Gigaclear broadband
Discussion
Accelebrate said:
I got a call yesterday inviting me to place an order. I've been given an install date at the end of July, this seems a bit ambitious as they haven't yet blown any fibre into the ducts around here, but we'll see.
My installation is supposedly on Monday. This seemed highly unlikely at the start of this week - the groundwork/ducting contractors only finished on Wednesday. On Thursday fibre was blown into the ground chambers, terminated and then tested by Gigaclear. Today they pulled fibre from the chamber to the pot outside my house, so everything is now in place. I haven't had a site visit yet, but maybe that will happen over the weekend. We'll see.Accelebrate said:
Accelebrate said:
I got a call yesterday inviting me to place an order. I've been given an install date at the end of July, this seems a bit ambitious as they haven't yet blown any fibre into the ducts around here, but we'll see.
My installation is supposedly on Monday. This seemed highly unlikely at the start of this week - the groundwork/ducting contractors only finished on Wednesday. On Thursday fibre was blown into the ground chambers, terminated and then tested by Gigaclear. Today they pulled fibre from the chamber to the pot outside my house, so everything is now in place. I haven't had a site visit yet, but maybe that will happen over the weekend. We'll see.About 1pm in the afternoon I got a call from an installer saying he'd be with me in 30mins. There was a bit of confusion when he arrived, his paperwork suggested my area used blown fibre when it's actually been pulled through larger ducts. This meant he needed to fit different equipment, and needed authorisation for that.
That occurred, I think as a result of it being pulled rather than blown there's no requirement for a grey box on the outside of the house. I've just been left with a small cable running through the wall into my garage. Along with a slightly blown brick, but this cable will soon be hidden when the bush I trimmed to give them room to work grows back. They relaid the paving on my driveway neatly.
On the other end of that attaches their modem. I plan to relocate this to the other side of my garage where all of my networking gear and UPS lives (we get a reasonable amount of power cuts here). I'm just waiting for the correct SC/UPC cable, connectors and junction box to arrive. For now, I've just run a long ethernet cable to it. The supplied modem just uses DHCP so it was easily connected to my existing router rather than the supplied Velop mesh nodes.
Unfortunately, the line didn't work after the install team left due to a fault elsewhere. I was impressed when a project manager for the area called a few hours later to say he was busy splicing some connections at the cabinet that had been missed. He then popped over in person at about 7pm to check everything was now live. The communication before the installation day was rubbish, but they really redeemed themselves on the day.
Here's my previous connection. FTTC on what used to be an exchange-only line, so it's still 90% copper cable to a FTTC cabinet outside the telephone exchange. It'll never go any faster.
I'm still in contract for another 5 months with Plusnet, so I've configured it as a failover in my UniFi router.
Here's the new connection, not bad for £20/month!
You'd think that my previous 30Mb connection was still enough, but with two people working from home, a couple of children streaming stuff and security cameras constantly uploading footage latency would suffer. Thinkbroadband has a great external monitoring tool for this, here's what the latency looked like most days...
There was nothing physically wrong with the line or cable that feeds our house, now that that line has no traffic going through whilst it sits idle as a backup things look a lot better, it was just congested by my traffic...
By contrast, here's the new Gigaclear connection with all of the previous household traffic running through it and some larger backup jobs that I'd been putting off running...
It's a similar graph to an expensive fibre leased line that I monitor in my office, to get that at home for not a lot of money is remarkable.
I got the modem moved last night. I think this was under £30 in bits from Amazon, Gigaclear wanted £120 for an internal extension cable. I was originally planning to run it in conduit, but the tiny cable looks quite neat clipped, so I'll see how well it lasts. It wouldn't take too long to replace if it ever gets damaged.
I replaced the modem on the exterior wall of my garage with a fibre junction box...
I clipped it up the corner of the wall and ran it into the loft space above.
Under the loft floor over to the other side of the garage and into some boxing that covers the back of the electricity meter. The modem is now plugged into a UPS along with the rest of the internet stuff. The three access points around the house are all PoE so they stay active as long as the switch in the garage has power.
I replaced the modem on the exterior wall of my garage with a fibre junction box...
I clipped it up the corner of the wall and ran it into the loft space above.
Under the loft floor over to the other side of the garage and into some boxing that covers the back of the electricity meter. The modem is now plugged into a UPS along with the rest of the internet stuff. The three access points around the house are all PoE so they stay active as long as the switch in the garage has power.
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