I enquiring on behalf of a small block of flats (17)
We've approached CityFIbre who have fibre in the street for options to get connected.
They can relatively easily connect from the street to our shared electricity/phoneline room
but from there they would either do
- an "external build": cable to each flat externally running in brown UPC conduit or along tensioned wires.
- an "Internal build" from the meter room take fibres under the pathways and/or through an internal wall to a distribution box in each of 2 separate stairwells, then from there run fibres attached in corners of the walls to terminating box above and outside the doorway of each flat.
The external build is not going to fly as it would spoil the exterior appearance of the building.
The internal build is slightly tidier but only a little; similar concerns and quite disruptive works. The actual ISP then still needs to drill through a wall and inside the flat doe something similar with a fibre mounted in corner between wall and ceiling running to wherever the resident wants their router - again a bit messy and disruptive if its hidden in the wall or ceiling.
So remaining option and best one seems to be to make use of existing CAT5 cabling that runs from the meter room to each flat (4 separate cables go to 4 wall ports in each flat) this is currently how phone lines are connected in.
Have flat owners/residents put their router supplied by the ISP into the meter room and connect with CAT5 into the relevant port in the CAT5 patch panel.
Either this or use a pair of media converters
- fibre to CAT5 in the meter room & and CAT5 to fibre in the flat; then router can be in the flat
An additional advantage is that when OpenReach bring fibre to the area in 2024 they too could bring fibre to the meter room and residents could choose from a wider range of ISPs
- but without having 2 lots of digging and 2 lots of fibre running to each flat in the shared internal spaces
anyone have any experience of a solution like this?
any pros/cons?
thanks in advance!
Tim
