Fibre

My understanding is that they do not supply for the home owner to install but install everything, They join the inside and outside fibres together in a junction box either inside or outside the house and terminate the inside fibre cable in a powered modem or ONT.

My supplier - Wefibre ran 18m of fibre inside. The fibre, 20/25m of it, came spooled up in a small box which had an optical lead socket on for connection the modem. The fibre was unspooled back to the external junction box with the thin fibre being glued along the wall/ceiling interface.

Fibre patch cables are pretty cheap, you just need to know which connectors each end requires. Presumably they will be the same, which makes it easier, and the fibre is almost certainly single-mode.

LC connectors are small and very widely used. APC has an angled end, UPC does not. APC has better return loss from less reflection, but greater signal loss. It's also generally less common.

Ready-made patch cables go up to about 10m, more than that may have to be made to order, but that shouldn't cost much more. The cost is pretty much all in the termination equipment.

In message snipped-for-privacy@jrenewsid.jretrading.com>, Joe snipped-for-privacy@jretrading.com writes

I have 6 more months on my current contract and copper meets our current needs.

From upthread comments, somebody will be trying to market their service. Armed with new knowledge, I hope to strike an acceptable deal.

Thanks.

This video shows an installation of FTTP by Wildanet.

Chris

My install overhead from the pole was nothing like that.

It took Citylink approx 30 minutes to run the fibre from the pole to the eves of my house and then down the wall to the outside box. The ONC ,about 50% smaller than the one shown in the video, was positioned the other side of the wall and connected to the outside box with a short fibre lead.

Two men approx 30 minutes to install the fibre.

I did have a problem with Zen Internet with their configuration of the router which should have be automatic but that was sorted in the afternoon with a call to their technical help line and me configuring one parameter in the router manually.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Chris J Dixon snipped-for-privacy@cdixon.me.uk> writes

Sadly the sound suffers massive break ups. Ours will have to be overhead as the poles are either across the lane or behind a 20m wide concrete yard.

Nobody's told them the microduct wouldn't go all "coily" if they unspooled it properly, rather than just pulling it of the edge of the drum ...

Yup mine neither...

On ours they did the fibre drop from pole to the eves of the porch, then round the side of the house and into some ducting I already had in place. They drilled a new hole through the wall into the cupboard and took the fibre in without any external junction (this probably pre-dated that). They stripped back the cable a metre or so before the ONT. Our drop cable also had a very fine copper pair in it - but that is not connected at the pole, so they just bundled that up. They put the connector on the end of the fibre and connected it to the ONT. Then handed it over to me (which I think threw them a bit since I don't think they had done a "wires only" install before where they were not supplying and setting up a router!)

My router is a quad WAN model (it has one ADSL/VDSL WAN port, one gig ethernet, one USB, and can also do WAN over wifi). I had been using it with two ADSL connections with load balancing. I had used the internal ADSL/VDLS port for one, and an external ADSL modem to convert the other to ethernet to connect to the ethernet WAN port on the router. The router then talked to that as a PPPoE WAN device.

Switching to the ONT was just a case of plugging its ethernet into the WAN2 port on the router. Since I had ported the broadband to the FTTP with the same ISP, it just automatically connected without any further tweaking.

(I was only seeing about 7Mbps at that point which had them worried. I told them not to worry - once I turn off all the traffic shaping I was using to try and get the best out two really slow connections, and switch the load balance to failover it would get much better!)

Probably about 40 mins total.

Probably not too important at 15m - but more so with longer runs. It looks like the kind of stuff that would be a bugger to really get the twist out!

They're showing underground blown fibre - they don't blow fibre on poles, they string armoured fibre directly. He has another video showing the whole end to end process:

- see 39:24 onwards for the pole setup.

(from what I've seen of Openreach's way of doing things it's more or less the same)

Theo

It's all a bit like a moon landing.

Having to remind people about dust caps, it's like I was back in the lab, fighting a losing battle.

But practically speaking, nothing has changed :-) Still the same endearing qualities.

At least nobody got stabbed with a piece of broken glass fibre (very bad, floats in the blood stream). You can horse around all you want, but be VERY CAREFUL with bare fibre. If they left pieces on the ground, you'd use a tool to pick them up, not your fingers. And the pieces go into an approved marked container. The same way you'd handle "sharps" at an injection site.

Paul

When I was working with fibre 40 years ago the one bit of safety advice was to never hold the fibre close to your eye. It's the equivalent of putting a laser pointer to your eye, more so if the light at the other end is in the IR band.

Thanks for that, some really interesting basic stuff there.

Chris

I think I had a power meter for that.

Most of the staff I worked with, knew that 1500nm wasn't visible and there was nothing to see.

But with lab accidents, you never really know what people know. You have to be careful when new people wander into the lab.

Paul