Lit Fibre

[bimbleuk]

Ultrafast Fibre Home Broadband | Feel the Power

Experience the internet the way it's supposed to be with ultrafast full-fibre broadband. Enjoy eyewatering upload & download speeds of up to 1Gb.

litfibre.com

I thought I'd start a thread for anyone else looking at or already with Lit fibre.

I'm having the Lit500 service connected to my house next week (3rd Aug) so can provide some feedback. So far the process was very swift. I placed an order online and about an hour later on a Saturday I was called back to arrange an appointment.

Openreach installed an external box on my house way back in January but after Talk Talk offered to switch my current FTTC to FTTP for free they failed to turn up twice! So I told them to cancel the order and I waited for Lit to start offering a service in my area.

 

[Sparx]

Look to be quite pricey, you'd have been much better off waiting for TT/Openreach... The only extra benefit is it's symmetrical speeds.

I hate the sort of marketing they're doing. It comes across very underhanded imo.

I suppose it's only a 12 month contract, so the 3 months free is made up by the fact they charge you £45pm for months 10-12.

£35 headline price for Lit500
Free for the first 3 months
but it's £35 for just 9 months
then it's £45 a month

 

[bimbleuk]

Look to be quite pricey, you'd have been much better off waiting for TT/Openreach... The only extra benefit is it's symmetrical speeds.

I hate the sort of marketing they're doing. It comes across very underhanded imo.

I suppose it's only a 12 month contract, so the 3 months free is made up by the fact they charge you £45pm for months 10-12.

I believe you've read that wrong.

3 months free
9 months £35
Average =£26.25 for 12 months.

May only be an interductionary offer to gain new customers but it's 12 months of relatively cheap access after which I can shop around.

 

[Sparx]

Ahh I understand, yes I read it wrong. So it's free for 3 months, THEN £35 for 9 months which is the remainder of the contract. Then after it expires it's £45pm?

Fair enough, in that case it's quite reasonable then considered. Hopefully the service, speeds and reliability are as expected.

Let us know how your install goes and the kit they use. Always find altnet installs interesting

 

[picnic]

I've been with Lit Fibre for about 3 months now. Very responsive when you ring them up and have always got back to me quickly if they couldn't answer the query first time around. Did have some issues with installation but now it's in it seems pretty good. I got the full 1Gbps service however I'll not keep this after the 12 months as, apart from Steam, nothing has got close to maxing the line out. Lit do use CGNATT so I've had to stump up an extra fiver a month to get a static IP.

Had an outage one Sunday, lasted nearly all day but I was out for half of it. Gave everyone a half price month as compensation. Otherwise I've not noticed any downtime. Router they gave me was nothing special, cheapy make I'd never heard of with only 2 Ethernet ports.

Edit: In the space of 3 months we've gone from being a FTTP not spot to having Lit Fibre, Openreach and Virgin now all appearing and offering high speed FTTP based solutions.

 

[bimbleuk]

Edit: In the space of 3 months we've gone from being a FTTP not spot to having Lit Fibre, Openreach and Virgin now all appearing and offering high speed FTTP based solutions.

Good to hear. Similar here nothing before 2022 now I have Openreach on my house and Lit next week.

I do have gigabit at my desk at work being an admin but yeah the novelty wore off once we tried to find the fastest download services

 

[bimbleuk]

I didn't receive a confirmation prior to the day but they did respond in about 20 mins to an email to confirm the appointment. As mentioned before Openreach failed to turn up twice!

So the engineer actually turned up a bit early which was fine and took just over an hour. Fibre cable comes from the street chamber at the end of my drive. Then to the external box and then up the wall to the 1st floor where it terminates in the fibre ONT inside my office. Wireless router temporarily mounted next to that with 2 ethernet ports.

My previous setup had cables running up and down the wall to the previous wireless router so I've reduced the cables this time. From the pic below I still have some tidying up to do. 2nd ethernet port on the new router goes downstairs to another switch.

Initial speed is above 500 mbps for downloads and a bit below for uploads but was told that should improve after 24 hrs. Much better anyway. I tried a Steam game download but it was a bit erratic so tried a 12GB download from an NNTP server. I saw a constant 55 MB/s for the entire download (~450 mbps) so that's almost 10 times my previous speed which is a big improvement and well worth the switch.

Spoiler: Lit500 installation

 

[picnic]

I never understood why the installation engineer told me the same thing about speeds should improve after 24hr. It's fibre so not at the mercy of RF and interference, length of line to the cabinet etc. Isn't it just what it is?

You also said

Openreach installed an external box on my house way back in January but after Talk Talk offered to switch my current FTTC to FTTP for free they failed to turn up twice! So I told them to cancel the order and I waited for Lit to start offering a service in my area.

Does that mean you now have 2 fibres coming the house?

 

[bimbleuk]

I never understood why the installation engineer told me the same thing about speeds should improve after 24hr. It's fibre so not at the mercy of RF and interference, length of line to the cabinet etc. Isn't it just what it is?

The engineer mentioned something about a profile building while he was commissioning the line as the D/L was exceeding expectations but the U/L was a little down so I guess there's still something unique to each connection.

Does that mean you now have 2 fibres coming the house?

I have the capability as there is an Openreach connection box already present. The engineer installed the Lit box next to it. First question he asked when he saw it was "you're not under BT contract already are you?".

Spoiler: Lit500 External box - Right

 

[picnic]

It's disappointing each supplier has to have their own box. Virgin in our area install a Fibre to Coax converter that's bigger than each of those. I've not room on my bit of wall for all three

 

[bimbleuk]

I think this is common with other ONTs (the internal wall box you don't access directly) but they can run hot. Enough that I think the room temp is noticeably warmer this morning. The room is quite small though.

I'm thinking of a wall box/cabinet next time I have to change all the cabling to make it easier each time I change ISP!

Spoiler: Lit500 - Bit tidier now

 

[the-evaluator]

If an ONT is hot enough to make the entire room warner then I'd expect the ONT to be on fire! My ONT isn't even warm to the touch.

 

[Sparx]

It's disappointing each supplier has to have their own box. Virgin in our area install a Fibre to Coax converter that's bigger than each of those. I've not room on my bit of wall for all three

I think the industry has cottoned onto that problem, multiple ONTs and entry boxes as Openreach, Virgin and a dozen AltNet FTTP firms popping out all over the country!

As a result there are already trials for a universal CPE ongoing...

CityFibre UK Pilot uCPE Universal Customer Premises Equipment

Network builder CityFibre has today announced that they're piloting enhanced "virtualisation capabilities" for business ISPs across their UK full fibre broad

www.ispreview.co.uk

 

[Caged]

I don't think the industry is doing that out of any sense of wanting to avoid waste, they quite rightly understand that people might be unwilling to switch ISP if it involves another hole in their wall and another ONT mounted where they can see it, so they'd rather move to a system where the fibre is connectorized outside the property and different providers just plug the house into different networks.

 

[bimbleuk]

No one asked me if Openreach could install a box on the outside of my house. I only realised it was there as soon after Talk Talk phoned me offering to switch my service for free. Imagine if you came home one day and you had 5 or 6 innocuous boxes installed outside

Plus I asked the Lit engineer if they shared the fibre CBT (Connectorised Block Terminal) in the street chamber and he said no and that were 8 Openreach connections on my side of the street. Looking in the hole I noticed the pop up bracket OR had used appeared to take up half the chamber so how do they fit all the other providers?

Coincidentally now I know what I'm looking at I noticed some CBT bundles roughly zip tied to telegraph poles out while riding in the countryside.

 

[Sparx]

I don't think the industry is doing that out of any sense of wanting to avoid waste, they quite rightly understand that people might be unwilling to switch ISP if it involves another hole in their wall and another ONT mounted where they can see it, so they'd rather move to a system where the fibre is connectorized outside the property and different providers just plug the house into different networks.

I'm pretty sure they would've primarily factored in the time, labour and cost saving into the analysis (along with the waste for brownie points)

Since when did most corporates give a hoot about what the customer's opinion was

 

[bimbleuk]

The modem supplied with the Lit Fibre installation is a Mitrastar M2028E-2.

There is a mesh device available to extend the wireless network MGM1028-2.

I sent an enquiry to Lit to see if they can supply them as they aren't widely available.

 

[bimbleuk]

Lit Fibre will supply these extras.

Fixed IP = £5 per month
Mesh unit = £5 per month

Modem is Calix GigaSpire BLAST® u4
Mesh is Calix GigaSpire Mesh BLAST® u4m

Though in reality the units are MitraStar manufactured. MGM2028E-2 & MGM1028-2.

 

[picnic]

I pay for the fixed IP as otherwise it's CCNAT and I run a joinFS server for my flight sim friends.

Not sure I'd want to pay £5 a month though for a mesh unit. I'm sure there are better ways to solve that problem if you have it. I enquired when I first got connected to see if I could replace their supplied router with one of my own and they are happy for that. Wonder if I could give them the old one back for a £5 a month reduction

 

[bimbleuk]

Not sure I'd want to pay £5 a month though for a mesh unit. I'm sure there are better ways to solve that problem if you have it. I enquired when I first got connected to see if I could replace their supplied router with one of my own and they are happy for that. Wonder if I could give them the old one back for a £5 a month reduction

My friend near me was asking about the router as the service availability is slowly creeping towards his house. He likes to setup his network in a particular way so while I was going through the menus I noticed the mesh option and thought i'd have a dig. Actually as you mention that we can use a different router my neighbour opposite runs a network consultancy from home so is even more picky about the hardware he uses. He may sign up with that knowledge.

I wouldn't want to rent a mesh unit if I can find the extenders for a reasonable price but can't see them available on the open market.

I am interested in the POE (Power Over Ethernet) router attachment for the router to reduce the wall warts. If it's just an injector for clients I'm less interested. My CCTV cameras are POE so it would be easy to centrally locate the Wi-Fi 6 router and drop a cable from the ceiling. Mesh probably not needed then.