FTTP who to buy it from - Recommendations please

[SnoopZ]

Thoughts on EE FTTP, has anyone got any experience with them, how good or bad is customer support and is it UK based? It's not one I would have gone with initially but they're the first to drop a leaflet through my door and also offer a 12 month contract. My goal is to go with Cityfibre as soon as they say it's ready to order so the shorter the contract the better. I could take a monthly contact with someone but it's expensive and would have to buy my own router.

---------- Post added at 10:33 ---------- Previous post was at 10:24 ----------

The reviews are terrible so that's a big fat NO from me.

[thenry]

My mum's with EE. Because she has smartphones they do her a big package. I tried to get her on 1gb community fibre around £25 per month which is cheaper than her current 150meg for around £30 per month. I've been in her company a couple of times when EE have called her and it's generic speak, like a robot. Nothing beats a constructive conversation.

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by thenry

My mum's with EE. Because she has smartphones they do her a big package. I tried to get her on 1gb community fibre around £25 per month which is cheaper than her current 150meg for around £30 per month. I've been in her company a couple of times when EE have called her and it's generic speak, like a robot. Nothing beats a constructive conversation.

I don't answer the phone to cold callers that would drive me nuts, atleast when I do this and ditch my landline my Pixel phone will do that work for me.

[thenry]

my pixel thinks my service provider Three are a scam when they try call lol malwarebytes thinks Three billing texts with links are a scam ha lol

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by thenry

my pixel thinks my service provider Three are a scam when they try call lol malwarebytes thinks Three billing texts with links are a scam ha lol

[SnoopZ]

Decided to go with Zen primarily because it's got UK based support which seems to get good reviews, it's not the cheapest but it's an 18 month contract on Full Fibre 900 so that will be £50 a month, however I'm currently paying £128 a month to VM for 250mb, TV and phone( I know it's alot but didn't want the hassle of negotiating again and taking another 2 year contract).

I'll be cancelling all of VM including landline and my TV license so will save a monthly fortune and will rely on Zen and my IPTV service which is basically paid for with my EVERUP gift card monthly savings, so that will be a very nice yearly saving and maybe I can chuck it into my pension or an ISA.

I think you'll be fine with Zen, same price as I pay IDN (12 month contract) - you should also get a fixed IP address.

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by Paul

I think you'll be fine with Zen, same price as I pay IDN (12 month contract) - you should also get a fixed IP address.

They provide a FRITZ!Box 7530 AX, hopefully that'll be good enough but I never needed anything fancy so if a VM Hub is good enough then this should be, the house is also small so WiFi range is never more than 15ft or so while inside.

[adzii_nufc]

Late post but happy to clear some tidbits up from reading through.

CityFibre, Youfibre and other 'altnets' do commonly use existing infrastructure via Openreach and the PIA service offered. Virgin also use this where available. They do also create their own infrastructure, Underground boxes using green or purple ducting marked with their company name on as well as erecting new poles. Openreach on the otherhand wont or very seldomly use third party infrastructure due to costs. The costs Openreach charge to use their infrastructure is significantly lower to the altnets than the charges the altnets would charge Openreach. If I remember correctly Openreach charges are capped on that front due to it being BT and then before that the GPO thus government funded (you can still find a lot of GPO underground boxes and telephone poles marked GPO)

The obvious downside to a lot of this is large areas of the UK were built with cables buried directly in ground, an altnet comes and lays trenches all over the place and installs ducting, 5 months later you get Openreach digging up the same footpath to do the same.

Everyone builds the network quite differently too. Virgin use sub ducting and tubing to blow fibre bundles through. CityFibre often do this but also mix with physical sheathed cables. Netomnia on the otherhand build some areas almost identically to Openreach, using the same CBT's and fibre nodes in areas Openreach havent yet reached, but have been seen to be using blown tubing in areas that Openreach have FTTP. Almost like they're wanting to be bought out at some point.

There were also once areas with no BT/Openreach provider for periods of time. I cant imagine they were that common but a few north east towns built from scratch in the 50's up over were essentially forced into these alternative cable providers that would provide a service back to the BT exchange whilst selling their own television products or television reception. BT/GPO eventually did provide services at later dates but Telewest/NTL/Virgin got a strong foothold in these areas with broadband later down the line.

The last one incredibly is new housing companies creating their own altnet and bundling that in with a home purchase, forcing you to take their product or nothing when purchasing the property, the most notorious for this is Persimmon homes which have next to no Openreach/Virgin or other altnet FTTP due to having an exclusive deal with their own provider as well as not having the council adopt the estate roads for a fair while which won't allow any other provider to build for a set amount of years.

[SnoopZ]

Thanks for the informative post, I'll ask the engineer when he gets here if they're using Cityfibre ducts because they are the only people I saw digging trenches.

I've just this minute had confirmation of my installation date and I was happy I was able to change it to Saturday 31st January instead of Friday 30th all with a simple click!

I did have issues placing the order because there was a known issue of orders getting automatically rejected and Zen Support was fantastic and all done quickly via email, I've been given my username and password and IP address already, no modem yet.

[adzii_nufc]

Originally Posted by SnoopZ

Thanks for the informative post, I'll ask the engineer when he gets here if they're using Cityfibre ducts because they are the only people I saw digging trenches.

I've just this minute had confirmation of my installation date and I was happy I was able to change it to Saturday 31st January instead of Friday 30th all with a simple click!

I did have issues placing the order because there was a known issue of orders getting automatically rejected and Zen Support was fantastic and all done quickly via email, I've been given my username and password and IP address already, no modem yet.

Zen sell FTTP through Openreach and CityFibre. Fair chance you'll be using CF's network.

It usually tells you when buying a package, I know Vodafone do when providing a line via an Altnet.

Virgin Media did intent to go wholesale too and offer their network up for use by altnets but backed out I believe. I do wonder if their very differing network types in areas played an issue. Had the pleasure of using their XGS-PON product with a HUB 5x. Given that they've set this up so that the optical cable and thus light travels directly to the router rather than an ONT, I cant see how they could have wholesaled these areas out to other providers, unless they covered the virgin logo with a Vodafone one Good service though, just had a huge drawback of no ONT and a router that had no Modem mode, leaving you with double NAT mesh networks.

Other than I believe BT intend to shuffle every non-business customer onto EE as that becomes the consumer broadband and telephone base of BT group, ive probably about covered everything.

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by adzii_nufc

Zen sell FTTP through Openreach and CityFibre. Fair chance you'll be using CF's network.

It usually tells you when buying a package, I know Vodafone do when providing a line via an Altnet.

Virgin Media did intent to go wholesale too and offer their network up for use by altnets but backed out I believe. I do wonder if their very differing network types in areas played an issue. Had the pleasure of using their XGS-PON product with a HUB 5x. Given that they've set this up so that the optical cable and thus light travels directly to the router rather than an ONT, I cant see how they could have wholesaled these areas out to other providers, unless they covered the virgin logo with a Vodafone one Good service though, just had a huge drawback of no ONT and a router that had no Modem mode, leaving you with double NAT mesh networks.

Other than I believe BT intend to shuffle every non-business customer onto EE as that becomes the consumer broadband and telephone base of BT group, ive probably about covered everything.

I'll be on the Openreach network, unfortunately City Fibre is still in the 'planned' stage in my area and not Live, but I hope it'll go live by the time my 18 month contract is up because it'll be cheaper and off better speeds.

In the email they say the ONT needs to be close to a power socket, do they mean right next to it so they can grab power from it by plugging something in because in the Zen videos nothing was plugged into a power socket so do they just use that for the modem?