Full Fibre Optic Broadband.

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The town where I live is having a full fibre optic broadband network installed by a company called LILA Connect and the avenue in which I live is next. The installation provides a junction box on the property boundary, i.e. the top of the drive but you have to pay £1000 to connect your home to the network and then pay a monthly subscription to an Internet Service Provider.
My neighbour and I have both had our drives resurfaced recently and neither of us want an ugly scar running down our drives or to pay £1000 for the privilege.
I already have Fibre To The Cabinet which is giving me a healthy 65Mb download speed and enables me to stream 4K movies without any issues.
Does anyone else thinks this is expensive?
There have also been reports of residents not being able to get their cars off their driveways for over ten days due to presence of the open trench and barriers!
I think I have an interesting few weeks ahead especially as I just read some reviews online.
 
Nov 11, 2009
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Virgin are installing the cables in our area and its extensive. Like you say each house will have a termination point just off of the drive. LILA Connect are very active too. The problem in our close is that all drives are block paving and there is no pavement. The blocks edging the road are slightly ramped then you are onto the drives. each drive has a line one block wide, of contrasting blocks about 1 meter in from the road which basically indicates where services are installed. But the area between the contrasting line and road is the same blocks as used on drives, there are no pavements.

From what I have seen of the quality of Virgins installation on tarmac pavements we are dreading what they may do to the block drives as it is assumed the termination box will sit in that area and not in the road.
 
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We’ve had fibre to within about 150 yds of the house and get average of 75mbs and has been sufficient for last few years, there has now been fibre available right to your door, couple over the road have had the fibre extended to the house and he’s getting 500 mbs from sky, I think he said to get that speed was extra £4 monthly and for another £2 monthly he can have 900mbs, at those speeds you can probably get next Saturdays lottery numbers today.

BP
 
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Well I rather envy your position to even have high speed fibre available!

Back in the late 1990's a cable company was installing cable TV systems and internet throughout our area into the pavement. They connected every property, except the properties in our cul-de-sac. Most annoyingly my house is the first in the cul-de-sac and one side is actually on the main road where the cable has been installed, but becasue my address was listed as being in the C-D-S they wouldn't allocate me a feed. even though I was closer to the cable than most of the other houses.

The best internet speed available to me from any provider is up to "8Mbs". In reality I only get at best 5Mb, and it often drops to below 4 and occasionally it drops out, where as all the other properties outside of the c-d-s have 60Mbs or better.

However 5Mbs is just about enough for us as we don't tend to stream a lot, and "I player" just about works with the occasional buffering.
 
Jun 16, 2020
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The town where I live is having a full fibre optic broadband network installed by a company called LILA Connect and the avenue in which I live is next. The installation provides a junction box on the property boundary, i.e. the top of the drive but you have to pay £1000 to connect your home to the network and then pay a monthly subscription to an Internet Service Provider.
My neighbour and I have both had our drives resurfaced recently and neither of us want an ugly scar running down our drives or to pay £1000 for the privilege.
I already have Fibre To The Cabinet which is giving me a healthy 65Mb download speed and enables me to stream 4K movies without any issues.
Does anyone else thinks this is expensive?
There have also been reports of residents not being able to get their cars off their driveways for over ten days due to presence of the open trench and barriers!
I think I have an interesting few weeks ahead especially as I just read some reviews online.

We have virgin fibre but its copper to the box. I pay for 200 but usually get 220. We recently had city fibre installed to the boundary. The installers did the whole area in a couple of weeks and no one was stuck on their drive. In fact very little inconvenience. So far as I know, I can connect to that for no initial fee and its faster and cheaper than Virgin. I will look to swap over in September when my contract ends.

Our drive is block paving, It‘s fairly easy to remove blocks and lay the cable. But with concrete or asphalt that not so easy.

John
 

Sam Vimes

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FTTP was run through our community over a year ago by BT. It was a farce with many install dates missed and charges for the final connection ranging from free in our case to over £10k. BT will subsidise the install upto £3400. Many of those who complained about missed dates and ridiculous install costs eventually got good deals and generous compensation.

Ours was relatively pain free and since the old wired broadband was working we didn't worry about dates slipping. In the end we did get some compensation.
 
Jul 18, 2017
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We have fibre to cabinet which is giving us about 55Mb download speed and enables us to stream 4K movies without any issues. The cabinet is about 400m from our home. We are happy with it and no issues. We would not pay £1000 to connect to a network just to get a couple of mb faster.
 
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We have virgin fibre optic we had something wrong so a technician came to our home was there over a hr+ . he installed virgin tv v6 box and boost the system up we were on 200 but he had to rewired it because he was not getting a signal but it seems to be alot faster , so very happy with there service so far
 
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Jul 23, 2021
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The town where I live is having a full fibre optic broadband network installed by a company called LILA Connect and the avenue in which I live is next. The installation provides a junction box on the property boundary, i.e. the top of the drive but you have to pay £1000 to connect your home to the network and then pay a monthly subscription to an Internet Service Provider.
My neighbour and I have both had our drives resurfaced recently and neither of us want an ugly scar running down our drives or to pay £1000 for the privilege.
I already have Fibre To The Cabinet which is giving me a healthy 65Mb download speed and enables me to stream 4K movies without any issues.
Does anyone else thinks this is expensive?
There have also been reports of residents not being able to get their cars off their driveways for over ten days due to presence of the open trench and barriers!
I think I have an interesting few weeks ahead especially as I just read some reviews online.
£1000 to connect is nuts. Depending on where your existing line comes in, it may be possible to pull fibre direct to you home via the existing ducting, or via an overhead drop if that is what is already in place. LILA won't have access to that existing infrastructure, so will be quoting for a new dig. However, if delivered by Openreach (when they get round to you) it would be more like £50 to free. If you already have 65Mbps down (and close to 10 or 15 up) and are happy with it, I would stick with that.

Depending on the age of the rest of the equipment in you home, you may find you are limited to about 50 - 60 Mbps by your WIFI hardware anyway (802.11n), so think hard and do some testing and research before you increase your access speed.

Also - remember that if you move to a FTTH broadband provider, it will not include a landline phone service. If you want that you will have to pay for it separately with either an additional copper land line rental (about £13 - £15 pcm) and phone service, or add a Voice over IP service (£3 to £5 pcm + hardware costs) and move your phone number (£20 - £40 one off).
 
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£1000 to connect is nuts. Depending on where your existing line comes in, it may be possible to pull fibre direct to you home via the existing ducting, or via an overhead drop if that is what is already in place. LILA won't have access to that existing infrastructure, so will be quoting for a new dig. However, if delivered by Openreach (when they get round to you) it would be more like £50 to free. If you already have 65Mbps down (and close to 10 or 15 up) and are happy with it, I would stick with that.

Depending on the age of the rest of the equipment in you home, you may find you are limited to about 50 - 60 Mbps by your WIFI hardware anyway (802.11n), so think hard and do some testing and research before you increase your access speed.

Also - remember that if you move to a FTTH broadband provider, it will not include a landline phone service. If you want that you will have to pay for it separately with either an additional copper land line rental (about £13 - £15 pcm) and phone service, or add a Voice over IP service (£3 to £5 pcm + hardware costs) and move your phone number (£20 - £40 one off).

Thanks as very good advice with wisdom. In our case living in a rural area with poor signal we are stuck with a landline. We are lucky to get 3G at times yet they want to phase out 3G? 4G is totally non existent unless you go outside and walk up the road a bit. I guess that if I was able to climb on the roof I may get signal, but not willing to even attempt that!
However we have our TV connected by cable to our router for downloading films etc so if we did drop the landline we may have an issue there as how will you get a signal to it?
The other TV in the conservatory uses wifi from the router for any downloads so again not sure whether a cell phone signal could cope if we did not have a landline? At the rear of the house where the conservatory is lucky to get 2G!
 

Damian

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I have recently had Openreach install full fibre to my property and it cost me nothing.
The engineer replaced the copper telephone line from the post to the house and then installed the router to a location inside the house of my chosing.
Very good service from Openreach and I get a download speed of 148mb/s and upload speed of 28mb/s.
 
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How does your existing line get into your house? Many of these independent fibre providers have permission to use BT/Openreach ducts and telegraph poles etc. if Lila has that agreement they should be able to pull through any ductwork used by BT.
However some of these independent providers do seem to cherry pick. A company called Trooli is doing our village. Walk down our road and a group of houses will have it available, then some that won’t, a few more that will etc etc. basically what seems to be happening is that if ducts are clear between main duct and telegraph pole they will do it. If any work required, or telegraph pole is in a garden rather than on the verge it is parked for a “later” date.
£1000 certainly sounds expensive, their website says a max of £650. But if they really need to dig a channel then maybe understandable.
 

Sam Vimes

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Thanks as very good advice with wisdom. In our case living in a rural area with poor signal we are stuck with a landline. We are lucky to get 3G at times yet they want to phase out 3G? 4G is totally non existent unless you go outside and walk up the road a bit. I guess that if I was able to climb on the roof I may get signal, but not willing to even attempt that!
However we have our TV connected by cable to our router for downloading films etc so if we did drop the landline we may have an issue there as how will you get a signal to it?
The other TV in the conservatory uses wifi from the router for any downloads so again not sure whether a cell phone signal could cope if we did not have a landline? At the rear of the house where the conservatory is lucky to get 2G!

I seem to recall we had a similar 'conversation' in another thread about cell phones and no signal in your home. So, I'll just clarify a couple of things again lncluding your TV concern in the hope this is still the case.

Whatever system you use to bring the broadband signal into your home - fibre or a piece of wire - this will go into your router to provide a connection to the Internet. From your router the signal can either go through the air via Wifi or through an Ethernet cable. The telephone landline may work over the same piece of wire but the telephone service plays no part in the broadband connection.

From what you describe you have one TV that's wired via a cable to your router and one TV that uses wifi. This would still be the case if your broadband was to fibre all the way to the home. The telephone service i.e your landline plays no part in this so there's no change to how you watch TV. If you get rid of the landline you'll still be able to watch TV as a streaming service as it comes via the Internet not the telephone service.

Previously we discussed about dropping your landline because you told us that you use your cell phone almost exclusively at home and that this was probably working through Wifi Calling because you have a poor or no signal in the house. If you don't have a mobile signal this is the only way your cell phone could work at home. So, in theory you could get rid of your landline service - unless the number is still used for some services and you want a backup should the internet go down. No internet - no Wifi Calling.

Hope this helps.
 

Sam Vimes

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In these days of increasing expenditure it would be wise to assess what broadband speed you actually need. The temptation for some is to go for the fastest just because you can but do you really need it.

We survived for years on a 6Mbps link which allow just the two of us to have adequate download capability and enough to be able to stream digital TV content. The reason for switching to fibre when it came along was two fold. One - it was more reliable than the old pieces of wire under the road that constantly broke or got wet. Two - it give me a better upload speed which I frequently need.

The basic speed on offer was 36/10 but for £1 more I could get 50/10 so that's what we have.

It doesn't make me type or read any faster and the TV shows still run at the same speed and look the same. What's more I deliberately chose a TV thats only Full HD and not 4K because unless you view a 4K TV at the correct distance its no better than Full HD and in some cases its worse when playing SD.

The other consideration is what speed you can actually acheive on the local side of the router. Having a 900Mbps signal coming into the router isn't much good if you only have 100Mbps Ethernet cables or 72Mbps wifi on the local side - unless there are many users wanting simultaneous access.
 
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One thing often overlooked - and here is no exception - is contention. The reason that there is a difference between download and upload is that the download is shared between a number of users. In the early days it was 50:1, then it came down to 20: and where it still exists these days it is often 10:1. Ergo make the download 50Mb and share it between 10 people and they (theoretically) will get a solid 5Mb apiece - hence why the 6Mb worked well for a long time.
However, make the feed 900Mb both ways and the relatively small amounts of data any one person is using is of little consequence in terms of getting a steady throughput.

Per domestic phones, if you have FTTP (or FTTH as some call it) you don't need a copper pair for a phone, just a VoIP interface (that is Voice over Internet Protocol.) Your landline number can be transferred to a VoIP service provider, and you will pay <MUCH> less for the service and calls compared with BT.

In respect of closure of 3G in 2023, the base stations will simply be changed to 4G. 3G, 4G and 5G use very similar technology so getting rid of 3G and replacing it with 4/5G is logical. It does mean however that those with a phone that is only 2G and 3G will be limited to speech and texts - and I bet they don't get a reduction in charges from their SP!!
 
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I seem to recall we had a similar 'conversation' in another thread about cell phones and no signal in your home. So, I'll just clarify a couple of things again lncluding your TV concern in the hope this is still the case.

Whatever system you use to bring the broadband signal into your home - fibre or a piece of wire - this will go into your router to provide a connection to the Internet. From your router the signal can either go through the air via Wifi or through an Ethernet cable. The telephone landline may work over the same piece of wire but the telephone service plays no part in the broadband connection.

From what you describe you have one TV that's wired via a cable to your router and one TV that uses wifi. This would still be the case if your broadband was to fibre all the way to the home. The telephone service i.e your landline plays no part in this so there's no change to how you watch TV. If you get rid of the landline you'll still be able to watch TV as a streaming service as it comes via the Internet not the telephone service.

Previously we discussed about dropping your landline because you told us that you use your cell phone almost exclusively at home and that this was probably working through Wifi Calling because you have a poor or no signal in the house. If you don't have a mobile signal this is the only way your cell phone could work at home. So, in theory you could get rid of your landline service - unless the number is still used for some services and you want a backup should the internet go down. No internet - no Wifi Calling.

Hope this helps.

Not sure if I understood it correctly? Are you saying we can have BB via fibre, but without a landline? Taking into account the landline rental part adds about £18 onto the BB package. I also forgot that the Sky box has cable for downloading missed programs. Thanks for the clarification.
 
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Not sure if I understood it correctly? Are you saying we can have BB via fibre, but without a landline? Taking into account the landline rental part adds about £18 onto the BB package. I also forgot that the Sky box has cable for downloading missed programs. Thanks for the clarification.
Yes;our son has broadband via Zen fibre and has no landline. They have very fast speeds as his partner works exclusively from home and is dealing with colleagues and customers in several countries around the world. Their mobile provider is Vodaphone but the signal is poor so most telephone calls are via WiFi calling using the router output or one of two extra boosters, being a large three storey house.
 
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Yes;our son has broadband via Zen fibre and has no landline. They have very fast speeds as his partner works exclusively from home and is dealing with colleagues and customers in several countries around the world. Their mobile provider is Vodaphone but the signal is poor so most telephone calls are via WiFi calling using the router output or one of two extra boosters, being a large three storey house.

Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that although no land line number they no longer pay line rental? Apologies for all the dumb questions, but just need to get my head around it.
One of the main reasons we held onto the landline was for overseas calls, but Whatsapp and Skype has made that obsolete.
 
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Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that although no land line number they no longer pay line rental? Apologies for all the dumb questions, but just need to get my head around it.
One of the main reasons we held onto the landline was for overseas calls, but Whatsapp and Skype has made that obsolete.
That’s correct no landline rental just the broadband service to their house.
 
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Not sure if I understood it correctly? Are you saying we can have BB via fibre, but without a landline? Taking into account the landline rental part adds about £18 onto the BB package. I also forgot that the Sky box has cable for downloading missed programs. Thanks for the clarification.

Our BT line was damaged when I had an extension built about 25 years ago. We have not missed it, However it does limit our choice of supplier. Virgin ran 2 wires, one for the landline, the other for the internet. The landline wires are now redundant as the phone plugs into the router.

We still pay for the landline.

Once our present contract is finished I will renegotiate as we are in a strong position now having a choice of two fibre companies. And if we have to loose the landline, we don’t care.

John
 
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Just to be clear, you can only have broadband without “line rental” if you use either Fibre to then Home (FTTH), Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) (like Openreach fibre or Gigaclear) or a cable type provider (such as Virgin broadband).
If you have a “regular” broadband service delivered on copper wire, you have to have line rental and a phone number with it.
 
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I contacted my supplier as my bill had jumped up from about £23 to £50 so I assumed we were being charged Out of Contract" rates. We used to pay the line rental up front for a small discount, but now it is monthly. We also pay about £10 for inclusive calls LL & mobile.
On checking the bill one 0333 call cost us nearly £5 as it was nearly 90 minutes long. I cannot speak for longer than about 5 minutes, but they are crediting me with the amount. Possibility I never ended the call?
Sadly despite the change to the line rental aspect which is why we stayed with the current supplier, we are still locked into a contract until Feb 2023. However we can drop the £10 charge for unlimited UK LL and mobile calls and only use the mobiles with wifi for calls. £10 in our pocket is better than £10 in their pocket.
 
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Nov 11, 2009
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I contacted my supplier as my bill had jumped up from about £23 to £50 so I assumed we were being charged Out of Contract" rates. We used to pay the line rental up front for a small discount, but now it is monthly. We also pay about £10 for inclusive calls LL & mobile.
On checking the bill one 0333 call cost us nearly £5 as it was nearly 90 minutes long. I cannot speak for longer than about 5 minutes, but they are crediting me with the amount. Possibility I never ended the call?
Sadly despite the change to the line rental aspect which is why we stayed with the current supplier, we are still locked into a contract until Feb 2023. However we can drop the £10 charge for unlimited UK LL and mobile calls and only use the mobiles with wifi for calls. £10 in our pocket is better than £10 in their pocket.
Our tariff for landline calls is inclusive up to 60 minutes then the price per minute kicks in. So I set a 55 minute timer for when I chat with an old work colleague, but fortunately I haven’t forgotten to end the call; but it is easily done.
 
Jul 18, 2017
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Just to be clear, you can only have broadband without “line rental” if you use either Fibre to then Home (FTTH), Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) (like Openreach fibre or Gigaclear) or a cable type provider (such as Virgin broadband).
If you have a “regular” broadband service delivered on copper wire, you have to have line rental and a phone number with it.
I assumed that we have copper to house from junction box down the road. I think my speed is about 73mbp/s. Up load is about 20mbp/s
 

Sam Vimes

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Thanks. Would I be correct in assuming that although no land line number they no longer pay line rental? Apologies for all the dumb questions, but just need to get my head around it.
One of the main reasons we held onto the landline was for overseas calls, but Whatsapp and Skype has made that obsolete.

That's correct but you need to be aware of potential problems if you have no mobile signal at home. The main problem being that in the event of a power cut or the internet service not working you will not be able to make emergency calls.

A battery back up unit could keep your router working for a limited time should you experience a power cut. Ofcom guidelines are that communication providers are supposed to give these to those in vunerable situations yet few will offer them. You can push BT like we did and get them FOC but they are relatively inexpensive to buy anyway.

The issue of landlines is going to be more prevelant come 2025 when BT plan to switch off the current wired landlines and the only options will be mobile or Digital Voice
 

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