YouFibre Review

sebbelcher

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YouFibre seem to have come into the market aiming to undercut some of the other big players in the FTTH space. Their offerings are simple and generously priced. They seem to make this possible by cutting cost in other areas, like using CGNAT and not having any form of online account management. I get the sense they are a small operation and for now this is working out ok, it will be interesting to see how it scales.

Installation Experience

My installation, like many others, was severely delayed from the original date YouFibre quoted when they started marketing and taking pre-orders in my area. Originally I was told I could be connected in September 2021 but it took until March 2022 for them to actually get my street connected. That said, my installation appointment was made within 2 weeks of the fibre in my street being activated, so the issue is with the wider infra build rather than their installation team.

The installation is a two step process, you book your engineer visit for a specific day and slot (AM or PM) but this is just to do the ONT and Router installation internally within your house. Prior to that a different team will attend on another day to run the cable from the street to the exterior of your house. For my installation they did this by simply going up an existing telegraph pole and running an cable through the air to the eaves of my home, it took less than 30 mins. There is a slight issue with the process in that you don't get any notice of when the 'external team' is attending to do the outdoor cabling, they say this is because typically they don't need the customer to be there to complete the external cabling, but this is not always true and there are issues with leaving them to their own devices. For my property, it's behind a locked security gate which separates the street from the house, on the day the external team came they couldn't get in and one of them jumped the gate to knock on my door (I don't know if this is because they didn't have my phone number, but it was odd). Luckily, I was in the house and was able to open the gate so they could bring their van and tools in, if I was out, I'm not sure they would have been able to complete the job and this could have delayed my installation. The second issue with this is that they want to do the quickest job possible, which may not be the best thing for your home. When I popped out to see their progress, they were just starting to run the cable down the outside of my house, and I had to stop them, they were running black cable with black cable clips right down the middle of the front wall of my white rendered house, it looked awful. Thankfully they had no issue, when asked, to run the cable down the side of the house instead, however if I was not there, I suspect they'd have gone ahead and nailed the cable right down the front of my house and I'd have been furious when I returned. So my advice here would be to contact YouFibre and see if you can get the date of the 'external team' attending, or if this is not possible, leave them instructions of where you want the cable to be run.

The second part of the installation occurs on the date you booked. The engineer runs the fibre from the exterior wall box that the external team install, through your wall, to the location of the ONT internally, which needs to be close to a plug socket. The engineer then activates and tests the ONT and fibre, before finally plugging in the Eero router. You then have to setup the Eero router using an app on your phone which the engineer will guide you through. Annoyingly the engineer will insist on you doing this even if you don't want to use the Eero unit as they are contractually required to do some speed tests which require functionality on the Eero, thankfully it only takes a few minutes. Once that is done, the engineer is also contractually obliged to go around your house taking signal measurements in various rooms. If any rooms are beyond acceptable signal range the engineer will deploy another Eero mesh device to boost the signal. This all takes about an hour.


Speed and Service

Speed was bang-on from day one, despite the engineer stating it may take a few days for the ONT to find the right signal levels. Once my own router was plugged in I did several tests on my YouFibre 500 service using DSLReports and got close to 500mb up and down with A+ on buffer bloat. As noted in the previous post, I was surprised to find my router was not getting a public IP address, at first I wondered if somehow the ONT was doing some sort of NAT, before the realised the address range I was getting was in fact CGNAT. Upon talking to the support team, it transpires that the standard package is a CGNAT based package and you only get an externally routable IP address if you add the 'static IP' option. I don't actually need a static IP, but this is the only way, with YouFibre, to get a publicly routable IP on your router WAN interface. Aside from some provisioning issues, reliability has so far been fine, but only time will truly tell on this front.


Support

Support is via chat, email or phone. The response times are very good and I've never had to wait longer than 2 mins on the chat and 5 mins on the phone. Where it falls down a little is on case management. The L1 support team seem to have just one way to resolve network issues, which is to 'reprovision' the service. As far as I can tell, this is an automated script that re-applies the default settings to their Optical Line Terminal and routers for your ONT, in fairness, this did work to fix the issue I has, kind of (see later). Anything beyond this requires a ticket into their 'Technical Team' and suddenly your case disappears into the ether as they cannot (supposedly) talk to the Technical Team directly so you have to wait for the technical team to pick up the ticket and work it. The L1 team on two occasions promised to follow-up when they heard back from the technical team, but did not, and I had to contact them again to get an update. There does seem to be an issue with the L1 team's reprovisioning script however, in that it applies the default service settings to the account, this means if you have a static IP, you suddenly lose it when the service is reprovisioned and you go back onto CGNAT, it then takes another ticket to the 'Technical Team' to get the static IP reinstated. For this reason, if you have a static IP, I would ensure you let the support team know if they suggest reprovisioning.
 
Nice review, thanks for the info.
Do you mind if I ask what the monthly cost is and how long is the contract for?
 
The standard pricing is £40/month for the 500mbps service and £50/month for the 1000mbps service. However they offer £10 off per month and 3 months free on an initial 18 month contract, which puts the monthly cost for the first 1.5 years at £25/month for 500mbps and £33/month for 1000mbps.

Plus free installation and setup and free Eero Mesh system.
 
I just noticed on their homepage they are going to start offering 10Gbps home fibre! I've enquired but they don't have pricing for it yet.

Not fast enough?​

Speak to one of our team about getting 10,000 Mbps for your home on 0800 270 0100​

 
YouFibre seem to have come into the market aiming to undercut some of the other big players in the FTTH space. Their offerings are simple and generously priced. They seem to make this possible by cutting cost in other areas, like using CGNAT and not having any form of online account management. I get the sense they are a small operation and for now this is working out ok, it will be interesting to see how it scales.

Installation Experience

My installation, like many others, was severely delayed from the original date YouFibre quoted when they started marketing and taking pre-orders in my area. Originally I was told I could be connected in September 2021 but it took until March 2022 for them to actually get my street connected. That said, my installation appointment was made within 2 weeks of the fibre in my street being activated, so the issue is with the wider infra build rather than their installation team.

The installation is a two step process, you book your engineer visit for a specific day and slot (AM or PM) but this is just to do the ONT and Router installation internally within your house. Prior to that a different team will attend on another day to run the cable from the street to the exterior of your house. For my installation they did this by simply going up an existing telegraph pole and running an cable through the air to the eaves of my home, it took less than 30 mins. There is a slight issue with the process in that you don't get any notice of when the 'external team' is attending to do the outdoor cabling, they say this is because typically they don't need the customer to be there to complete the external cabling, but this is not always true and there are issues with leaving them to their own devices. For my property, it's behind a locked security gate which separates the street from the house, on the day the external team came they couldn't get in and one of them jumped the gate to knock on my door (I don't know if this is because they didn't have my phone number, but it was odd). Luckily, I was in the house and was able to open the gate so they could bring their van and tools in, if I was out, I'm not sure they would have been able to complete the job and this could have delayed my installation. The second issue with this is that they want to do the quickest job possible, which may not be the best thing for your home. When I popped out to see their progress, they were just starting to run the cable down the outside of my house, and I had to stop them, they were running black cable with black cable clips right down the middle of the front wall of my white rendered house, it looked awful. Thankfully they had no issue, when asked, to run the cable down the side of the house instead, however if I was not there, I suspect they'd have gone ahead and nailed the cable right down the front of my house and I'd have been furious when I returned. So my advice here would be to contact YouFibre and see if you can get the date of the 'external team' attending, or if this is not possible, leave them instructions of where you want the cable to be run.

The second part of the installation occurs on the date you booked. The engineer runs the fibre from the exterior wall box that the external team install, through your wall, to the location of the ONT internally, which needs to be close to a plug socket. The engineer then activates and tests the ONT and fibre, before finally plugging in the Eero router. You then have to setup the Eero router using an app on your phone which the engineer will guide you through. Annoyingly the engineer will insist on you doing this even if you don't want to use the Eero unit as they are contractually required to do some speed tests which require functionality on the Eero, thankfully it only takes a few minutes. Once that is done, the engineer is also contractually obliged to go around your house taking signal measurements in various rooms. If any rooms are beyond acceptable signal range the engineer will deploy another Eero mesh device to boost the signal. This all takes about an hour.


Speed and Service

Speed was bang-on from day one, despite the engineer stating it may take a few days for the ONT to find the right signal levels. Once my own router was plugged in I did several tests on my YouFibre 500 service using DSLReports and got close to 500mb up and down with A+ on buffer bloat. As noted in the previous post, I was surprised to find my router was not getting a public IP address, at first I wondered if somehow the ONT was doing some sort of NAT, before the realised the address range I was getting was in fact CGNAT. Upon talking to the support team, it transpires that the standard package is a CGNAT based package and you only get an externally routable IP address if you add the 'static IP' option. I don't actually need a static IP, but this is the only way, with YouFibre, to get a publicly routable IP on your router WAN interface. Aside from some provisioning issues, reliability has so far been fine, but only time will truly tell on this front.


Support

Support is via chat, email or phone. The response times are very good and I've never had to wait longer than 2 mins on the chat and 5 mins on the phone. Where it falls down a little is on case management. The L1 support team seem to have just one way to resolve network issues, which is to 'reprovision' the service. As far as I can tell, this is an automated script that re-applies the default settings to their Optical Line Terminal and routers for your ONT, in fairness, this did work to fix the issue I has, kind of (see later). Anything beyond this requires a ticket into their 'Technical Team' and suddenly your case disappears into the ether as they cannot (supposedly) talk to the Technical Team directly so you have to wait for the technical team to pick up the ticket and work it. The L1 team on two occasions promised to follow-up when they heard back from the technical team, but did not, and I had to contact them again to get an update. There does seem to be an issue with the L1 team's reprovisioning script however, in that it applies the default service settings to the account, this means if you have a static IP, you suddenly lose it when the service is reprovisioned and you go back onto CGNAT, it then takes another ticket to the 'Technical Team' to get the static IP reinstated. For this reason, if you have a static IP, I would ensure you let the support team know if they suggest reprovisioning.
Nice review, they have been hooking up their network in my street for the last few weeks and had one of their representatives knock on my door today,
I'm still on contract with virgin for another 9 months so they are giving me their 1gig up and down for free 9months and then £25pm onwards.

Install date is the 15th this month will let you guys know how it goes :)
 

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