Moving to Full Fibre (Dude, where’s my ‘phone?)

So, finally BT Openreach had got round to installing fibre optic cabling to the local area to provide fibre optic based Internet. If you’re interested to know if you can get (or if not register your interest) by using the https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband site.

You might ask, what do you mean fibre Internet? I already have fibre Internet my ISP said so, well, unless you have a fibre optic cable coming directly into your house from either Virgin Media or one of the BT Openreach backed ISPs like Sky, Plus.net, TalkTalk etc. you don’t actually have (full) fibre Internet, you have either FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) or plain ADSL (depending on the speed you are getting).

For some reason Ofcom let ISPs market FTTC has fibre Internet when in reality it is not, its more like half fibre, half copper, with which you are limited to download speeds of up to 80Mbps. Of course with Virgin Media and their DOCSIS coaxial-fibre hybrid (also not full fibre) standard you can get higher speeds than this (on a “half” fibre based system), however this article is focussed on BT Openreach provided full fibre otherwise known as FTTP – Fibre to the Premises.

I’m a Nerd, How Can I Tell if Fibre Internet has Been Installed In My Area?

If in your area the telephone lines are buried then this can be a bit difficult, in which case the use of the online tracker is needed.

If however like me you live in an area where there are telegraph poles (seems a slightly old fashioned name for them now) then look for a small black box near the top, which appears to have some ports on the front. Each one of these is a terminated fibre cable ready for use. These will look different to the normal DP (Distribution Point) boxes that typically have all the cables going into the bottom.

Booking a Slot

I’m currently with Plus.net as my ISP. When visiting their website I now got the option to switch to FTTP (because Openreach have installed FTTP in my area), I chose the 150/30 package, this has a guaranteed minimum download speed of 80Mbps and up to 150Mbps with an upload speed of 30Mbps. Either way its a massive improvement over the 28Mbps download and 4-5Mbps upload I had before.

The FTTP package cost was basically the same as my FTTC package. I placed the order and also needed to pay £6 for a new router, Plusnet Hub Two, which basically is the repackaged BT Hub with a different logo on it.

Then it was deciding on which install day (normally a couple of weeks wait but this depends on how busy they are in your area), an engineer will need to attend site to run the fibre into your house from the street (either above or below ground) to ready it for your use.

Once a day was chosen, the install was booked.

Dude, where’s my ‘phone?

Yeah where is my ‘phone?

FTTP replaces the copper wire to your house, this is very important to bear in mind, you will no longer have a copper telephone line, which means if you have technology like Redcare (alarm lines) or Fax machines or some home safety monitoring devices you will need to understand the implications of this before you commit.

I used my copper telephone line as a land line telephone and also had this bundled in with my Plus.net subscription.

Plus.net at the time of writing did not offer a way to port your telephone number out to a different provider, nor did they provide a VOIP (Voice over IP) service you could switch to.

Note: Other ISPs may offer their own VOIP service to switch to. They also may offer the router they send to include an ATA (Analogue Telephone Adapter) to allow you to connect a normal analogue telephone.

What’s VOIP? VOIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol (IP), it means rather than your telephone call being carried on two copper wires (the “ring” and “tip”) it is instead turned into a stream of data and carried over the network just like you downloading movie or reading your email, the sound of your voice (and the other parties voice) is just turned into packets and sent over the network like that.

So I surrendered my telephone number and instead swapped to a service called SIPGATE (other VOIP providers are available) these providers can provide UK telephone numbers for a number of different

If you want to see how you can use an ATA with a VOIP provider and utilise your existing analogue telephone see my article: https://www.geekmungus.co.uk/grandstream-ht801-configuration-with-sipgate-uk for how to setup the Grandstream HT801 ATA with SIPGATE.

Also bear in mind that you should not try to “port” the number yourself, if you port the number to a different provider you can inadvertently cease your broadband, so follow the process your ISP had to avoid disruption.

Install Day

The engineer arrived within the booked time slot and started work. Firstly they wanted to know where I wanted the fibre connection terminated, in my case within a cupboard where my existing telephone line terminated.

They installed the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) device, this is the small box that terminates the fibre optic cable from the street and turns it into a copper Cat5e cable that plugs into your router. In network parlance you can think of it as a “Media Converter”.

The green cable is the fibre optic, the red Cat5e cable is the cable to the router. The white cable is the power lead, you’ll need to have two power sockets one for the ONT and one for the router in close proximity of the fibre termination point.

Some holes were drilled and this leg of the fibre was run outside to a small box (Customer Service Point) on the wall where this “internal” fibre cable was terminated. Having the fibres (or any telephone cable for that matter) run like this in two legs means that if there is a need to replace either leg either the leg of cable in the street or the leg of cable in your house it can be done without needing to replace the whole run or cut and re-terminate cables.

The engineer then ran the fibre in from the telegraph pole and removed the old copper cable, at this point the old line and broadband stopped working.

After a few tests end to end to verify a good connection, the new router Plus.net had supplied was plugged in and after a few minutes came on-line and was ready for use.

And that was that, took about 1.5 hours to complete the install.

Conclusion

So, what was the final speed? Well, I’ve got a bit more testing to do but I’m currently getting around 80-100Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload, so not the full 150 but a massive improvement over the 28Mbps down and 4Mbps up I was getting before, not to mention the lower latency.

With FTTP there is no intermediate active hardware (from what I can tell) in your line from the telephone exchange to your house, so unlike FTTC where there is active equipment in a green box (PCP – Primary Connection Point) in between the telephone exchange and your house. What this means is you’re on a dedicated fibre cable from the exchange all the way to your house giving you a dedicated link (of course at the exchange you may find there is contention).

The switch to VOIP was more problematic, having to surrender your land line telephone number is a pain, if you have services (like the bank) that use it, but with Plus.net it was early days in their offering so hardly surprising they had no service to offer.

The switch from FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) based on a copper telephone line over to a dedicated fibre optic cable was all pretty straight forward. Hopefully this article has given you an overview of the process and what happens at each step.

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