installed, up and running before I cancelled Plusnet.

Hopefully things will get sorted for you soon.

Did you get this resolved?

I was under the impression there was a little more work required when moving between CityFibre ISPs than just changing the Login Credentials...

I thought it required a physical/virtual cable move by the ISPs to get you onto their hand-off hardware?

I seem to remember theres no agreed migration route between CF ISPs currently (unless that's changed recently).

I'd get back onto FACTCO and ask them to sort ASAP (if its not done already).

CityFibre do now have their systems setup for ISP to ISP migration, so that is a lot smoother moving now.

In terms of the migration think like moving between different Openreach ISPs rather than BTWholesale. The customer has to be reconfigured to the new ISPs connection with CityFibre from the old. This is the same as moving between two Openreach ISPs where you are reconfigured to the new ISPs cable link.

Do FACTCO have a connection in Coventry with CityFibre or are they using CF's national network?

Thank you for your responses. I am sure that CityFibre have a proper system for migration from one ISP to another, but in my case it has not worked. I am still not connected after the weekend. I have used up all my mobile data through tethering my mobile to my router and have had to buy more data just to get some connectivity!

FACTCO customer services have been as helpful as they can, but, would you believe it, FACTCO do not assign technical department staff to residential customers out of office hours or over the weekends?!

This morning, a priority request to connect me has gone out to CityFibre. Initially they said I would have to wait until the next migration day Friday 23rd November. My explosive response has led them to assure me that I will be prioritised. They noted that some essential data for my connection was missing, so CityFibre have got onto their own IT department to resolve it.

I don't know why my connection is causing such difficulty for them. Vodafone/CityFibre disconnected me properly. CityFibre's automated migration should have done the job.

Given my experience with ISPs, insurance companies etcI will be calling FACTO every two hours throughout the day. I feel that I will be forgotten if I don't.

It isn't until you have no internet, that you realise how important it is. ISPs and network providers should recognise that!

FACTCO popped up on a CityFibre postcode search along with some well-known providers such as EE and PlusNet. Some offered 2.5Gb connections. After lots of research and phone calls, I opted for FACTCO. The offer of £29.99, monthly, for two years helped my decision.

Edited by KilgoreTrout (Mon 20-Nov-23 11:14:08)

Finally, I am connected via FACTCO.

Customer services gave up on chasing my migration from Vodafone. They scrubbed that contract. Instead, they treated me as a fresh customer with no City Fibre history. It took only 45 minutes from initiating the request to get me connected.

I obviously have a lot to complain about, but I am certainly not complaining about the operatives in customer services. They really did try hard for me.

My main criticism of FACTCO is they don't have techies available at weekends or after 5.30pm in the week. After I voiced that criticism it was acknowledged as a weakness and that there had been management discussion about having technical support 24/7, not just CS. FACTCO is a new company, rapidly expanding, so I expect they will sort this out soon.

The quality of my connection seems to be as expected. Just now, early evening peak, I got speeds of >920Mb up and downstream. Ping is 7ms. Jitter <1ms. Traceroutes to Cloudflare and BBC.co.uk get me an average of 6ms. Happy days!

One puzzle is that the Thinkbroadband monitor isn't reading my connection properly. despite me having allowed ICMP echo.

Is it a residential or business connection?

Whilst failed migration / new provision is not really the same as a fault, the underlying provider (e.g. Openreach or CityFibre) SLA for residential services typically upto two business days, i.e. no weekend working. ISPs are unlikely to employ technical staff at times when they are not going to be able to escalate issues.

The integration between ISPs and their wholesalers systems often seem somewhat brittle, the slightest error results in failure with no or unhelpful feedback to the ISP making it difficult for their customer services to progress things without escalation to second-line support. Maybe this will improve with the requirements for one-touch switch processes.

In reply to a post by Ad_G:

Do FACTCO have a connection in Coventry with CityFibre or are they using CF's national network?

FACTO are using CF's national network. Their server is somewhere in the NW Midlands I think.
My best Ookla test server is 20i Ltd Nottingham.

Glad they managed to work around the issue for you!

Seems this "New Customer" work around could have happened quicker, but hindsight is a wonderful thing

The work needed to put it right had to wait until Monday. Nothing happens at the weekend!

I have complained that although staff were great, none was equipped to make that sort of decision over the weekend!

In reply to a post by KilgoreTrout:

FACTCO popped up on a CityFibre postcode search along with some well-known providers such as EE and PlusNet. Some offered 2.5Gb connections. After lots of research and phone calls, I opted for FACTCO. The offer of £29.99, monthly, for two years helped my decision.

i suppose being a City Fibre only ISP I would not have heard of it, I am glad you are now connected.

Will that price increase over those two years?

In reply to a post by KilgoreTrout:

The work needed to put it right had to wait until Monday. Nothing happens at the weekend!

I have complained that although staff were great, none was equipped to make that sort of decision over the weekend!

Lucky you have weekend customer service . I have been with providers that offered CS in office hours only. the one I am with now, out of office hours it is someone who works at home

Yes, I guess no CS is worse than a weekend presence, but when they can't do anything except raise tickets they seem a bit pointless.

Just to show how useless CityFibre can be, I had some engineers turn up this morning to install my fibre, ONT etc OMG! CF took the new contract thingy literally and assumed that I was starting from scratch. They guys took photographic evidence that the work had already been done and that my connection was up and running.

Hopefully that is the end of the saga.

That is not good, I think I have it good compared to you., Zzoomm had a problem over the weekend according to some people, when I got back home on Sunday it was fine and on Saturday it was ok.

i think a lot of the problem with Zzoomm is the awful router, they really need to get a decent one, this is why people are complaining. One person on Facebook saying they had a higher upload than download, 6MB/s down and 1675Mb/s up.
Not good for people who pay the money for the higher speed. I hope these are just teething problems with the new network and will get better. I have had much worse over the years and paid a lot more money. I am not changing to Openreach fibre, I can't be bothered to go through that again., I rather go back to FTTC, I don't think my landlord would like another hole drilled in the wall and another splice box installed.

If it seems your problem is lack of communication, sadly I know a lot of about lack of communication, I live with it at work, and it can cause all sort of problems. I hope you get it all working correctly

Sorry about the.late reply. I didn't spot the email alerts.

I wouldn't be surprised if the FACTO package price goes up in two years. I expect it, but would only complain if it is by more than inflation.

ISPs vary in quality in all sorts of ways and so do their routers.

I quickly learned when I was with Virgin Media to have my own router. VM let you switch to modem-only mode, but virtually all ISPs provide you with your network credentials to enter into your own router.

Having your own router leaves you in control of so much more, e.g. your own VPN server and no engineer callouts to fix it, but most of all your WiFi. I run iMesh off my main Asus router using three old routers connected by ethernet. My coverage is fantastic. I get over 500Mb up and down in every room and even >100Mb down the end of the long garden or in the street.

Strangely, Ookla now point me in the direction of London test servers rather than the NW servers of before. The speed test results are much better than the best of the NW located ones. I'm getting pings of 5ms consistently.

Does this apparent relocation of my static ip suggest that my point of entry into City Fibre's national network has also changed? It's hard to tell using Traceroute because City Fibre IPs aren't shown amongst the steps.

Ookla use Maxmind's GeoIP service to attempt to locate you and direct you to a local server. Often pointless - eg my ISP's IP addresses are in Leeds but all their connectivity is in London, and I'm in Norwich. The best place for your IP address to look up to is where your ISP picks up connectivity to the rest of the world, not where you are physically located.

You can submit a correction to Maxmind if you like. I "corrected" my IP address to Telehouse in London (instead of Norwich or Leeds) which gives the best results for me.

Correction site is here:
https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-location-correction

In reply to a post by jimbof:

Ookla use Maxmind's GeoIP service to attempt to locate you and direct you to a local server. Often pointless - eg my ISP's IP addresses are in Leeds but all their connectivity is in London, and I'm in Norwich. The best place for your IP address to look up to is where your ISP picks up connectivity to the rest of the world, not where you are physically located.

You can submit a correction to Maxmind if you like. I "corrected" my IP address to Telehouse in London (instead of Norwich or Leeds) which gives the best results for me.

Correction site is here:
https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-location-correction

Thanks for that link. Having conducted an IP location search, although it gives the IP correct ownership, i.e., Cadence networks (FACTCO), it locates me on all IP location searches in San Jose, California. This, no doubt is where the IP is registered. This outcome is not unusual. I recall doing traceroutes when I was with Vodafone. Some of their step IPs were allegedly in the USA. lol. Before I opted for a static IP my dynamic IP was often located by the Thames in Hammersmith.


I have submitted a correction using your link. I will be interested to see if that makes any difference to anything, down the line. Incidentally, they used my IPv6 address.

In reply to a post by KilgoreTrout:

Does this apparent relocation of my static ip suggest that my point of entry into City Fibre's national network has also changed? It's hard to tell using Traceroute because City Fibre IPs aren't shown amongst the steps.

Cityfibre is a wholesale layer 2 network. That means that what it carries over its network are ethernet frames. It doesn't care whether those ethernet frames contain IP datagrams (IPv4 or IPv6), and does not look at IP addresses. The IP addresses are allocated by the ISP that Cityfibre connects to.

That's why you won't see Cityfibre anywhere in your traceroutes: traceroute works at layer 3 and shows only router hops. The whole link from ISP to your home is a single hop as far as routers are concerned.

If it helps, you can think of the Cityfibre connection as a very long ethernet cable that runs from your home all the way to the ISP. That's not actually a bad analogy: it does work like a point-to-point connection.

(In reality, packets for multiple customers are carried over the same cable when it hits the ISP. Each customer is a different VLAN, and each ethernet packet carries a VLAN tag to distinguish the traffic. These VLANs are still separate and unaware of each other, like ships that pass in the night)