FTTP on Demand

Fingers crossed!

Did manage to get them to honor the special offer they were running until yesterday too......300mbps for £35 a month.

That's my only concern with Gigaclear - you lose the competitive element, it could be like going back to BT monopoly days. They claim to have "service providers" but I'm unsure what they can really offer (https://www.gigaclear.net/get-connected )
Think you’re getting a pretty good deal there for £35 a month.

Comparable ultra high speed deals via Openreach FTTP providers or Virgin Media in the cities are at least 50% more than that.

Don’t worry be happy...

7635FAA9-1778-47A5-910E-FC3C153A6A75.jpeg
BB1EC1A2-7B93-4B94-95AF-DE2DF38A4AB3.jpeg
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Think you’re getting a pretty good deal there for £35 a month.

Comparable ultra high speed deals via Openreach FTTP providers or Virgin Media in the cities are at least 50% more than that.

Don’t worry be happy...

View attachment 825061View attachment 825062

Year 1 (well, 18mths!) is £35 a month, usually £45 but comes with £10 discount. No setup/activation fee either.

Just gotta remember to try and renegotiate in 18mths time and see if they will keep the discount. Fingers crossed...! Either that or I'll have to try the old trick of threatening to leave.....maybe 3 will have a 5G service running by then which could be considered a viable alternative. I doubt they'd believe me if I said I'm happy to go back to 3mbps from Openreach!!
 
Year 1 (well, 18mths!) is £35 a month, usually £45 but comes with £10 discount. No setup/activation fee either.

Just gotta remember to try and renegotiate in 18mths time and see if they will keep the discount. Fingers crossed...! Either that or I'll have to try the old trick of threatening to leave.....maybe 3 will have a 5G service running by then which could be considered a viable alternative. I doubt they'd believe me if I said I'm happy to go back to 3mbps from Openreach!!
Be interesting to see how long it takes them to get you up and running. Also what the performance is like. The fibre speed will be full rate, buy like any broadband service much depends on what your fellow neighbours are doing on the service / how contended it is. But by most accounts of what I’ve read on here and elsewhere Gigaclear tend to deliver what they promise.

There have been some users of Openreach based FTTP genuinely not getting what they’re promised, in most cases it gets resolved because the comms provider and Openreach swap then onto a different (less traffic / contention) Service Virtual LAN (SVLAN) back at the exchange/point of presence
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Fingers crossed. I’m hoping I’ve jumped the gun a bit. There has been no official announcement it’s live, but I’d been chasing them and happened to get a call yesterday to say it’s all go. I had hoped to get the installation done prior to “live day” as I could foresee every man and his dog placing orders and suddenly a six month lead time before they could do the work. I’m curious to find out who they sub the installation out to as I’m sure they won’t have their own digging team.

They’ve gotta cross a stream too....though that didn’t seem to be covered by their “standard installation” questions!!

We shall know more in two weeks....
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
One step closer with this.....survey has now been completed. Just awaiting all the details.

It's simplest/cheapest to mount the router in the house on the external wall nearest the cable route. By all accounts the Gigaclear router (you have to use their own router) isn't the best at wifi so this may not be sufficient for covering the whole house.

I could use powerline adapters to run wired signal around but I'm not too impressed with them for a long term solution, and they wouldn't cover wifi devices either.
I also looked at an Amplifi mesh system but these seem to need to use the Amplifi router, and wouldn't work with the Gigaclear setup it would seem.

Am I best to run a cable up into the roof space and mount a Ubiquiti Unifi or something to provide wireless coverage for the house?
 

upnortheast

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Northumberland
The Openreach chap who installed ours said he could only go 3m inside the house with his "drop" cable to the ONT box. (Needs a 13a socket to power it ) After that you can run a cat6 cable (Max circa 100m ) to the best place for your router. Best place for WiFi is very much dependent on your house layout
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
The Openreach chap who installed ours said he could only go 3m inside the house with his "drop" cable to the ONT box. (Needs a 13a socket to power it ) After that you can run a cat6 cable (Max circa 100m ) to the best place for your router. Best place for WiFi is very much dependent on your house layout

Gigaclear it a bit different to Openreach. I'm not sure how the system works. I'm not sure whether they have a separate ONT/router, or whether it's fibre direct into the router.

Either way, I'm pretty sure it'll be a case of running an ethernet cable out of the router to a separate (and hopefully better!) AP to cover the house from a more central place.
 
Just had the ONT (optical network termination) unit here replaced here by Openreach.

Actually to be fair to OR, it was pretty quick turnaround as I reported the "underspeed" fault only yesterday afternoon. Engineer just left here about half an hour ago. So sorted and back to normal in under 24 hours, guess that's the benefit of having a business grade service.

Anyhow we had a big lighting strike and surge about 2 weeks ago, which either physically blew up or irreparably faulted a LOT of stuff....I have had to replace our main router, 2 network switches in the house (toast), another network switch near a gate (cooked), a complete gate opener (black and fried), a ring doorbell (blow apart), the garage door opener (motor died) and there's yet more stuff broken or being sent for repair. A real bleeding nightmare when it all goes wrong.

The original ONT basically didn't want to connect at anything faster than 100 Mb/s after the strike. They just put a new one in and it immediately connected at 1000 Mb/s so it was clearly a victim of the surge fault.

The 'old' ONT is shown below, the new battery backup unit (BBU) is next to it. The BBU is spare as the existing one was OK.

IMG_5771.jpg
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
There is exactly the square root of FA you can do about it unfortunately. I'd wager your connection will get delivered twice as quickly as mine, just a shame that is still many months.... :X3:

Very true! Never hurts to keep it fresh in their mind though so things don't get stuck somewhere by accident.

You're probably spot on about the timescale too.....it does make you wonder how/why telecoms companies are so inefficient. Can't blame the hangover of public sector ownership like Openreach etc.
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
Yes, very pleased with it.

Supposed to be a 300mbps up and down service - I'll give it a week or so to stabilise (assuming it's like standard broadband and has a stabilisation period) and it still below the 300 mark I'll give them a bell and let them know.

Just need to slowly upgrade the rest of the network now. Got a few adapters that run on 150mbps which are only(!) getting around 40-70mbps - plenty fast enough though!

A new PC will be on the cards soon too....
 
Yes, very pleased with it.

Supposed to be a 300mbps up and down service - I'll give it a week or so to stabilise (assuming it's like standard broadband and has a stabilisation period) and it still below the 300 mark I'll give them a bell and let them know.

Just need to slowly upgrade the rest of the network now. Got a few adapters that run on 150mbps which are only(!) getting around 40-70mbps - plenty fast enough though!

A new PC will be on the cards soon too....
I’ve found wired ports (so long as your switch and wiring is capable) are all good at 1000 Mbps.

The main bottleneck is wireless...some adapters are better than others and you quickly find out where all those (really) dead-spots in coverage are.

Also you will have a short term addiction to running speed tests...and getting a little grin when the results come back wow . :p:X3::geek:
 

Steevo

Member
Location
Gloucestershire
I’ve found wired ports (so long as your switch and wiring is capable) are all good at 1000 Mbps.

The main bottleneck is wireless...some adapters are better than others and you quickly find out where all those (really) dead-spots in coverage are.

Also you will have a short term addiction to running speed tests...and getting a little grin when the results come back wow . :p:X3::geek:

Almost no wired usage here at all, other than the DS418. Have a Samknows box wired up too for monitoring so that will show the best results.

Gigaclear supply a Genexis modem and now use it in bridge mode with a Linksys Velop router for improved wireless. (They has complaints previously about the WiFi range of the Genexis). Single node supplied which will do most rooms well despite being situated in the corner of the house. Will likely purchase another node though to give better coverage all over, and also enable the DS418 to be situated in a more discrete location.
 
...I’ll hasten to add you also discover what sites on the net have good or poor connections and even there is a lot of traffic “hitting” a big site. Downloading 10’s of gigs in a few minutes gets quite nice and then every so often when things “elsewhere” go slow you’re like hey WTF (shock horror :yuck:)
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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