Question BT Fibre to home

gavinl1967

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We have just moved in to a new build property and discovered a few weeks prior to moving in that the property is supplied with BT fibre to home - fibre all the way from exchange to the house. After a lot of chasing Openreach and BT, the broadband is due to go 'live' today, but unfortunately I work away from home so won't be able to deal with any potential issues until Friday.

Does anyone have any experience of this and what we can expect?

The router is plugged into the Openreach box as detailed in the setup information. However, this is in a cupboard under the stairs at the back of the house, so not an ideal location. Can the router be moved and plugged in to any phone point in the house? I ask because no cable seems to have been suppplied in order to do this.

Cheers.
 
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If you have fiber to the premises, the router doesn't "plug into the phone line" at all - the fiber is (possibly) connected to a fiber optic line termination box of some sort and/or modem, then probably an ethernet cable between the modem and router.

You can extend them modem-router ethernet link up to 100m over a suitably long UTP cable, but if your property is not wired with UTP cabling, you'll need to install a dedicated UTP link to do so.

I am not sure if BT FTTP also delivers voice over the fiber or if voice is on an entirely separate (traditional) copper cable. If you tell us the make/model of the fiber termination equipment (and maybe take picture of it) someone may recognise it.
 
Hi, thanks for the reply.

I'll try and get my partner to take a picture of the setup to post up here - as I'm not home to do so until Friday.

The fibre does come into the house via a fibre optic termination box, it then loops onto what I assume is an Openreach modem. I have connected the Ethernet cable between the modem/router as instructed, in readiness for the wifi going live today. According to my BT order, the phone line is to be activated on 'the existing fibre connection' so I had assumed I could plug the router into any of the phone points around the house?

The modem/router are both currently sited in a cupboard under the stairs at the rear of the house, but I'd like to place the router in a more central position. I don't really want to be routing additional cables around a brand new house.
 
Picture of fibre setup attached. If anyone can see a way of getting the router (out of pic, on floor under moden) into the main body of the house it would be appreciated.
 

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Just buy a longer ethernet cable and connect it to the open reach modem. You can realistically situate the router 100M away from the modem with a cat5e cable.
 
Just buy a longer ethernet cable and connect it to the open reach modem. You can realistically situate the router 100M away from the modem with a cat5e cable.
Cheers. This is the message I seem to be getting. I asked an engineer at work who used to design fibre networks for BT and got a similar answer. He also said I could probably leave the router where it was and get a perfectly acceptable signal.

I was reluctant to run cables around a new house, but I might get myself along to Maplin and pick up a white flat cable, as I think I should be able to run that without it being seen.
 
You shouldn't use "flat/ribbon" type cables like you get for phone extensions if you want to convey ethernet. You need UTP - the "T" means "twisted" which means the wires inside the cable are paired up and twisted around each other. The twists help reject interference. The "cat" describes various standards of UTP cable. cat5e is good enough for Gigabit Ethernet.

You can get so called "flat" UTP but it's flatER, more like a lozenge shape that the usual cylinder - it's different to cheap so called "telephone extension" cable which have straight (untwisted) conductors and won't be "cat" anything.
 
You shouldn't use "flat/ribbon" type cables like you get for phone extensions if you want to convey ethernet. You need UTP - the "T" means "twisted" which means the wires inside the cable are paired up and twisted around each other. The twists help reject interference. The "cat" describes various standards of UTP cable. cat5e is good enough for Gigabit Ethernet.

You can get so called "flat" UTP but it's flatER, more like a lozenge shape that the usual cylinder - it's different to cheap so called "telephone extension" cable which have straight (untwisted) conductors and won't be "cat" anything.

Cheers, I'll be sure to look for the UTP cat5e cables.
 
What price are you paying per month if you don't mind me asking?
Our new build has the same service but it's not currently connected to the network as I have just found out, so i was unable to get a price from bt
 
What price are you paying per month if you don't mind me asking?
Our new build has the same service but it's not currently connected to the network as I have just found out, so i was unable to get a price from bt

I believe we pay around £32/month. That's for 52MB broadband and phone line (which we don't actually use, but need for the broadband). There's some sort of discount in that price, but all the notes I took when I phoned are at work, so not sure of the exact percentage discount.

Ping test shows a consistent 52mbs download speed in all rooms in the house. My teenage son has no complaints re speed, so all is good [emoji106]

I also phoned Sky and talktalk to see if they could provide the service, but they can't as they rely on a final copper connection to the property.

I also had to constantly hassle the Openreach guys on site to connect us up!
 

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