Thoughts on Lit Fibre?

Currently weighing up whether to hold out a little bit longer for Lit or go with an Openreach supplier for 1Gb FTTP.

Lit ticks a lot of boxes, inc price, symmetrical speeds, but I don't know how reliable their network and support really is. Also not keen on CGNAT as standard, albeit easily solved for an extra fiver a month for static.

So interested to know of any experiences, outside of Trustpilot reviews.

The Openreach based companies I've shortlisted are CIX, File Sanctuary and Ashford. Hard to find any differentiators between them. Pretty sure they'd all be decent.

Found it will now be December at the earliest for Lit, so taken a 12mth contract with Cix.

I've been with Lit for four months now and have no complaints. I have the 500Mbps service with a static IP, and I get a static IPv6 allocation as well (though it's a /62 which is a strange number but still adequate).

Don't use the bundled router so can't comment on that. I had one overnight outage of about 20 minutes at 2am which Lit confirmed was network maintenance, other than that there has been no downtime.

My Broadband Ping

I was asked by PM whether I would still recommend Lit, and the answer is a solid yes. I can't find any fault with the service, there's been no downtime other than small overnight pre-announced maintenance windows. I was not affected by whatever caused them to knock a bunch of ONTs off their network a few weeks ago (https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/02/broadband-isp-lit-fibre-send-engineers-out-after-borking-onts.html).

I'm based in Hertfordshire and it seems like Lit run fairly regional networks so I don't know how much my experience can be extended to other regions. My experience with e.g. changing routers has been that the service comes up straight away, I've read others in different regions need to either spoof MAC addresses or wait for a DHCP lease to time out.

To respond directly to the points that were raised:
- Speed: I have the 500Mbps service, I've never experienced any slowdowns
- Reliability: Covered by the paragraph above
- Latency: Never noticed any issues, consistently below 5ms to things hosted out of London

I opted for the static IP address so cannot review the quality of their CGNAT gateways or the reputation that those IP addresses have.

@jpm - which router are you using? I'm thining of signing up with Lit, and have a UDM-Pro. Just wondering whether it's likely to be a seemless procedure to get it running with Lit

I am using a Netgate 3100 but will probably be replacing it as the platform is EOL now. But it's working fine.

Great, thanks!

I've had Lit Fibre for 2 weeks now (100Mb/s & static IP) and thus far everything has been fine and meeting the speed/reliability/latency requirements. I'm using the ONT direct into my own Draytek router and the allocated static IP must actually be a fixed DHCP lease since I was advised which MAC to use on my WAN interface.

Only very minor downside is that my static IP must come from a block with a slightly dubious reputation as I get very considerably more port 5060 probes then ever I did on BT (but as these are all blocked by my Draytek firewall it is largely immaterial).