Community Fibre

[chaosophy]

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.

 

[chaosophy]

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.

 

[chaosophy]

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 !

 

[chaosophy]

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.

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.

Spoiler: Ping Results

 

[chaosophy]

Nice to see a few more people signing up for this, their continued roll out seems to be going well.

Since being with from the beginning of 2019 I've not had any issues with them, changed contracts a couple of times.

Started on 1000/1000 for £30pm for the first 6 months on an offer that then switched to the normal £50pm.
Then dropped down to a 400/400 for £27.50pm on a 2 year contract, that they had as an offer, to save a bit of money.
But am now back on another 2 year 1000/1000 contract for £25pm, which they kindly let me switch to even though I still had a few months left on the slower, more expensive contract.
Didn't really miss the 1000 speed when on the 400 but didn't hurt to switch back to the higher speed for £2.50 less pm.

£25pm for 1000/1000 FTTP still blows my mind considering different prices I've paid over the years for internet plus a landline I never used and have now got rid of.

re: Their engineers and fitting, I was lucky with mine. I live in a flat and where the cables were run it came in by the bedroom window and the engineer was great.
He ran extra fibre cable from the plate under the window, out the bedroom into the hall and then into a small cupboard where I have a switch for my internal CAT cabling.
Bit of a pain as we drilled a couple of holes and had to go up an over the ceiling from the bedroom door to the cupboard door but it's not really noticeable and means all the equipment is nicely out the way.

Saying all that though, I did notice that the time from me contacting them for my latest contract switch, to them getting back to me and then eventually getting moved to the new contract took a lot longer this time than the last time I switched.
This might have been down to me wanting to switch mid contract but I hope it's not a sign of them rolling out their service quicker than they are growing their back end support.

 

[chaosophy]

Got CF in my area, was considering a switch to them from VM how reliable has CF broadband been overall for you?

I have probably 12-15 outages per year by VM by comparison which is why I am considering them. BT 36Mb like once or twice in first 5-6 years.

I've been with CF for 3, coming up to 4, years and off the top of my head can only remember two issues.
Once when my speed dropped and my internet was patchy but that ended up being a damaged/loose cable outside of my flat that they fixed pretty quickly and one planned outage when they where doing some work.
May have been more that I don't remember but nothing comes to mind.
I have had a few mails from them over the years apologising for outages that never seemed to actually affect me.
Though I think they've grouped my building with another one nearby on their mailing list, so the mails weren't relevant.

Whatever the above, it's no where near the 12-15 you are seeing with VM. Think I'd remember if CF was that bad.

 

[chaosophy]

You can run a speed test on the router via the web interface and then work back from there.

 

[chaosophy]

Pretty sure most ISPs say the same thing, that the equipment is theirs (you're effectively renting it) and that it needs to be returned.
In reality I've never had an ISP actually enforce this.
By the time you'd ever need to return it the equipment is out of date and not worth the time and cost to them to take it back and reuse it.

The only potential issue I can see is getting support from them, as in if you have an issue and they ask you to plug back in the original equipment for them to test and trouble shoot any connection issues.