Category: ISP

A few notes about the move to Full Fibre.

A few weeks ago City Fibre finally finished digging up our road and moved on to other places, a short while later we received an email list available Full Fibre providers and out of the list we went for Vodafone.

We had been a BT user for phone and broadband for many many years, from the early dial-up days right up to the latest speed that they could provide. Which only became available with their upgrade to their ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’ (FTTC) mechanism two years ago, which then delivered an average of 40Mb downloads.

Although the FFTC did give a medium increase in downloading speed (doubling the previous speed) the last 50 meters from the cabinet to the house was still using copper wires. Despite a number of calls to BT over the last year, we were unable to get any kind of commitment that they were likely to replace that with ‘Fibre To The Premisses’ (FTTP). Hence, the move to another supplier for FTTP.

So how did the upgrade go? The actual physical connection work took around three hours to complete to a) run a sheathed fibre cable from the City Fibre connection port in the pavement next to the house, b) bury the cable under the front garden c) drill an access hole in the house wall to get the connection inside and finally d) to commission the connection via the new router which had been delivered a few days before.

No real issue with any of this except to say that Vodafone have been pretty cheap with the length of the cable on the mains adapter used to power the Broadband Router, it is only one meter long!! The mains adapter for the BT router is just over two meters long; so if you have positioned your previous router in a particular place for convenience/Wi-Fi reasons and you want to keep it there, then an extension lead will be required.

You will also need an extra power socket near to where the internal Optical Network Connector (ONC) box (a nice long cable for this) is located next to the access hole that has been drilled through the house wall. In the end, as we have a number of items running from original sockets, invested in a six-way surge protected extension lead which has covered everything.

The other thing that we are beginning to understand is that the Wi-Fi signal of the Vodafone router does not appear to be a strong as the previous BT router. Still testing using a number of tools and will give it a few more days to see if it improves before a calling in a report to Vodafone. We do have some Wi-Fi repeaters located around the house, but may have to look at some others if this is the standard strength.

All in all though, we do have some great download speeds, depending of course on where you are downloading from.

But after a week of settling in, today’s figures are…

The above speediest results are interesting, in that they show different speeds depending on whose test ‘app’ you are using.

So here is another test. Using a fixed sized (one GB) file located at Thinkbroadband.com and using the Windows 10 Task Manager Ethernet window, you can see that the download speed is nearly at the top speed of the promised spec.

Downloading to various devices

What speed should we expect on your devices from a Full Fibre connection? – This is a good question. The package we went for was the Full Fibre Vodafone 900 (900 MB) at a very good price of £30.00/month for 24 Months with a guaranteed service level minimum of 450 MB.

So many factors can determine the speed of download and of course uploading (but who cares about that!!) some of which include the age of the device such as smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop to name a few. The connection you have to the router, fixed or Wi-Fi. The distance you are from the router. The site from where you’re downloading and the number of people downloading the same item, such as a film for example and the number of people in your household using the connection. All in all, it can get quite frustrating if you’re not aware of the various pieces of the jigsaw.

For example, after the completion of installation, we could not get any faster than 95 MB download speed via a wired connection on an HP desktop that we have. It’s around five years old and we found that the on-board network connection on the motherboard itself was only rated for transfers of up to 100 MB. To overcome that restriction, we purchased a Gigabit PCI Express Network Adapter and as soon as that was installed, speeds then reach up towards the 700/850 MB.

In regard to Smartphones, Tablets and Laptops where you can’t physically change any hardware, you’re basically stuck with whatever hardware level it is at.

Here are some devices we have checked using Wi-Fi…

Device	Download Speed (MB)	Up Load Speed(MB)
Acer	90.5	80
Motorola G9	252	301
Galaxy Tab S5e	257	296
Galaxy Tab 10	51	39
HP Desktop (Wired)	680	550
HP Desktop (Wi-Fi)	420	380

So that’s about it for now, but I think there is more testing and evaluation to be done, but with =out a doubt it is a very different world with FTTP.