Community Fibre

chaosophy · 20 Aug 2018 at 17:31

https://communityfibre.co.uk/

Received a letter this week saying that this is going to be rolled out to where I live, looks to be offering good speeds at decent prices. I'm currently with plusnet FTTC and get pretty much the max of the 80/20 speed it offers but do like the idea of full 1GB/1GB FTTP.

So just wondered does anyone have - or know much about - 'Community Fibre'? Thoughts etc.

ta.

Ayahuasca · 20 Aug 2018 at 22:22

I’d probably just go for their 200/200 service first and if that’s not quick enough for your needs just up it to the full 1000/1000 package.

chaosophy · 29 Jan 2019 at 18:59

So this got rolled out to my block a couple of months back and so decided to give it a go. They've got an offer on at the moment where by if you sign up for 12 months the first 6 months are £30/pm, then back up to the normal £50/pm for the 6 months after that. Free installation and kit.

Just had it fitted this afternoon. Speed tests where a bit erratic the first hour or so but seems to be settling down now and will see how it goes over the coming days but best test so far has been 942.73 Mbps down / 913.53 Mbps up, on the same test. Have had slightly better on either up or down on other runs but this is the best so far with both over 900.

So coming from my previous ISP's FTTC at around 74Mbps down 18Mbps up I'm pretty happy so far.

I might end up dropping down to the cheaper 200/200 package (they do a 40/40 as well) but as someone who's been through dial-up, ISDN, ADSL, ADSL2+ and FTTC over the years I couldn't resist trying out the full fat 1000/1000.

Happy to do some testing and try and answer and Qs if anyone has any. Sounding like a sales pitch I know but if you ask me something I'll try and be honest about it.

faceman123 · 30 Jan 2019 at 18:41

chaosophy said:
So this got rolled out to my block a couple of months back and so decided to give it a go. They've got an offer on at the moment where by if you sign up for 12 months the first 6 months are £30/pm, then back up to the normal £50/pm for the 6 months after that. Free installation and kit.

Just had it fitted this afternoon. Speed tests where a bit erratic the first hour or so but seems to be settling down now and will see how it goes over the coming days but best test so far has been 942.73 Mbps down / 913.53 Mbps up, on the same test. Have had slightly better on either up or down on other runs but this is the best so far with both over 900.

So coming from my previous ISP's FTTC at around 74Mbps down 18Mbps up I'm pretty happy so far.

I might end up dropping down to the cheaper 200/200 package (they do a 40/40 as well) but as someone who's been through dial-up, ISDN, ADSL, ADSL2+ and FTTC over the years I couldn't resist trying out the full fat 1000/1000.

Happy to do some testing and try and answer and Qs if anyone has any. Sounding like a sales pitch I know but if you ask me something I'll try and be honest about it.

How are the pings and latency? I'm getting fttp rolled out in my street will go for 200mbs tbh but tempted by the 1gb

chaosophy · 30 Jan 2019 at 19:49

Latency seems good, though not tested that massively. Is there anything, like a tool or something, I could run to compare?

When I run speedtest.net it seems to always show a 1 or 2ms ping.
Pinging a few web sites from a CMD line mainly shows 2ms.
Played a bit of PUBG last night, not the best to test probably but that was showing around 15ms.
Previously on plus.net 80/20 I would average more around 20ms, so not massively lower on the new connection but did seem to have less fluctuation and tbh it's probably hitting the limits of the PUBG servers would be my guess.

So far pretty happy with it. It's also running through a bit of internal wiring.
I'm a few floors up in a block, so their cable comes up the outside of the building and annoyingly had to come in through the bedroom.
So there is a small plate in there and then the engineer ran extra from that out into the hallway and then into a cupboard where I had the BT engineer move my old phone line to.
In there is a second face plate, then into their modem and then into the supplied router.
Router is then into a cheapish tp-link switch, switch to a wall socket which is then cabled round to another socket in another room where the PC is cabled into that.
So not a huge amount of cable but considering there is a switch and three Ethernet cables between the PC and router it seems good.

~~I do have a long enough cable to reach direct from router to PC, so might test with that at some point to see if it ekes out any more speed.~~

edit: Just ran a cable direct from PC to modem and got my best speedtest.net result so far..

946.39 Mbps down / 939.89 Mbps up !

they advertise it as 920 Mbps average, so pretty happy tbh !

TJM · 31 Jan 2019 at 01:32

faceman123 said:
How are the pings and latency? I'm getting fttp rolled out in my street will go for 200mbs tbh but tempted by the 1gb

If it helps your decision, your pings/latency on a 200Mbps and 1Gbps FTTP connection would be exactly the same and I wouldn't expect a dramatic improvement if you are on FTTC (as your connection is already fibre virtually all of the way). I'm in central London and was pinging 5-6ms to bbc.co.uk, etc., over FTTC. I've switched to Hyperoptic in the same building and now get 1ms. While the difference is imperceptible, it is very stable.

I'd recommend a 1Gbps service if you can get a good introductory offer and then switch at the end of the discount to a lower tier. My Hyperoptic connection is good for blitzing large game downloads but I wouldn't pay full whack for it as even Steam will rarely hit 80MB a second. For everything else, 150Mbps would be more than enough.

chaosophy said:
Latency seems good, though not tested that massively. Is there anything, like a tool or something, I could run to compare?

This tool is about as informative as you're likely to get: http://www.dslreports.com/tools/pingtest

chaosophy · 1 Feb 2019 at 17:32

TJM said:
If it helps your decision, your pings/latency on a 200Mbps and 1Gbps FTTP connection would be exactly the same and I wouldn't expect a dramatic improvement if you are on FTTC (as your connection is already fibre virtually all of the way). I'm in central London and was pinging 5-6ms to bbc.co.uk, etc., over FTTC. I've switched to Hyperoptic in the same building and now get 1ms. While the difference is imperceptible, it is very stable.

I'd recommend a 1Gbps service if you can get a good introductory offer and then switch at the end of the discount to a lower tier. My Hyperoptic connection is good for blitzing large game downloads but I wouldn't pay full whack for it as even Steam will rarely hit 80MB a second. For everything else, 150Mbps would be more than enough.

Think I'd agree tbh, unless you really need the full bandwidth for massive uploads or downloads there comes a point where you're going to get just as good a day to day experience on the lower speeds with the same latency.
But saying that I still went full fat, just to try it out and because it blows my mind a bit that this is even possible to get in the home. The lower cost for the first six months definitely helped and as you say I can see myself probably dropping down to a lower speed at some point.

Once you've run a few speedtests to show off to your mates with and deleted a few Steam games, just to see how quick you can download them again, you realise that the majority of the time you're just browsing websites and streaming media with no massively obvious improvement over what you had before with FTTC.

TJM said:
This tool is about as informative as you're likely to get: http://www.dslreports.com/tools/pingtest

Results here from that test, got A+ results so seems good though I've nothing really to compare it to.

blueacid · 3 Feb 2019 at 11:50

It's a sad thing to say, but I echo the sentiments here. I'm on 1gbps hyperoptic and, while it's lovely, I've genuinely not found any application yet where their 150mbit service is insufficient. MAYBE in the contrived example of lots of people streaming at once, but that's a way off.

It's awesome to know that this sort of speed is available (rather than being at the maximum 80mbit of FTTC and wishing there was a bit more oomph), but when my minimum term is up I'll be looking at the pricing of their 150/150 service again.
I figure that even if I lock in a contract at the slower speed, there won't be many companies that'll respond badly to a phone call saying "Hi, please can I upgrade my service and give you more money?"

Caged · 3 Feb 2019 at 15:31

150/150 is fine, even in a reasonable sized office that would still be enough.

It's good that the gigabit headline is there but I've never felt even a 100Mbps connection to feel slow - the upload is very high up my list of things that are important. Things like the quality of the links out to the rest of the world, the routing, how responsive the ISP is to faults etc. are all far more important than the headline speed. Having 1Gbps service into the ISPs core is no good if at 8pm on a weekday it runs at 30Mbps with packet loss, or everything ends up routed via Amsterdam for a week because nobody in the networks team knows what they are doing.

bulldog147 · 3 Feb 2019 at 17:28

I wish to have that in my area for 150/150

labcoattech · 13 Sep 2019 at 11:16

Looks like all the providers are only concentrating on wiring up blocks

TooNice · 7 Sep 2021 at 02:44

I hope that there are no rules on bumping as long as it is on topic. Figured it would be better to keep it on the same thread.

I was wondering if anyone would kindly post a few photos of the installation. I am particularly interested in finding out what the cables through the hole they drill in and into the brought near the socket.

Thanks!

ED209 · 7 Sep 2021 at 08:39

Seems that at the moment its only available in London.

Stuck my post code in and that's what I got back.

Armadillo · 15 Sep 2021 at 02:08

So this has started to pop up in my area, not available yet, but the leaflets are about, the work is going on outside etc. I'm still in contract on fttc 80/20 for another few months, so can't look at it till then. I have a question and may as well keep it here.

From a quick look, apparently they use CGNAT. Looking around, this used to break some online games or to be more specific, it causes issues with p2p games. Dedicated server games are fine, but any that are p2p, it's basically like having a strict/closed nat, so you can't host a game and you can only connect to players with an open nat. Looks to be quite an issue, especially in p2p based games with low player counts where having open nat gets the best chance of getting a game.

Most of the topics with those complaints are fairly old though. Is it still an issue? I get full sync 80/20 and the connection is rock solid. Pretty much just me who uses any amount of bandwidth as well, so it's fine in that regard as well. If it's going to cause potential issues with some games, I'll probably just stick where I am.

Thanks.

Caged · 15 Sep 2021 at 10:51

Every new player in the ISP game is going to be using CGNAT because there aren't enough IP addresses to go around, and the long-established providers (BT, TalkTalk, PlusNet, Virgin etc.) got much larger allocations than they 'deserved' at the time. Most of the time they will also offer you IPv6 which solves all NAT issues as long as you are using services that support IPv6. If you want to play console games and get an open NAT type or need to host something that you need to be accessed from IPv4 networks then usually you can add a static IP address which has the side effect of being a public IP.

In Community Fibre's case as long as you aren't on the lowest two product tiers then you won't be on CGNAT, unless there's been a change since their presentation from a couple of years ago.

Meddling-Monk · 18 Oct 2021 at 19:18

Just curious, I noticed a new local WIFI signal come up recently. Its ID is Community_Fibre10gb(and extra id here). Is that REALLY the 10gb offering from Community Fibre? From the business side? Or do their lower end products also have the same ID these days starting off?

Caged · 18 Oct 2021 at 20:46

I think all business services are using XGS-PON so the SSIDs advertise 10Gb as that's what the service could be provisioned up to without having to do an ONT swap. The ONT is an Adtran SDX 621 which has a 10Gb RJ45 interface.

Meddling-Monk · 18 Oct 2021 at 23:20

Caged said:
I think all business services are using XGS-PON so the SSIDs advertise 10Gb as that's what the service could be provisioned up to without having to do an ONT swap. The ONT is an Adtran SDX 621 which has a 10Gb RJ45 interface.

Neat. I thought that might have been something along those lines, but wasn't sure. Would be crazy to drop ~£450 a month for 10Gb a month when the area I saw this is a residential area largely for the elderly. :eek:

Armadillo · 23 Jul 2022 at 18:25

Quick bump. So community fibre is finally live here, going to go for it, but just have two quick questions.

When ever I've changed isp, it's always been fttc, to another fftc, so the switch has pretty much been sign up to new isp, let them take care of it. With community fibre being it's own thing and not openreach network, I just order it, wait till it's up and running and then cancel sky?

The ONT (I think, the thing the fibre goes into), does it screw to the wall or is it more like a modem with feet and it just sits wherever. Community fibre videos seem like it just sits like a modem. Just sitting would be better, but can move stuff to accomadate it if it has to screw to the wall.

Turn · 24 Jul 2022 at 16:00

Armadillo said:
With community fibre being it's own thing and not openreach network, I just order it, wait till it's up and running and then cancel sky?

Yeah I'd assume so, that's how it was when I joined CityFibre's network (via Vodafone).

They're running a new promo at the moment.
If 150Mbps up/down is good for you, then this is a pretty nice deal. - > https://communityfibre.co.uk/150mbps-12-months-dt