City Fibre potential installation......

It seems like you have three options:

Sweet talk the installers to install it where you want. (openreach did mine, and they were quite flexible - doing a half lap of the house on the outside, drilling through the wall and then routing the fibre to adjacent to my comms cabinet); or,

Find a discrete place where they will install downstairs, and connect to your router in the loft via an existing ethernet connection; or,

Do as above, and then when they have installed and proved it, move it yourself to where you want it. (they might even leave you enough fibre to do with without extending!)

This will depend on their character and their willingness to bend the H&S rules or allow me to get involved with installing the ONT and Router

That will tie up one of the Ethernet ports in the lounge....

They would have to wind up about 8 metres of spare fibre to allow me to pull said fibre back outside, up the gutter downpipe and then via the soffit/fascia board into loft....

As I understand it, to extend optical fibre, requires special fibre cutting gear and polishing.

I did wonder if a optical coupler and a pre-made 8m fibre extension lead with pre fitted connectors at both ends would do the trick, leaving me to fill in the drilled holes afterwards?

S.

May be a daft question but would they install it on an external wall if you presented them with a weatherproof box and power supply?

If your loft is fully boarded, like mine, it won't be an H&S problem, but its always easier to say "no" rather than do on individual survey.

I remeber visiting a wonderful new 'energy efficient' house. To get to the solar power equipment you had to walk on narrow boards across the loft. The extra cost of putting down some sheets of ply in a new house would have been minimal.

You could install a small managed switch next to the fibre termination and use a VLAN to separate the traffic. Your router would need to be configured with the same VLAN id for the WAN port.

John

I don't know if City Fibre use the same customer-side optical stuff as Openreach, but it is possible to extend an Openreach fibre connection:

Owain

Which depends on how far they have to bend them... Boarded out, lit, open volume, good sized hatch and permenantly installed loft ladder with hand rail is easier to "bend the rules" for than insulation covered rafters, unlit, crammed with bits of timber from roof trusses, small hatch, access from a step ladder.

The big gotcha currently might be how long and how much of your house the installer will be happy to be in. Covid-19.

Make the installers job as easy as possible. Have good free running draw string(s) installed so the fibre cable can be simply pulled in. Bear in mind that as the distribution is underground they may well install a duct and blow the fibre in rather than a bury a tough fibre cable. Ducting for blown fibre has quite a large bend radius.

The ONT, PSU installtion, etc is little more than a couple of screws and plugging in. The fibre will need properly terminating, with appropiate plug, he'll have the kit to do that but then it just plugs in.

connect

If it's in the lounge, perhaps they'll run the duct/cable around the house so that the ONT can be located somewhere else.

To do a fusion weld join yes.

Possibly, if you can get a barrel or appropiatly sexed premade extension with the right connecter(s). There are quite a number of fibre connectors, some look very similar but don't mate... Each non-fusion welded joint adds to the loss a single coupler shouldn#t be an issue unless the light levels are marginal in the first place.

Also if the optical side develops a fault you may have to shift the ONT to the end of their cable when they come to fix it.

It appears they blow fibre to a box called a TOBY in the road, and then joint a cable to your premises from there:

The photos do appear to show the same fibre from the internal access box to the ONT that Openreach use, in which case an (unofficial) extension would be possible (see Owain's link).

The ONT isn't very big. You could make a nice cover for it, I suppose...

Theo

Well, one assumes it has to terminate into a device of some kind. you cannot really expect the fibre to go all the way up the wall, if she wants to pay for an outside contractor to do this, then that is her issue. Brian

In 1993, just after our 1930s street had been cabled (by Videotron) a friend bought a new build a mile away (when I visited him, the roads weren't tarmaced).

They were due to be cabled in 1999.