Gigafast and Copper

[Masquerade]

Hello all,

I have been keeping up with the progress of Gigafast since it was first anounced by Cityfibre as I am a resident of Milton Keynes, but unfortunately even though I in the central part of the city they are only starting my road at the end of this month.

Hopefully someone who already has the service will be able to assist me with this query.

Is it possibly to keep your copper line when you have Fibre installed?

The reason I ask and would choose to do so is because we used to get 4 or 5 nuisance calls a day until I activated Talk Sheild (Sky) and for over 2 year now we have had zero nuisance calls and I would ideally like to keep the phone service with Sky just for that reason. I cannot find any information relating to my query, even Voda's FAQ section is limited.

[GlassFibre]

Apparently there is a bedding in period of 10 days whilst the line adjust to settle the speed between the exchange and your home.

I'm also aware that only the Vodafone supplied router/modem will allow you to connect to their phone line.

[__graeme]

Fibre has a settling in period? I didn't think it did.  FTTP is capable of far greater speeds than is currently being rolled out by Vodafone and many other ISPs. It's thottled down to the speed you are paying for. The speed is controlled by configuration rather than the bandwidth the fibre is capable of. The fibre (and the hardware at either end) is likely to be capable of  at least 1000mpbs.  For a lot of people anything over 900mbps will not be that beneficial as the maxium bandwidth will be constrained by the customers own hardware. A lot of routers have trouble maintaining firewall throughput at those speeds and WiFi speeds tail off very quickly on 5Ghz unless you are close to, and are in line-of-sight of the router/ Wireless Access Point.   It about time we saw some consumer grade (and priced) 10gbs routers and switches IMHO.    

[Masquerade]

From what I know about Gigabit Fibre connections the actual achievable throughput is only 155MB/s in the real world, the theoritcal speeds of Full Duplex Gigabit is still theoretical inside a closed network and to exceed that you need enterprise hardware capable of 10Gb+, even with link aggregation it is hard to achieve Gig tranfers in a closed network. 

[vectraturbo]

had mine 3 months now and had nothing but trouble with it 1st week 900 up and down then all of a sudden down load dropped to less the 100down but upload was still 900   so after that had nothing but trouble with tec support over it went throug the usall rubbish of splitting wifi etc ( dont bloody use wifi my hole house is wired and is more than capable of running there internet plus more ) any ways for weeks it went on the i got a call just before boris shut down the uk saying the fault is in your home ! so they were told nobody is to enter my house im in self isolating for 12+ weeks due to heath conditions i have  so they said ok we will get back to you but the faults somewhere in my house  with in 24 hours ( next morning ) my speeds were back up to 900 again (so the fault wasnt in my house what a supprise )  kept an eye on it through out the day and it was fine   next morning check again download was 850 ish and upload was 1.23 average and thats where it stayed for nearly 2 weeks  ! but then i got a phone call monday(6th)  from tec and spent over half an hour on the phone to them and he told me there was and has been a fault with cityfiber and they have now hopefully sorted it out at least he was honest with me says theres been a fault and has been for a while  but touch wood its been ok since monday im not holding my breath but when it works its bloody fast  comeing from virgin 350 its one hell of an improvement (apart from being reliable) 

i can have the mrs on netflix streaming in 4k my kids on ther computers (3of them) plus my own system and all there phones running at the same time and you wouldnt notice much speed drop  not like with virgin  real world tests i havent really payed much attention to it but i did download a game the other evening that was 46gb and it took less than 10 mins once i know its stable i will do some tests i just think they are have problems with our net work as it hasnt been long installed down our streets  once its sorted it will be a good internet   just a bit miffed it hasnt been usable for nearly 3months but they are quick enough to take the money from you !  if you do get a problem just be prepaired to fight with tec support they will ask for 3 speed tests take through out the day and eve and send them and they will look at it with in 3 days i think ive sent over 100 screenshots as of today to them but its sorted now ! 

[Masquerade]

That is what I am worried about, the notoriety of Vodafones customer service and tech support. I work in IT and have done for 17 years, I am a hands on technical person and love it when technical support from an ISP try to tell me its something on my end when logically and factually the problem is with their infastructure and not mine. Lets hope Granmere (the contractors for Cityfibre who did my road/area) did a good job of laying the fibre and no issues exist when it goes live.

I look forward to seeing what your speeds are.

[Mark]

Hey @Masquerade I'm sure you will love our service and if you have the need to contact our Customer services team, this will always be a great experience. As we'll need to take a few personal details to update you on when the service in your street goes live, pop us a private message via Facebook or Twitter and we'll be happy to help.

[Mark]

I'm sorry to hear you had a frustrating start to your time with us @vectraturbo 😢 I'm glad to hear everything is sorted now and I'm sure the rest of your time with us will be plain sailing. If you do need anything you can always get in touch with us here, or through one of our Social channels and we'll always be happy to help.

[Dabbs]

Hey @Masquerade, the great thing about FTTP is that you won't lose any speeds going the property, as the fibre cable runs straight to the socket. Which provides some amazing speeds! In answer to your second question, we provide you with our latest router, which has been future proofed and really does the job great! 

You can view our latest offers here, https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/deals/gigafast.

[Masquerade]

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@Dabbs wrote:

Hey @Masquerade, the great thing about FTTP is that you won't lose any speeds going the property, as the fibre cable runs straight to the socket. Which provides some amazing speeds! In answer to your second question, we provide you with our latest router, which has been future proofed and really does the job great! 

You can view our latest offers here, https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/deals/gigafast.

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I know how FTTP works, I am however wanting to hear from people that have the 900MB package to see the actual download speeds they receive as it should be 155MB/s on a 1GB Fibre connection and so until I am able to order and test myself I was curious to hear from others as I connect to 3 different Data Centres from home and upload/download terabytes of data a month currently at a max speed of 9MB/s (actual speed, not bandwidth speed).

I do not believe your router is great from the topics I have read on this forum and it appears to lack some basic functionality and lots of more advanced options, I would look to use my own router which makes the Voda Router look like a Fisher Price toy from the 80's. First I need to be able to join Gigafast. My street was finished 3 weeks ago and the surrounding area is finished but I still cannot see the option for Fibre when I check the Voda website.

[Logical_lefty]

So I've just had the 900/900 package installed.

1st question: 105MB/ (megabytes per second) sustained, 125MB/s peaks on upload and download. But don't expect that to happen simultaneously to one computer. You start hitting the limitations of ethernet.

2nd question about own router: This question is what I put to the gigafast team. They said anywhere from leave it till you can access the Internet to 10days. Personally I did it a couple of hours after the install because I got impatient. It worked perfectly aslong as you get the right details and ensure a vlan911 is enabled.

I setup using a netgear ax router with no issues, about to switch to a ubiquiti equipment though as I'm already seeing the limitations of a consumer router.