Internet was due off this morning until 2pm for some '3rd party damage' issue, but was fine until 3 when it went off. Checked emails

"Hello Mike


Due to adverse weather conditions and planning road closures our emergency repair work is taking longer than expected. This will continue this afternoon and is now likely to continue into this evening.

Please do not switch off any of your BeFibre equipment during this time.


We're sorry for any inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

Kind regards,
Your BeFibre team"

At least they keep you informed.

Came back on before 6pm.

In reply to a post by Graz279:

It just makes me wonder that they advertise having a static IP address (at £4 a month) will somehow improve your experience for gaming, downloading, streaming and so on. Really it shouldn't, the main benefit should be that it enables you to access your own hardware from the public Internet because it's not behind NAT and the IP address is known to you. It seems to suggest that they know their CGNAT system isn't the greatest and that getting away from it will make it all better.

Had my install today - fast but I'm also on CGNAT in Shrewsbury. Seems like others have had success getting off CGNAT, was hoping someone could confirm the process they used?
Looks like they have a support email, is it just a case of emailing them saying you've setup port forwarding but you can tell you're on a CGNAT and game servers etc are not working?
Have they been trying to charge extra for the static IP? I don't need a static IP, I just need to be rout-able. As far as I'm concerned having a static IP and not being behind an additional NAT layer I have no control over are two separate things. Dynamic DNS will solve one but not the other!
If it had said "you need to pay for a static IP to be accessible from the internet" I might have made a different decision with who I signed up with!

In reply to a post by fletch986:

Seems like others have had success getting off CGNAT, was hoping someone could confirm the process they used?

If you are successful please post what wording/process you used as it will be useful to know.

CGNAT is what puts me off many AltNet providers.

Thanks

In reply to a post by fletch986:

I don't need a static IP, I just need to be rout-able. As far as I'm concerned having a static IP and not being behind an additional NAT layer I have no control over are two separate things. Dynamic DNS will solve one but not the other!

In practise with always-on broadband services these are the same thing, the ISP would still need an IP per customer.

Is this a common issue then? Ie the same on Squirrel, Community fibre etc?

In reply to a post by jpm:

In reply to a post by fletch986:

I don't need a static IP, I just need to be rout-able. As far as I'm concerned having a static IP and not being behind an additional NAT layer I have no control over are two separate things. Dynamic DNS will solve one but not the other!

In practise with always-on broadband services these are the same thing, the ISP would still need an IP per customer.

Completely agree, but you've got to be quite deep inside networking/provider business model to appreciate that. Practically the IP I share now through CGNAT is unlikely to change (static), just like back in the early days of home ADSL if you powered off your modem for a while and powered it back on you would get a brand new routable but different (dynamic) IP.
My frustration with them is more about the way it's presented.

In reply to a post by fletch986:

Is this a common issue then? Ie the same on Squirrel, Community fibre etc?

I am purely looking at options for myself and family so it is a limited set of different ISPs, none that are live yet and different depending on the area of country but broadly speaking the "cheaper" ISPs that can offer a FTTP connection in the £20/month price band tend to be ISPs that use CGNAT. So if it is a good deal it is worth checking in my opinion.

I am sure I have read somewhere that BeFibre does have a 30 day guarantee though so if you are not happy talk to them and see if they can do something?

I wouldn't be too happy with a CGNAT connection but I have no experience of one apart from when using a mobile phone connection which quite often uses CGNAT.

Have you had any problems since your connection has gone live? Does general browsing, streaming and banking work as expected even though you are on CGNAT? Have you had any slow downs like of people are reporting?

Thanks

Issues yesterday and again today but during work hours. ONT showing a red light. Others on the estate also affected. Was dropping out for maybe 20 secs at a time (3 times in a 1hr meeting in the afternoon) and then a longer outage of around 40mins.

Same again today but morning time :/

On a more positive note, can't remember when the last evening slowdown occurred.

An update on how mine service has been going since the install.

tl;dr - Very good once I got off the CGNAT

The first few days were a bit hit and miss, I saw fairly constant but very short outages. Maybe 3 seconds every hour.
I got swapped over from the CGNAT to a different range which has an IPv4 pool and it's been much better since. Almost no drop outs.
The people in customer service were trying to be very helpful but I don't think they knew much at all, They also wouldn't put me through to their level 3 guys, so presumably it's a very small team and they're trying to ring fence them for real issues which is fair.

I've never seen any issues with speed in the evenings.

I still have the Linksys connected directly to my Ubiquiti kit, but I did manage to run some Cat 6A to my office, so I now have the full 900Mpbs to my desktop and I think I've only had one drop out since then.
A few people mentioned DNS, mine is pointed at CloudFlare and I use a Pihole with Unbound for recursive DNS so most of it happens in house.

I'm not sure anyone needs the full 900Mpbs like I have unless you have multiple people who really want connections of around 300Mbps each at the same time. Most websites and services don't offer anything over 300 from what I've seen.
The PS5 wired in directly can get about 700Mpbs as said in my last post, but if there wasn't an offer on then I doubt I could justify paying for more than 500.

Here's my BQM

My Broadband Ping

In reply to a post by manclab:

I've had it installed this morning. It took the engineer a few hours to install the ONT but it's a very tidy job, so no complaints there.

I'm happy to say I got the Linksys router and the engineer told me that they're putting new customers on the Linksys now.

I've been able to get 945 download and upload even on Speedtest.net, although that varies a bit. The engineer claimed the speed test on the Linksys which talks to their kit is more accurate, which is nonsense, but I get good download speeds out of it so no complaints yet.

I took a cable out of the Linksys and put it in to the WAN port of my Ubiquiti kit and it's been smooth sailing so far. I also wired my PS5 directly in to my UDM and that got around 730 which is much better than I had before.

I've spent most of the day on a desktop running on Wi-Fi until I can get some ethernet to my office so I haven't really tested the full 900 but I've been running a ping from UptimeKuma and haven't seen any dropouts yet.

I'll report back if I see any issues, especially the congestion in the evenings. I think I'm one of the first customers in this area so it'll be interesting to see if it is a nation wide issue which I see straight away, or if it's more down to local contention.