I was at a friends house at the weekend and noticed he has 2 white Openreach boxes on the wall, one bigger than the other. The only thing that connects to them (Via CAT5) is what lookS like a standard BT wireless router (and nothing connects to that except wirelessly)
I suspect the smaller white box is some kind of termination for FTTP, and I further suspect he?s paying through the nose to have the equivalent of a pipe the size of the Thames Water Ring Main brought to his house and then fitting a water main to 10mm reducer onto it.
I?ve asked him to look out his contract, but in the meantime....
The two boxes are likely the Openreach ONT and a battery backup unit containing 4 AA cells. The ONT terminates the fibre and presents gigabit ethernet to your router.
What you do with your router is up to you (and your ISP). If it's the 'standard BT wireless router', the more recent BT Smart Hubs are capable of doing gigabit over ethernet and up to 1.7Gbps (theoretical) over wifi. That's plenty for the 40/80/160/330Mbps that people usually take over FTTP.
On speedtest.net with a Smart Hub 1 and 5GHz 802.11ac wifi, I'm getting
193Mbps down, 20Mbps up, 7ms ping on a nominally 160/20 connection.
There is a dirty secret in the Openreach fibre rollout - Passive Optical Networking (PON) is a shared medium, like Virgin cable, joined by optical splitters. The whole fibre goes at about 2.5Gbps but it's shared between about 30 houses. So not everyone can get full rate all the time, and upgrading to faster speeds will be harder. Other fibre providers give you a dedicated fibre.
BT OpenReach are no longer fitting the battery box as part of FTTP. We have an ONT (and it is smaller than some of the ONTs that have previously been fitted) and a power supply. No battery at all. Fitted December 2019.
sounds like the ONT, that will have 2.4 Gbps of raw download bandwidth and 1.2 Gbps of upload shared with up to 32(?) neighbours.
But hge could connect over gigabit ethernet to the Hub
He has the choice of paying the same for 40, or 80 Mbps FTTP that anyone else pays for 40 or 80 Mbps FTTC, or he can chose to pay more for 330 Mbps (and quite possibly even more for 1Gbps too)
Agreed. Whilst FTTP prices are a problem (because so few ISPs support FTTP), I don't see any major issue.
And would we expect BT to fit a 40 pipe then, for an upgrade, an 80 pipe, and so on? We are not paying for the size of the pipe but for the bandwidth we contract.
I have to be fair to BT OpenReach, they have converted the entire estate/area to FTTP and did so efficiently. This was done in response to my complaint about ADSL speeds for just a few of us. Sure, of course they want to sign people up, and some have, but that was quite a significant investment. I think we are looking at the cost as something we will pay to begin with, happy with the huge improvement, and look for cheaper deals in future.
It's a bit disappointing that BT have chosen not to make FTTP available from Plusnet beyond their trial, as you say that forces you to go via more expensive BT Consumer packages (or a smallish number of ISPs)
I think there are ways to share a single gigabit fibre amongst domestic users. I'm surprised its out in the open this stuff is normal in a cabinet somewhere. Its no different to the way back in the dial up days there were fewer modemms than people. In those days you just got no connection, now you get problems with congestion if lots of people are using the system at the same time. Its very like motorways. Widen them and within months the traffic increases to make them as congested as before. Brian
The typical kit that was installed for FTTP by Openreach was the main optical network termination device, and a battery backup unit. They were then both housed in a larger plastic enclosure. The enclosure was a roughly 8" square unit like:
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Opening the bottom part of the enclose reveals:
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And open the top and you see:
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On the left is the ONT that terminates the cable (green connector), and has connections for power, and a data link to the battery backup unit (BBU). Plus 1 gig ethernet out to the router, plus a phone socket.
On the right is the BBU - basically a box with space for 4 AA rechargeable batteries and an onboard charger. This is fed power from a plug mounted PSU, and it feeds it through to the ONT.
More recently Openreach have opted for a cut down installation that does not have the BBU, and hence does away with that as well as the outer enclosure - instead mounting the ONT directly on the wall, and feeding it power directly from its plug in brick PSU.
That's very unlikely to be the case.
If you go for the "full fat" install, you will get all the kit described above, and a BT Homehub style router. That will be connected via gig ethernet to the ONT, and is quite capable of handling the full WAN speed of the fibre service. Obviously the user may end up compromising that if only using WiFi to connect devices to the main router, and they do so in unappropriated circumstances (like when too far from the router or obstructed the building construction such that the wifi performance is poor.
If you go for the PON Only install (i.e. decline the option of the bundled router), then there is perhaps scope for pairing the ONT with something not capable of handing the throughput - but even then you would probably have to try hard. Plus in reality its typically only going to be the more technically aware users opting for an install without a bundled router anyway.
That is hardly a "dirty secret", but the standard way to configure and operate just about any wide area network.
You rarely provide backhaul capacity that is the numerical sum of all downstream services. To do so would be massively cost prohibitive[1], and totally unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. Instead you plan your capacity based on statistical models of likely shared usage, such that you deliver and acceptable service in peak times. If a small number of individual users want to pay for a higher service levels or prioritisation of traffic, then you can implement that with traffic shaping / profiling or bandwidth reservation.
[1] Business users may instead what an FTTP "leased line" service, which will guarantee (typically symmetric) bandwidth at full connection speed
24/7, but even a 100/100 service is likely to cost £300+/month which is probably more than most domestic users would be prepared stump up.
Although it seems to go against what has been claimed, we ended up with our phone line still over copper - and not coming through the ONT.
I do not know why they did not port our phone number over to digital/fibre - but it does have the marginal advantage of working during a power outage. Well, it should do, we haven't had one since installation so we do not know for sure.
That's true. However it's corner cutting because they're putting the effort into running a fibre anyway, so why not run the fibre back to the exchange, rather than jointing it locally? The copper already runs all the way. That means when somebody wants to order a 1 or 10Gbps service they don't have to build any more plant, just upgrade the equipment at both ends and you're done. It's what the other fibre installers are doing and seems to be affordable for them.
PON means it's the same problem as HFC - you have to wait for the slowest customer on your local segment to upgrade before you can think of raising the speed.
The extra running costs are mostly due to reserving the upstream bandwidth. With PON you also have to install the plant too, which is what makes it unaffordable.
In many cases these installs are going into properties that already have copper coming in, so there is little incentive to mess with something that is not broken, when the priority seems to be getting new FTTP installs rolled out as fast as possible.
Having said that, they will turn off the POTS network in the near future (IIRC 2025 was suggested), and need to migrate lots of lines to VoIP.
IIRC, they have just introduced a new 512Kbps FTTP service for provision of basic telephony.
Yeah its odd that they original FTTP installs had the battery backup that would have in theory allowed for continued operation without power. However they have now switch to not installing them.
T suspoect that the answer lies in how MANY fibres they have to lay. And terminate, It makes sense to aggregate a street into a cabinet - possibly with cheap multimode fibre - and run just one (monomode?) fibre back from that.
Fibres are capable of many Gbps depending on the kit on each end
Fibre is cheap fullstop, multimode struggles to support any decent speed over not very far.
These days single mode will do 10 Gbps over tens of km without breaking into a sweat. When Openreach put the fibre down to the village FTTC I got to know the manager for the roll out. He said they normally put a 96 core fibre cable in, very occasionally 48 core. It really is very cheap compared to the costs of digging or even just shoving a fibre conduit through existing ducting (when they can find the chambers every 200 m and got past the blocakges and collapses...).
We've just had FTTP installed at a remote country location where I never thought it'd ever be supplied!
However a connection point appeared on a pole around 20 feet away a sort of black box with connectors on. Openreach guy came along has a long "ish" lump of fibre terminated with a connector at one end the other free. Plugs into the pole mounted connector box, ran it down the pole pulled it thru an underground duct already there than a short length of that thru an old duct we already had into the building theres a sort of square wall box about 5 inches square, in that a winding former to coil up the spare fibre from outside normally this would outside.
He then had another lump of fibre witch went into a wall mount Hawaii box that had an Optical in, ethernet out and a power in supplied be a wall wart. No backup batteries "we don't fit them guv" said he.
Anyway this lump of fibre had a pre-terminated connector which plugged into the Hawaii box and then had a small compact fibre cleaver splicer then you could see it on a small LCD type screen when aligned pressed the button, cable joined pulled a short bit of shrink wrap like stuff over that coiled it up in the wall box plugged it in phoned base to see it all was well the PON light lit then traffic stated flowing we used an external router rather than the one supplied, speedtest was as solid as a rock been told by Zen that we can have up to 330 down now and higher to come later if we want it, so all well here!..
Multimode can do 10Gbps, but I agree not over long distances. It's what you use to patch between kit in a Pop. You are then using cheaper interfaces on that kit, too.
That's been possible for a while. We were doing that around 15 years ago. Even then you could configures a single fibre pair to have 96 separate 10Gbps channels. Mind you, that would require several racks of expensive kit. I don't know what they do these days.
Yes, the cost is in laying the fibre, much less so in the fibres themselves.
Yes, strikes me as odd as well. I think it's tied up with who is responsible for providing the recomended 1 hour of voice access in the event of a local powerfail. It's not really Openreach but the provider of the telephone/voice service that the Openreach network is purely carrying. So that would place the onus of complete backup solution (corded instrument, battery backed DECT or WHY) on that service provider. On the other hand the ONT is part of the Openreach network so Openreach ought to keep their bit working...
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