Fibre to somebody else's premises, part III
I got to see the install for myself recently:
and give it a road test:
The above was done during the evening peak; I did see the full 100mbps down during the daytime.
Any surprises? Well, I was expecting the ONT (the box in my first picture) to be about twice that size and have a phone dongle hanging off the bottom of it.
But no! It would appear the VoIP service is now handled directly by the ISP router, and indeed in this case, the Fritz!Box provided by Zen has the phone cables connected directly to the back of it. It’s a shame the Openreach engineeer couldn’t have have taken five minutes to connect all the phone cabling in the house, including the venerable 1990s ringer mounted at the bottom of the stairs so you can hear the landline ringing if you’re upstairs. Fortunately the router seems to have a high enough REN to power it. (If you know what REN stands for, well done, and like me, you’re getting old.)
Zen went as far as to supply a five port switch, which is handy, but not to supply some decent length ethernet cables to allow for the router and the ONT to be located a decent distance apart. So I had some tidying up to do.
Here’s hoping I’ll be able to get speeds over 100mbps at home soon (no, Elon, I’m not buying Starlink as long as you remain in charge of it).