For background, I was previously in a FTTC environment getting average speeds due to my distance from the cab, however good enough to assumably be overlooked for the next phase of the Openreach Ultrafast rollout. Not that I’m complaining, 2020 is the year my speed gets a much-needed boost.

2020 also turns out to be the inaugural international work from home year, so had the opportunity to have a front seat view from my home office on the activity and timeline that brought FTTP home.

I’d like to share my observations and timeline as an example of what you can expect should you get the inkling of fibre coming to your street soon.

Before we get started, as my expectations rose, I found this post by Andy’s World invaluable for identifying activity and helping me confirm that FTTP was on its way.

Background

As mentioned, I was already in a FTTC enabled area. From the cab the copper “last mile” travelled underground from the cab to my nearest telegraph pole, then overhead to my property.

I was getting speeds on average of 40Mbps down and 5Mbps up due to the distance from the cab, I also suffered loss of sync approx. every other day. I notice that my overhead line was a lot older than others on the pole, identified by the greying colour and how you could identify both cores on the cable rather than the single looking shielded core of adjacent cables. A 48h MTBF was not ideal but well within Openreach service levels, meaning I couldn’t get this drop cable replaced without a significant cost.

Being in an FTTC area, no matter how bad the connection is usually meaning that it is not up for consideration for upcoming phases of an Openreach FTTP rollout. Couple this to a Virgin media rollout along my street the previous year and this would reason that the demand for FTTP would be low.

Timeline

Early days – May 2020

Entering my second month of working from home, notice a lot of Openreach vans passing my door. I may be more observant of these given my profession, but it was a lot of activity over the normal fault-based callouts.

Later and as I started venturing out of the house again, it looks as though they were commissioning a new cabinet a couple of streets up, therefore assumed the activity was for this.

June 2020

I happen to live near a train station, and was intrigued by the letters through the door.

Since moving in a year earlier, I’ve received a couple of letters of this type. But a new ticketing system combined with increased Openreach activity made me think if maybe this would include fibre. Hopes were still low at this point, but even if the rail infrastructure went for leased line circuits, this would increase the likelihood of FTTP.

Hopes were increased later in the month, when I noticed active involvement in the pole supplying my house.

To coincide, another letter relating to communications works on the rail system piqued my interest further.

August 2020

Another letter, this time for roadworks to clear blocked ducts for Openreach, with my and adjacent poles labelled for work.

This was very telling, as FTTC was already available with a on pole distribution point (DP), either this was to increase the number of copper circuits, or for deployment of a new technology.

25^th August 2020

The conformation I needed; thanks to the Andy’s World post I knew what to look for.

This day a cherry picker arrived soon after 9am, and then commenced the installation of a FTTP termination at my local pole. It was a day later before the “Fibre lines overhead” label appeared but it was clear FTTP was on its way.

Through my work I’m able to check and order connectivity for premises, so now began my daily check to see if/when FTTP would be available.

10^th Sepember  2020

Daily ISP provision check 16, and FTTP appeared as an order option, at 9am it appeared as an option but unable to order to lack of capacity, but an hour later it was fully available:

Before getting ahead and ordering the full 1000/115Mbps, time for a reality check to see what my current router can actually process, resulting in an order of 220/30Mbps later that day.

My ISP like many others allow me to upgrade speed within contract but now downgrade, so this will be a good starting point with the option to increase should I get a router upgrade.

Activation date was set for Wednesday 23/09/2020.

Monday 21^st September 2020

Activation week, and more activity around the Openreach pole. Involving a cherry picker, a team of 3 descended to check over the FTTP distribution point.

Also noticed that the tensioners (Or the metal wire that attaches to the ring on top of the pole and is wrapped around the drop cable hold it to the pole) of my current copper drop cable were unwound slightly.

Tuesday 22^nd September 2020

The day before I had an unexpected reconnaissance visit from the Openreach engineer assigned to my activation the next day.

My previous drop cable for reasons I cannot fathom was run into the house via a corner of the uPVC window frame, so was eager to have the fibre enter the house via a new route. And the five-minute visit was worth it as it was determined that a cherry picker was needed at pole side due to the slope of the road.

Wednesday 23^rd September 2020 – Install Day

ONT- Optical Network Termination – The modem that converts light to electrical data.

Openreach engineer turned up at 9am as promised, and a recap of the installation path.

The assumed installation work would disconnect the copper to the building, and replace the analogue master socket like for like with the new ONT. I needed the FTTC to remain in use while I transition IP addresses so at request the old copper would remain active.

Sub-plan was to leave the copper untouched, and run a new route of fibre only cable into the house. However, when the cherry picker turned up so did a supply of combined copper/fibre cable, allowing the supply of all services via the new route, and to replace the aging copper.

Installation

Fibre installation comes in two parts, the distribution point (either overhead or underground) to the outside of the property, and a fibre from the ONT inside the property out to meet the other.

First the hole was drilled close to the ONT location, the ONT was mounted on the wall and the internal fibre ran to the outside. The internal fibre is much thinner than from the pole due to the less armoured sheathing and benefits with more flexibility, although this comes at a risk of snapping or kinking the fibre, resulting in light loss and ultimately network loss.

Next stage with the help of the cherry picker was to plug in the fibre to the DP on the pole, and run it overhead towards the house. The fibre was secured to the house and run down the side of the building. During this the old copper was disconnected and new was connected at the pole.

Thirdly, the internal and external fibres are joined together. A new box is attached to the external wall that has inside a spool that will hold a few windings of each fibre, as the joining of the cables is considered a failure point, as few windings are included during the initial installation to give extra fibre should the cables need to be re-joined in future.

A portable splicing machine is used to join both fibres by lining them up, heating to fuse the two together, and shrink wrapping the join for protection. The unit also checks the light levels at this location, mine being 17 at this join, 14 at pole.

The fibre is coiled in the external box and closed, completing the installation of the fibre.

Commissioning is a simple as Openreach completing the order, then waiting for the PON light on the modem to illuminate. Such is the technology, there’s no fine tuning or testing of the signal, as long as the light levels at the splicing phase is good, the connection should just would. Although a sanity check wouldn’t go a miss and a quick speed test confirmed I was running on the new connection.

Fibre installed, the analogue side was reconnected with the use of a new mk5c socket, the copper in the new combo cable is extremely thin to the point where you’d struggle to believe it’s a pair. That so, VDSL sync speeds are comparable to the old drop cable, although I don’t think longevity was in mind with this design.

Equipment

As FTTP enters a maturity, the efficiency and cost saving measures improve (depending on your side of the fence).

Early installations had modems which included a PSTN port for analogue phones, and were accompanied by a battery backup unit to keep the phone line active during power failures. Later units dropped the PSTN and battery options, in favour of four RJ45 ports, with the potential to provide 4 separate internet connections via the single fibre and modem.

The new ONT supplied for my residential installation was something new to me, a Nokia G-010G-Q. This unit is far smaller than previously seen, and is sized perfectly to replace in situ a BT analogue master socket. The compromise is from the bare minimum of I/O, with the only connections being power, fibre termination and a single RJ45 port for modulated data.

Results

As expected, my internet connection has been perfectly stable and just what I need when working from home, in particular the upload speed and lower latency is a much-needed improvement for this website, which I host from a home server.

Ironically the install of FTTP has greatly improved the FTTC connection its replacing, now it syncs for days at a time instead of a hopeful 48hour maximum.

If you are like me and insist on using your own router, double check the WAN throughput before deciding on a speed profile. Even though Draytek advertises a 400Mbps firewall throughput, I’m reliably getting a maximum of only 180Mbps. This I would attribute to three active WAN and a couple of VPN all with load balancing options applied.

My current router is a Draytek 2862ac, which has an advertised 400Mbps throughput at the WAN, but what can it actually achieve in the real world? This will be the basis on choosing a FTTP speed profile.

Speed testing a router can be setup with a couple of laptops…

In this example I’ll be using a similar Draytek 2860n router, this has an advertised firewall throughput of 300Mbps so this will be the number we are looking to hit.

Router Setup

Using a fresh factory rebooted 2860, plug the “client” side PC into a LAN port, then navigate to http://192.168.1.1 in a web browser and log in with admin/admin.

In the left-hand menu, navigate to WAN -> Internet Access.

Click the Details Page of WAN2.

Click the Static or Dynamic IP tab, then click the Enable button.

Here we will enter manual settings to simulate that of an ISP, enter the following IP values that will differ from factory defaults:

Note: Set WAN Connection Detection to Always On to force it as active.

Click OK to save and reboot the router.

Server PC Setup

While the client-side PC gets its network from DHCP, the WAN side PC needs to be set manually to fit the IP details set on the router.

On the WAN PC, navigate to change the network adaptor IP address:

Settings -> Network & Internet -> Ethernet -> Change adaptor options.

Right click the connection in use -> Properties -> Click Internet Protocol Version 4 -> Properties.

Enter the following to simulate the WAN side:

Click OK to apply changes, now plug in the network port to WAN2 of the Draytek.

Getting Data

Stats and throughput results will be delivered by iPerf3. For this to work it needs to be installed on two machines, one that will act as client on the local network, and another that will be the server sitting on the “internet” side of the router.

Visit the iPerf website and download the latest binaries for your operating system.

Extract the contents of the Zip file to the desktop of both machines.

Open up a command prompt window on both, and navigate to the desktop by typing cd desktop.

Firstly, on the server side, type iperf3.exe -s and enter, allow access to any security prompts. The window should report “Server listening on port 5201”

Now on the client side, type iperf3.exe -c 10.0.99.11 and enter. All things correct the two machines connect and start reporting bandwidth stats.

This reports the maximum throughput available between the two machines, the maximum is determined by the biggest bottleneck in the connection. In this setup it should be the firewall of the Draytek, but if your results are below expectations it’s worth investigating if something else is limiting the bandwidth. For example, a client PC using wireless N (150Mbps) technology would shift the bottleneck to the WiFi connection and will not be able to fully test the firewall.

Real World Setup

This example was conducted in a standalone environment, but a more accurate benchmark can be achieved by running this on a live system, for instance on a router where vDSL is established and the WAN2 speed is to be tested.

An issue you I ran into is even though the routing table has been updated on the Draytek, my Windows 10 machine is unaware on how to reach the test network.

To resolve, I added a temporary static route to push 10.0.99.0 traffic to WAN2.

In a command prompt window, run the following:

Replacing 192.168.1.1 with the gateway of the WAN2 setup.

Results

With the standalone example here using a 2860, the results averaging at 283Mps are comparable to the 300Mbps throughput advertised by Draytek.

I also conducted another test using my 2862 in situ, utilising the WAN2 port for testing alongside an active vDSL on WAN1. For an advertised 400Mbps throughput, the results were disappointing:

Where theoretical maximums are achievable, in reality there are a lot of factors that can impede this, I can only assume that my current setup involving multiple VLANs, VPNs and traffic shaping in place is causing the Draytek 2862 not to perform as advertised.

Whether this is expected behaviour or a misleading speed claim is another discussion.