One year ago, I persuaded thirteen of our neighbours to join us on a quest for better Internet connectivity, using the UK Government's DCMS Gigabit Broadband Voucher scheme, and now we've all been connected to our glorious new Gigabit-capable fibre infrastructure!
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In Summer 2020 we purchased our new home under the misapprehension it would enjoy comparable Internet speeds to our previous home. This was on the basis that we could see a nearby Openreach cabinet, around 100 meters away. (The BT Wholesale checker couldn't tell us much, as the physical line was severed a couple of years prior when the original home was demolished.)
Imagine our disappointment discovering the nearby cabinet was not the one which served us, but instead another one 900 meters down the lane, literally hidden in a bush! (and that was almost three months after moving in, a separately documented story of its own.)
Just before buying the house, I had been researching options for fibre Internet connectivity, and discovered a small Internet Service Provider called Cerberus Networks, who work with Openreach (subsidiary of BT Group which operates the UK's telephone network) delivering Fibre to the Premises On Demand (FTTPoD) projects. Out of curiosity I requested a build quote for fibre to our new home, but dismissed the notion when a figure in-excess of £13,000 was returned from their "desktop quote".
When it became clear even getting connected to the standard copper telephone network was going to be a slow process, I started working on a plan 'B' for the long term. Upon deeper investigation, I discovered the Fibre On Demand option might not be so unrealistic after all, thanks to the DCMS Gigabit Voucher Scheme funding, along with a local authority top-up providing a potential £3,500 per household (a minimum of two homes need to order together to unlock this money). I prepared a write up, found support from two interested neighbours, and then shared on the road's WhatApp group. A couple of weeks later half the houses on the road were signed up! (this was quite a surprise, given the slight catch that in order to go down the FTTPoD route with Cerberus it was necessary to spend the first year on their £90/pm inc VAT package; subsequently been reduced to £75/pm, but doesn't help us.)
(the really great thing here being the Openreach network allows a multitude of different providers to sell services, not tying anyone to an individual provider, beyond the initial 12 month commitment.)
Once that part was done, the next step was to pay £250 for an Openreach fibre planner come and perform a survey. Their job was to figure out the logistics of feeding our fourteen homes with full-fibre to the premises Internet connections. Within a couple of weeks an Openreach planner knocked at the door, and talked me through the the process of building our fibre network, then proceeded to photograph the proposed entry point where I wanted the cable to enter our home. They did the same with the other thirteen houses over the coming weeks, and then it all went quiet until early December. At this point Cerberus had been provided the build costs by Openreach, and shared them with us - the total was in the region of £35,000 - comfortably under the notional £49,000 the fourteen of us jointly qualified for. The next few days were a nervous wait while I hoped no one would pull out, and thankfully no one did. After some tedious back and fourth, Cerberus applied on our behalf for 14 DCMS Gigabit Broadband Vouchers, collected final confirmations from each of us, and then the order was locked in. At this point Cerberus paid Openreach the entire build cost to get the ball rolling (to be reimbursed by DCMS once we had each been connected), and the long wait really started...
The first signs of activity began in mid-January 2021, when we spotted Openreach engineers climbing telegraph poles, and examining ducting on the opposite side of the lane.
(an underground fibre splitter at the end of the lane.)
This was followed in mid-March by two days of digging by an Openreach contractor for 300 meters of surface trenching, to carry fibre from an underground chamber to some of the eight different telegraph poles along our lane.
By mid-April, a small army of Openreach vans descended upon us, and the fibre engineers were in full swing.
We watched as they pulled fibre through the underground ducting, installed Connectorised Block Terminals (CBTs) atop the telegraph poles, and performed all the jointing work.
It was a flurry of activity, and impressive to witness - however there was a problem - it turned out that one of the telegraph poles was not in good shape, and so was condemned (in Openreach terminology a 'D' pole), and as such received a little red plaque denoting its new status. I was assured this wouldn't be a big issue, and that pole replacement was a relatively routine thing.
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(Openreach engineers installing a Connectorised Block Terminal onto an existing telegraph pole.)
The weeks turned into months, with a couple of false starts; having been provided tentative dates Openreach's contractor would come to replace it, later to be told the appointments were being missed because "replacing this pole wasn't a priority, as it wasn't service-impacting". Eventually Openreach seemed to lose patience, as they came in late July and replaced it themselves. In what seemed like an extremely well-planned military exercise, the fibre engineers turned up one morning, followed a little later by the specialised machinery for drilling telegraph poles into the ground! Taking advantage of the cherry-picker ("hoist" in Openreach-speak), the fibre engineers mounted that last CBT, and performed the remaining jointing.
(the literal 'long-pole' item in our project finally being completed.)
Whilst doing their work, the fibre engineers were more than happy to educate me on how the whole system works, including the Passive Optical Network (PON) technology used to connect equipment in the telephone exchange to individual homes - a mixture of wavelet-division-multiplexing, and time-division-multiplexing that means a single strand of fibre can serve multiple homes (up to 128-ways, 32-ways by convention with Openreach, or 15-ways here given they opted to serve the potential 30 houses on our road with two fibre strands). They also shared that prior to the obvious local work, fibre cable had been run across five kilometres of fields from the local fibre aggregation node in town.
Sensing it wouldn't be too long before we all started getting connected up, I suggesting kit for the neighbours to take full advantage of the new speed. Having been a satisfied user of Ubiquiti UniFi networking gear since 2017, my goto suggestion was the relatively new UniFi Dream Machine all-in-one router/wireless access point/switch/control plane offering, and many of the neighbours bought one in preparation.
The next month and a half was relatively quiet, with the occasional update from Cerberus about the various administrative phases which the order was now traversing (auditing, commissioning, etc). I had almost entirely forgotten about the whole thing when out-of-the-blue my phone rang on the August Bank Holiday Monday, with an Openreach engineer informing me he was on the way to connect us. I made sure to tell him we would require the services of a cherry picker, recalling the trouble it had been to get one when our copper line was installed last year. Sure enough, around an hour later he arrived, rapidly followed by what must have been the oldest hoist van in the fleet (this turned out to be a good thing, as the modern ones cannot operate on gravel driveways, or so I'm told).
A couple of hours later, the pair of engineers had replaced our overhead "drop wire" with a new hybrid copper/fibre replacement, through an ingenious process called "cut and draw". The engineer was happy to follow my wishes in terms of cable routing, clipping the fibre cable to the underside of the soffits, and dropping it down out of sight, down the side of the house. There they installed the Customer Service Point (CSP) - a grey plastic box to house the all-important fibre splice - the point where the overhead fibre connects to the thinner fibre which enters the house. They had a clever machine which super-heats the two separate pieces of fibre, and bonds them together. I was told this is a critical element of the work; done wrong they would be back within 30 days to try again, but done properly the join will probably last forever.
Finally, the engineer came in to install the interior component - a small white box mounted on the wall, known as an Optical Network Transceiver (ONT). Along with the fibre itself, this magic box connected to an electricity socket, and an Ethernet cable into the WAN port of our router. The PON (Passive Optical Network) light indicated working connectivity back to the head-end (Optical Line Transceiver) at the local Telephone Exchange, so I gave the router a go; Cerberus had told me it would likely take a day after the physical activation for their system to provide service, however it did actually work straight away! The difference was night and day, but what really struck me was the mere three milliseconds it now took for a round trip to Internet destinations, such as Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Bandwidth is often considered the primary means of measuring an Internet connection, and can indeed be a significant bottleneck, but while working remotely, latency is absolutely paramount. (I had been experiencing around 10 ms of latency over the copper telephone line, which isn't at all bad, but this was a significant improvement.)
Having been fielding questions from the neighbours on our WhatsApp groups for months, news that I was now connected certainly peaked their curiosity. That curiosity quickly turned to envy, and frustration as the weeks went by. Finally, toward the end of September, several of the neighbours started receiving notice of their installation appointments, albeit with less than a day's notice in most cases. The first day was a slightly muted affair with plans to connect three houses, which ultimately resulted in only a single successful outcome. In one case the neighbour couldn't be home with such short notice, so asked for another appointment, in another case it turned out the initial planning failed to identify their existing line was served via an underground duct, which routed to an electricity pole covered in ivy. The third connection was eventually successful, but not before their newly installed hybrid cable was replaced - the first having been presumed broken - the engineers later realised it was in fact a faulty port on the CBT. (this is a fiddly business, and I've got enormous admiration for the persistence of Openreach's engineers.)
The next day was nothing short of a logistical marvel - Openreach engineers connected nine houses in a single day! The majority of these installations were straightforward, however in one case another planning oversight provided complications. One neighbour's house was covered with tile cladding at the point where the fibre was to come through the wall, but the engineer declared they couldn't possibly drill through, as it would likely result in damage to the house - clearly something to avoid, but unfortunately not spotted prior. After some negotiation, we managed to come to a satisfactory compromise that the fibre cable would come in through the side of the house, and as luck would have it, the neighbour's internal CAT6 calling meant that the ONT could be situated in a different room but still be patched into their study.
That left two houses still awaiting connection - the one with the problematic ivy, and the one who had originally asked to be rescheduled from that first surprised appointment. The former was taken care of mid-October although on closer inspection it turned out the ducting had collapsed. This neighbour generously agreed to a new overhead connection, saving what would have likely been months of additional delay, and thousands of pounds additional expense to Openreach. Just over a week after that (or seven weeks, and three days after me), the last neighbour was connected!
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In summary, this endeavour was far more work than I ever expected, but provided a chance to get to know our new neighbours, and provide a huge benefit to the local community - many of them were quick to point out how long they've suffered with poor connectivity, and just how much that's been amplified during the pandemic with prolonged working from home. It's been exciting to receive cutting edge technology; as far as I can tell it's almost unique in the surrounding area, with the infrastructure supporting our fibre network having previously only existed to serve leased lines for businesses, and mobile phone masts. It's quite clear Openreach had multiple teething issues during the process, but that's to be expected with such a bespoke product, and the end result has more than made up for the extended wait. Over the years this should become relatively mainstream, but given the scale of the national deployment, I suspect we would have been waiting quite some time for fibre to reach us organically. Cerberus Networks, though not a consumer ISP, were friendly to deal with, and did their best to provide us with timely updates from Openreach. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone that's interested in doing one of these Fibre On Demand projects. Even the Government's DCMS Gigabit Voucher application, and subsequent validation processes were relatively efficient. We will enjoy the benefit of having fantastic connectivity going forward, along with the educational boost it will give our children, not to mention the ability to stream ultra-high definition content with virtually zero waiting times. Thanks Openreach, Cerberus & DCMS! (...and the neighbours for their endless patience throughout!)