City Fibre

I want CityFibre at this point to be spending some of their marketing budget on finding things to do with multi-gig connections. Selling me on the idea of the same stuff I do now taking a bit less time is boring, it's not like jumping to 2.5Gbps from 1Gbps suddenly makes online distribution of games and patches viable in the same way that it would have been borderline impossible to join in with online games on a 30Mb FTTC when they had 200GB patches.

Go and put the time into finding the cutting edge stuff that is enabled by multi-gig services. I am grateful they exist and if people want to buy them then that's great, I just assumed five years ago we'd be finding things to do with these types of connections that aren't bursting to the full capacity for 1% of the day before going back to sitting idle. You'd think that there'd be some service that would take multiple high resolution video feeds from a CNC router or milling operation and use machine vision to process it all and remotely stop the machine if it saw damage occurring or the output straying from what was expected, stuff that would keep a small business in an industrial unit consuming 100Mbps+ of upstream capacity whenever they were running the tool. Instead you get "well your connection works all the time now, and you can video call and push large files around", which is good, but it's not that exciting.
 
I'm on a City Fibre supplied 900Mb circuit, would it work if got a Ubiquiti UDR7 and had the City Fibre Fibre plugged directly into the router and didn't use the Fibre > Cat5 media converter that City Fibre Install ?
 
Caged said:
It's not a media converter, it's an ONT.
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I know its called an ONT, but other than convert the incoming LC fibre to a Cat5 Copper connection, what else does it do.

I'm guessing by your response that its not possible to have the incoming fibre from CityFibre plugged directly into a Router.
 
There are communities around where people buy SFP+ ONTs and clone their current ONT, I'm not aware of it being done for CityFibre. The main reason people do it in the UK is on Nexfibre so they aren't forced to use the Virgin Media Hub. Otherwise you're spending a fair amount of cash for the only benefit being slightly lower power consumption and freeing up a socket.
 
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I've noticed you can get a PON SFP+ adapter. I was wondering if i could remove the ONT from the equation altogether. But it seems on initial inspection not to be possible, thank you for the info.
 
Not had any information from Home Telecom / No One re: renewing this month, tbh I think if the price stays at £33/month for 900/900 with static IP and on a rolling monthly basis, I'll keep with it until that changes.
 
I think if your on an older No One contract and still in contract you don't get the newly introduced yearly increase since Home Telecom took them over / merged, come November when my contract is up I'll be moving to someone else.
 
Glanza said:
I think if your on an older No One contract and still in contract you don't get the newly introduced yearly increase since Home Telecom took them over / merged, come November when my contract is up I'll be moving to someone else.
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Perhaps, however my last renewal was after the Home Telecom merge and my contract did have the annual price rise term in it.
 
I will be moving to someone cheaper I signed with them for £32 then 2/3 months into contract the price went up. Toob will probably be my next ISP £25 for the same 900/900 can't be beat just hope it stays that way.
 
Lord Alibaski said:
I will be moving to someone cheaper I signed with them for £32 then 2/3 months into contract the price went up. Toob will probably be my next ISP £25 for the same 900/900 can't be beat just hope it stays that way.
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I was considering them but they charge £8/month for a static IP, otherwise you're on a CGNAT. £25 is appealing but CGNAT isn't suitable for me, so by time the £8/month is added they're about in line with everyone else really.
 
Just noticed my area appears to have had XGS-PON enabled - cheeky little regrade request into Aquiss - hopefully fairly seemless switch over
 
SonicSW20 said:
Not had any information from Home Telecom / No One re: renewing this month, tbh I think if the price stays at £33/month for 900/900 with static IP and on a rolling monthly basis, I'll keep with it until that changes.
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I'm with no one, £29.99 for 900/900 and it expires in Oct. I called home telecom last week and the best prices currently are north of £40!

Been on the look out for a similar 900 up 900 down deal but coming up short.
 
Camalot said:
I'm with no one, £29.99 for 900/900 and it expires in Oct. I called home telecom last week and the best prices currently are north of £40!

Been on the look out for a similar 900 up 900 down deal but coming up short.
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I was in the same position my contract with Lit Fibre was finishing and I started to look around came up with a few ISP

CityFibre | The Full Fibre Broadband Network​


Rocket Fibre £28 per month 1GB which is on the CityFibre network, with a Amazon Eero 6 Router.

Toob is £25 per month 900Mbps for new customers, normally £29 which is on the CityFibre network

Toob, has better support open times 7 days a week, Rocket only 6 days no Sunday.

Both offer Static IP Toob £8 per month, Rocket Fibre IPv4 £4.99, I had no problems with CGNAT with Lit Fibre in the past.

18 months for both

Toob Free installation, Rocket Fibre £19.98

I was leading more towards Toob with better support opening hours.

But in the end I had a problem with the One Touch Switch process with Toob, I need a new ONT on the line.

I was informed by Toob that I would need to terminate the line first with Lit Fibre for the switch to happen.

I phoned Lit Fibre customer support and was offered a new 24 months deal for Lit 1000 at £28 per month this deal was not offered to me when I phoned up a few weeks ago.

In the end I decided to stay with them it is not worth the inconvenience of terminate the line first before switching.
 
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Camalot said:
I'm with no one, £29.99 for 900/900 and it expires in Oct. I called home telecom last week and the best prices currently are north of £40!

Been on the look out for a similar 900 up 900 down deal but coming up short.
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I don't even need 900/900 but the pricing generally makes the ~500 options unappealing. CGNAT usually causes problems for me so that either rules out a lot of the cheaper ISPs, or puts them about in line with others by time you add their static IP charge.

Can't comment on No One under Home Telecom support as I've never needed to use it, the only outages have been the rare City Fibre maintenance, which usually happens over night / early morning. If I have to deal with an ISPs support frequently enough to form an opinion on if they're any good or not, I think they've already failed. Read enough about Home Telecom to not want to lock in another term with them though.
 
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Caged said:
I want CityFibre at this point to be spending some of their marketing budget on finding things to do with multi-gig connections. Selling me on the idea of the same stuff I do now taking a bit less time is boring, it's not like jumping to 2.5Gbps from 1Gbps suddenly makes online distribution of games and patches viable in the same way that it would have been borderline impossible to join in with online games on a 30Mb FTTC when they had 200GB patches.

Go and put the time into finding the cutting edge stuff that is enabled by multi-gig services. I am grateful they exist and if people want to buy them then that's great, I just assumed five years ago we'd be finding things to do with these types of connections that aren't bursting to the full capacity for 1% of the day before going back to sitting idle. You'd think that there'd be some service that would take multiple high resolution video feeds from a CNC router or milling operation and use machine vision to process it all and remotely stop the machine if it saw damage occurring or the output straying from what was expected, stuff that would keep a small business in an industrial unit consuming 100Mbps+ of upstream capacity whenever they were running the tool. Instead you get "well your connection works all the time now, and you can video call and push large files around", which is good, but it's not that exciting.
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You mean like the decade or so when people used ACD/GD/DB to host PB's of data because with a multi-gig symmetrical connection, it was actually faster than local mechanical storage for some usage scenarios and cost bugger all?

The machine work example is an interesting one, as someone who ran commercial print/mechanical/laser/chemical engraving business and looked into something similar many, many years ago, the issue we faced was insurance/liability. It was specifically stated that machinery could not be run or left unsupervised. My solution was - as I lived 45 miles away - was to remote in, set-up jobs overnight and leave instructions on what material/blanks to load on screen and the jobs set-up ready to go once my staff arrived. It's was a lot easier (and cheaper) to train someone on the safe operation of a machine than it is to teach them 5 different software packages ranging from the 80's upwards. Also, if you were going the AI monitoring route (look how well it works for Bambu Labs), you'd logically run that locally - CF going down would suck.
 
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reflux said:
Think I'm gonna go with Toob, I went through all the other providers and they have some of the best reviews and the lowest price at the moment. Now I have to convince Virgin to let me leave and hopefully installation of Toob goes OK.
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Went with Toob in the end. There was a 3 man installation team from CityFibre who showed up. I had expected they would bring it up from the pavement, but they had to take it off the nearest telegraph pole. Unfortunately that meant taking it over an abandoned front garden two along (hoarders) and through a very overgrown tree, so they used the old BT landline to pull it across and then removed that. Installation took about 2 hours, and they didn't stay to do any setup of the router despite originally offering to. Think they were keen to get going to the next job.

Had some trouble getting a connection initially, but then I got a text from Toob saying my connection had been activated and the router started working. Took me multiple goes to log in via the LinkSys app, which has terrible reviews so it wasn't really a surprise.

Anyway, it's worked well since those initial hiccups. I would say we're a medium usage household with two adults working from home and lots of smart devices/speakers/laptops etc. The router is very small and unobtrusive in my home, which I like. But I think the signal is a bit weaker than the Virgin Hub 5 that it replaced. I'm looking at whether to get a mesh node to complement it or just buy a better router but I'm really not sure. It hasn't caused any issues, just that I'd rather have faster internet in the fringes of the house. If anyone has experience buying a replacement or mesh nodes, let me know. I have an Asus RT-AX59U here which I could try but I don't know if it's any better than the Linksys SPNMX56 they supplied.
 
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