Finally getting Full Fibre broadband!

[Harrison]

Fibre install went fine. It was quite a lot of work for Openreach and the main engineer was a really nice guy. There was no issue with where I wanted it installed and he did a great job.

My old BT Masterswitch was positioned in an annoying location on the hallway windowsill with the cable running out through the corner of the window. The new install is down on the wall level with the plug sockets, so much better.

The install took him from 12:30 till about 17:00. A second engineer in a van with a crane had to go to the top of the telegraph pole to remove the old copper line to the house and install the new fibre line, and the main engineer then cleated it down the wall to the ground. He installed the main fibre box on the outside wall, then ran a cable in via our front porch and then in through the wall to the new fibre modem on the wall.

Only small issue was the router didn't initially connect to the new fibre, but it was just a setting in the router's advanced settings to tell it was now using the full fibre and not the fttc it was using before.

And whilst the work was being done and the line disconnected it was an opportunity to see if the new Hybrid feature I also got with the upgrade worked, and it did flawlessly. If the main line goes down the router automaticalled connects to a separate EE 5G router to take over the connection until the line comes back up. It did this seemlessly and the Internet just carried on working until it was restored. The BT Hub light changes to purple whilst in this mode. Now the speed whilst on 5G was about 60Mbps, which was still faster than my old fttc (should have just been using that before! ) but actually has potential to be much faster because it is 5G. But I installed the 5G router out of the way in the garage where its only getting 1 bar signal strength, so to still get 60Mbps was good.

Anyway, fibre is now up and running and it will take up to 10 days to fully adjust its speed and settle down. Initially straight after install I was getting about 410Mbps down and 50Mbps up, but this was testing from an S20 phone via wifi so will never get the true wired speed This went up to 550 down and 110 up by the evening. And yesterday I was getting about 680 down and 110 up. Hopefully it will get closer to the 900 in the next couple of days.

Even at the current speed I tested downloading some games on the PS5, and Guardians of the Galaxy was ready to play in 1.5 minutes, and fully installed in another 5 minutes! On my old fttc that would have taken over 2 hours! That's a huge difference and makes it a completely different experience. Also makes everything much more fluid. And it actually makes the need for extra storage on the PS5 but so important when you can just delete finished games and redown load them in under 20 minutes if needed again later.

Very pleased so far.

Also because the old copper phone line is gone it's now using a voice over IP phone instead to provide voice calls. BT provided one, and as soon as the fibre was up you just pair it with the router and it sets itself up and is ready to go. Even has the same phone number as my old landline, which I wasn't sure would happen.

And the BT Smart Hub 2 is quite impressive. Supporting ADSL, FTTC and FTTP. Has built in support for their exclusive BT disc wifi extending (that I use in a different way to broadcast wifi 50m away at the bottom of the garden in the studio), The hybrid 5G wifi mode and their VoIP integration to continue getting phonecalls. I think for the price it might seem a bit expensive, but you are getting access to a lot of kit that actually works well.

If there is one negative I would say it might not be the strongest wifi signal, compared to a third party router, but with the ability to add up to 3 free discs to repeat and boost the signal it's not a big issue.