I’ve finally got fibre to the premises

29 June 2024 • 1 min read

I recently posted about how Community Fibre were installing their kit in my area. Well, things have changed since then – Community Fibre abandoned their roll-out on my road (and in other areas), and Openreach pulled their finger out and installed their kit ahead of schedule.

And so I’m now sitting here with 1 Gbps (advertised as 900Mbps) Openreach-based FTTP from EE.

Installation

Installation took an hour and a half. It wasn’t done by an Openreach engineer – the job was outsourced to a company called Morrison Telecom Services (MTS). The engineer also didn’t completely remove the old copper phone line (as he had no instruction to do so). He did cut the cable, though, allowing him to reuse the existing hole in the wall for the fibre. The end result is that there’s a useless cut phone line attached to the property. (I believe Openreach will remove it if asked.)

The optical network terminal (ONT) that was installed is a dinky 2.5 GbE Adtran SDX 611q:

Pings

Here in outer London, pings to London servers are around 3 to 4ms. Here’s Google (near Heathrow Airport, at a guess):

$ ping www.google.co.uk
PING www.google.co.uk (142.250.187.227) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from lhr25s34-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.187.227): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=2.25 ms
64 bytes from lhr25s34-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.187.227): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=3.10 ms
64 bytes from lhr25s34-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.187.227): icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=3.13 ms
64 bytes from lhr25s34-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.187.227): icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=3.14 ms

Speed tests

Speed tests come back around 930Mbps down (though around 700 to 800Mbps for a single-thread download) and 110Mbps up. A nice bump from my old FTTC service (which achieved around 73Mbps down and 18Mbps up).

Conclusion

Everything seems to be in order from the comparisons I could find online. (And there’s now another set of stats for other people to compare with.)