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.

 

[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.

 

[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

 

[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

 

[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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[bimbleuk]

Had a follow up call to check everything was running well so another good sign. They are small of course so easier for them to do this.

 

[bimbleuk]

That's a complete nonsense. Full fibre services don't 'settle' like variable rate DSL services over copper do. It's s standard thing that installers say so that they can finish up and get onto the next job.

I was skeptical about that when the engineer showed me 500/500 on his tablet and my PC was a bit lower but I have been seeing 530/430 fairly consistently. If you check the supplied router it should be synced at 1000/1000 which is what I see in my router settings.

Just contact them as they seemed quite keen to make sure people were happy with the service.

 

[bimbleuk]

I thinking about moving to them as I been offered a good deal £33 for 500/500 for 18 months, are people still happy with them

My concern it is a small company and does not seem to offer any speed guarantees.

Small sample size but no issues so far with my speed or connection.

Friend in Swindon was asking me which provider to go with and there 6 or 7 small companies I'd never heard of and little to no feedback. So far their feedback on Trustpilot for example is good.

Talk Talk asked for their router back and said they might charge for it but also provided a pre-paid return package.

 

[bimbleuk]

Yes I seen the feedback on Trustpilot look good. I only seen one bad review about speed

Good thing to know about TalkTalk also their router back as well. Maybe it a recycle requirement now, in the past when i moved ISP I was left with the router.

Do you use the supplied router?

Yes Talk Talk promoted the need to recycle as the reason to send it back.

I did look into adding mesh extenders but the supplier was OEM only from what I found at the time. At the moment I'm using the supplied router.

 

[bimbleuk]

Would anyone be able to share some details of the barrel plug on the power supply for the LIT ONT please?
I’m scheduled for connection next week, and am trying to get some POE kit lined up ready… so I’m after:
External dimension, internal dimension, plus the polarity of the internal/external contact.
I’m hoping it’s 5.5mm x 2.1mm and +12V on the inside contact, rather than the outside of the barrel…
Thanks in advance!

Using a meter black on outside and red in the middle does read +12V.

~5mm jack. Centre hole is ~2mm.

Spoiler: ONT Jack

 

[bimbleuk]

Thanks for going offline to look at that for me!
Don’t suppose you saw if it was a plain round metal inner, or one with a plastic insert and two opposed connectors? Think that’s the different between 2.5mm and 2.1mm

Updated the pics while you posted.

Got me thinking about moving the AP now as it's very similar connection and I have POE switches already for my CCTV cameras.

 

[bimbleuk]

I've been having the same Google service issues. Slow to open the initial web pages and Youtube at times taking several minutes to start and then lots of thumbnails don't load in. Seems worse with Chrome. Affects my older smart TVs more x2. Also issues on PCs and phones.

I may disable the IPV6 services myself to see how that changes things. I had tried the usual power cycles and switching DNS settings before coming back to this thread to see it wasn't just my connection in Gloucestershire.

 

[bimbleuk]

I disabled the 2 IPv6 services on the router and so far I'm not getting the loading issues with Google services so worth a try.

 

[bimbleuk]

I had the issue in July with slow-loading of certain pages and after contacting Lit they disabled IPv6 on my router and that fixed it. Approx 7 hours following the planned outage, the issues came back again. About the same time I had an email from Lit following up on my July email saying they believed they fixed the IPv6 issue and was I seeing any problems? I reported back that the issues were back, and they said 'Unfortunately this did not have the desired effect, and we will continue to investigate and work on permanently resolving the issue.'. I got them to disable IPv6 again whilst they worked on the fix, which they did, and things are working as normal again for me in Gloucestershire.

Makes sense as we're probably on the same local loop

This tip also saved me from buying another router to play with though that doesn't usually stop me. Working now so not going to touch it.