Fibre

Our recent installation involved them drilling a hole and fitting an eye-type rawlbolt to attach the cable to the house wall at eves' level, nail-in cable clips to run it to and around a nearby corner and then a drop down to downstairs cupboard level for entry to the outside termination box. The drilling and clipping was done from a ladder.

But a very thin piece of glass, so the stresses set up by one side being in tension and the other in compression are not too great, until pretty tight bends.

The nearest pole is on the pavement outside my neighbours house. With so many switching to fibre recently there is on average one connection from the pole every week. The only company I've seen using a van mounted cherry picker is Openreach. Openreach technicians still climb ladders to reach the eves of houses when they install fibre. All other companies use the pole climbing method. I have one re-occurring observation with Openreach installs. Turn up for a one hour breakfast break and the an hour later have a one hour tea break. The other fibre companies take around 30 to 45 minutes for an install.

The poles local to me all have attached climbing rungs and only need a relatively short ladder to reach the first one.

NO NO NO NO. With most UK Fibre there is an additional box, called an "Optical Network Terminator" or ONT. This converts the optical signal from the Fibre to an electrical signal, Ethernet, which connects to the Router, which in this case is the BT "Smart HUB". The ONT is fitted when the engineer installs the Fibre in the house, which is why it wasn´t in the pack.

So in order to continue to have service in a power cut you need a battery for the ONT, and a battery for the Router/Hub, so they have sent you two batteries.

You don´t need a battery for the "Digital Handset" its in the Handset, just like a "Normal" DECT handset.

If you are 80 BT will class rightly class you as vulnerable and needing a phone which works when the power fails. Too many have had issues because DECT phones DON´T WORK without power to the base station, leaving them with no service in a power cut. Your existing DECT phone base will work as it does now, when plugged into the Hub.

Of course when I say "as now" that means it won´t work in a power cut... ... were you aware of this? Did you care?

Dave

The is why the Digital roll out is taking so long. Those who don´t have mobile phones, so need a service which works in a power cut go to great lengths to deny it.

you don´t need the battery pack in the kitchen, unless you hub is there.

We just have the ONT, Router and DECT basestation powered from the UPS that feeds our home server.

Some ONTs have a phone socket - mine has - but for some reason openreach aren't doing it any more, I believe.

That's correct, the new scheme has the phone socket on the router (or if you're not using the ISP's router, you can provide your own ATA and buy VoIP from somebody else)

So it's ethernet over fibre, then?

Ok Dave. I will be 81 in December! The fitters graciously allowed me to do the loft pulling work as I knew where the joists are.

System ready to go except there is a fault at a junction box 400m away.

Probably because it was only usable on the BT Infrastructure , and Openreach cannot favour BT..

Dave

And it's a good thing to, as obviously not enough thought was given to this aspect. Many elderly, and those with limited movement, rely on an alarm which has worked simply for years. They can wear it and all it requires is a single push of a button to connect to an emergency service. I see that Doro do mobile phones which can emulate that to some degree (

A mobile account of some sort would be required to use it. It used to be the case that if a phone wasn't used for a few months to call or receive a call, the account would be closed. I assume that wouldn't happen with an "emergency only" mobile phone.

In any case, the current system works in a power cut. How long do cell towers work if the power in the area goes down?

Allegedly, Openreach wanted to own that part of the stack and offer 'landline rental' to ISPs using FTTP. ISPs said 'stuff Openreach, we'll do our own VOIP instead'. Ofcom agreed with the ISPs.

It turns out that a number of ISPs actually whitelabel BT/OR's wholesale VOIP service anyway, but this doesn't stop them running their own VOIP platform if they wanted.

Theo

Yes, but you know what you are doing, and a UPS that will run a home server .. most don´t and many blame BT/Openreach when theirs stop working during a power cut, hence the roll out delays.

Dave

Crudely, yes, but the encapsulation is very different. What open reach will do is present either a frame relay or an ethernet connection to your ISP and you will run a PPP session over that whole shebang, and IP over that. tyically with ADSL it used to be PPPoA (PPP over ATM) but for fibre and cable its usually PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet)

E.g. my router says PPPOE is the protocol it is using to talk to the ONT and that tunnels to some kind of PPP session at my ISP

I don't think the fibre takes the ethernet packets though. It may be high speed serial over fibre at that point. Oh. looked it up. It's (aptly) called POS (Packet over SONET). No ethernet at that point at all. So at the fibre level its TCPIP over PPP over POS over SONET

But you dont need to know that. All you need to know is that your router will have an Ethernet port that plugs into the ONTs Ethernet port and a bit of configuration sets up a PPPoE session to your ISP and Robert is a relative.

Can be quite a long time

Its not a cell tower but we have a local huge microwave relay tower. Walk past it and Sometimes you can hear the diesel generators going

OFGEM have *probably* imposed some form of 'minimum time for off grid operation'

Whatever my local cell tower is or has, its always worked enough to report a power cut.

In message <vdh1hf$2p05l$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, David Wade snipped-for-privacy@g4ugm.invalid writes Snippage

Right fibre is connected! Test speed currently 92.35 up and 28.46 down. Not quite the 150 claimed or the 99 guaranteed but a big advance on

Thanks for all the interest and support.

Now I need help re-connecting our Panasonic telephones! The engineers seemed confident that the green socket on the hub will work. Fine but I don't have an equivalent socket to plug into the old system. They have left the incoming copper cable connected. The BT outlet is recent. Any advice?

There shouldn't be any "training period" as with ADSL/VDSL, you should get what you ordered. As you've changed ISP, nothing at "their end" should remember what speed you got previously and throttle it to that, but it wouldn't surprise me if their first line support spins that story, give it overnight, reboot the lot and re-measure speed.

Was wifi involved in the speed measurement? If so measure with just ethernet cables.

Take whatever was plugged into your old master faceplate (or microfilter) and plug it into the green socket.