London ISP CommunityFibre Discount 3Gbps FTTP Plan to £50 | Hacker News Reader

London ISP CommunityFibre Discount 3Gbps FTTP Plan to £50

ispreview.co.uk

71 pointsMikeAshley17869 comments

CommunityFibre, the ISP that works of some of the most un-necessarily aggressive marketing I've ever seen.

Experience round some of my friends in their catchment area was their reps will attempt endless rounds of doorstop selling, on top of that they will then bombard you with marketing letters (which are carefully addressed "To the occupier" so as to avoid being caught by anti-junk legislation). I've seen the junk, and I've been round people's houses when the greasy sales reps have knocked on the door touting their wares.

If you call them or write to them to ask them to stop, they ignore it and continue.

That alone would put me off Community Fibre for life. I have a policy of not dealing with spammers.

I would also encourage people to read the small print.

More than likely that the door to door sales aren't employed directly with CF and on commission only so the competition for sales will be fierce. There's another ISP in London that does the same thing I think it might have been Hyperoptic.

> I think it might have been Hyperoptic.

Probably.

I was once called in as a consultant to sit-in on a meeting between Hyperoptic reps and a bunch of building owners they were trying to "sell" to.

It was clear the Hyperoptic guys had a well-rehearsed pitch which was fine tuned to their target audience (i.e. non-techie building management committees).

They had well rehearsed answers to the predictable questions thrown up by building management.

However they struggled with or rather tried to bluff and bluster they way out of technical questions.

For example, when I asked them how they could justify using CAT5e for the "last-mile" (i.e. basement area to residents flats), because for those residents on the upper floors this would easily exceed the CAT5e standards limits. (Their proposal was all their active kit was to be in the basement, so no fibre trunks between switches or anything like that).

So you can appreciate why I'm not a fan of the way these companies tend to operate.

There's something really interesting happing in the UK at the moment. We are awash with PE funded FTTP (fiber to the premises) startups, in my town there're two pulling their fibre through the BT ducts and putting small boxes on the top of telegraph polls. We can now get 1gb finer for under £40/month.

It's basically a repeat of the 90s / early 00s, their exit strategy is clearly for a larger player to build a conglomerate out of all of them, just as happed with [lost of small cable tv companies] -> NTL & Telewest -> Virgin Media.

I assume CommunityFibre is one of these PE funded startups, the larger their user base the larger the exit for the funders.

So private companies get to freeload the ducting and telegraph poles that were funded by the public? Are they even going to contribute to maintenance? What happens when the ducts fill up? This sounds corrupt as hell.

No, it’s way more complex than that. In the UK, the public phone network was privatised in the 80s and 90s; the assets are owned by the private company Openreach, with various regulatory requirements to provide access to the network to third-party operators. Providing access to that network is a chargeable service.

So yes, third-party operators contribute to installation and maintenance cost.

> I assume CommunityFibre is one of these PE funded startups

IIRC their startup money came out of the Railways Pension Fund, however the pension fund subsequently sold out to PE, so yes, at this point in time you are correct. ;-)

This is pretty good. They provide real fibre with IPv6 as well.

The only downside is the “router” they insist on is a Linksys Velop mesh Wi-Fi system that only has 2 Ethernet ports (one would be used as WAN port) and heavily insists on an app (and no doubt a “privacy” policy and an online account) to configure it so I’d really recommend you bring your own equipment.

I'm tempted to switch. I'm on Hyperoptic 1Gbps plan but I only got ~600Gbps some time lower. I noticed the switch for the whole building is only rated to 1Gbps. Their marketing is a lie. Any emails to their support got replied by "bots" with useless responses.

Does the switch have higher speed uplink ports? It's possible to have a switch with multiple 1G ports and two 10G ports for the uplink.

Yep indeed, the "support" when it comes to consumer-grade ISPs is either bots or monkeys and I'm not sure which one is preferable. The best solution is to never get into a contract with any so you can easily switch away if it turns out to be crap (and the extra leverage you have when you can just walk away is often helpful). As a backup plan, a real Openreach leased line is the gold standard and comes with real SLAs and actual network engineers on the support side of things - I ended up getting one when Virgin Media monkeys lied to me a bit too many times, purely as a middle finger to them even though it was significantly more expensive (but it never went down during the entire pandemic, unlike many consumer ISPs who got overloaded early on).

As far as Community Fibre goes, I don't know what the switch gear is. I saw a passive patch panel on the roof of my old building where all the fibers from the individual apartments go into, beyond that I'm not sure whether it all gets flattened down to 1Gbps or something more meaty. However in all the speed tests I've done I got 800Mbps symmetric on average. If I still was at the property I'd probably get the 3Gbps one but that's out of my hands now and the new occupiers are more than satisfied with 1Gbps (they only use it on Wi-Fi so they're getting half of that at best anyways).

Can't speak for their customer service, but one thing to note is that the installers are clueless. They had no backup plan when I told them "no" when they wanted me to install an mobile app (and most likely create an account) to configure their Linksys Velop mesh Wi-Fi system (which acts as a router) and they wouldn't leave without configuring it - I eventually saw a "continue without app" link (in tiny print) on the web UI of the router and ended up configuring it that way.

> As far as Community Fibre goes, I don't know what the switch gear is. I saw a passive patch panel on the roof of my old building where all the fibers from the individual apartments go into, beyond that I'm not sure whether it all gets flattened down to 1Gbps or something more meaty.

Community Fibre installs as XGPON.

So it all passive and gets aggregated down in building basements.

And yes, they are very cagey when you ask them about contention or similar. I suspect they run things on the "hot" side.

I find it deeply, deeply annoying when companies that are very obviously not owned by the "community" use the term in their name. I looked thinking they might be a cooperative and it appears they are not.

Not totally on topic I realise, but does anyone else find this misleading?

> Not totally on topic I realise, but does anyone else find this misleading?

With Community Fibre it is actually possibly even more misleading because Openreach use the terminology "Fibre Community Partnership" and "Community funded Fibre"[1].

Although the order of the words are different, given the target market of Community Fibre (i.e. non-techie residential) I would suggest there is a lot of scope for confusion between the two.

[1] https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/fibre-community-pa...

Currently on their 1Gbps package and it's been pretty good - apart from a couple of weeks ago when they remotely disabled the ethernet ports on the router and threw everything internally networked into chaos.

I had the same issue, this time didn't really liked the technician blamed it on me. It's a one off though, any other contact with them has been good and their service is good as well. Much happier with them than virgin media

Do they offer email hosting?

> Do they offer email hosting?

Why would anyone still want to tie their email hosting to their ISP ? You change ISP, you move house and your email is at risk.

Protonmail, Tutanota or even, god forbid, Gmail. That's where you should be these days, not relying on your ISP to provide email hosting.

Or do you mean self-hosting ? i.e. allow port 25 ? Residential ISPs that allow that these days are few and far between.

Is it difficult to use your own equipment over there? I guess what I’m asking is doesn’t the NTU simply spit out an ipv4/v6 address and it’s up to you how you route it? This is how fttp works here in Australia (if you’re as lucky as me and live in an area serviced with fttp that is)

They supply an NTU that they plug the fibre into and then, yeah, you plug whatever into it or use the WIFI.

(my best guess for why they turned off the ports is they just did a big swap-out of the original NTU for a new NTU + WIFI base and -maybe- did an over-exuberant reconfiguration that caught people still on the old NTUs like us.)

In France there are 8Gbps offering for around 50€ (cheaper the first year(s), depending on whatever their current promotion is)

What provider? Which region?

It's available in dense cities of the Paris areas at least, probably in other big cities. The providers are Free (offer "Box Delta") and SFR (offer "Box 8x").

The two others, Orange and Bouygues, offer "only" 2Gbps max.

It's 3 Gbps down and up and the router has a SFP+ 10 Gbit/s port (AFAICT), so that's good. But it's "only" 50 GBP for 24 months, then it's the full 99 GBP (about 116 EUR).

I'm in France atm and received my fibre router a few days ago (but it's not installed yet): next week the technician should bring the FTTH and then we should be able to plug it in the router. I'll be enjoying 2 Gbps/down and 600 Mbit/s up. The router OTOH shall not offer a 10 Gbit/s SPF+ port so I'll be "stuck" a 1 Gbit/s on my desktops (I don't think the router offers 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet ports). Cost is 72 EUR / month.

Crossing fingers because it's a house in the middle of nowhere and it's been years they promised fiber was coming. I'll believe it when I'll see it.

It'd be a big upgrade compared to the 50 Mbits/ down // 6 MBits/up I'm currently using.

(as a sidenote France had a plan for 100% fiber coverage for 2022 but things got delayed a bit due to covid and due to the issue of training enough technicians to install the fiber)

Though g.network is slower, it is £22/month for 150Mbps. I was comparing ISPs in London last year. https://www.g.network/. And £50/month for 900Mbps

I don't use any of them now, because my new building doesn't support either.

Isnt that just on openreach FTTP

That’s an amazing offer.

I live in Austria in a new (5 years old) flat an have fibre in it. So Speed would be unlimited in theory but my provider, which is A1 (biggest provider in Austria, was state owned in the past) only delivers 300/30 Mbit.

Everything other is „business“ level. The most they offer is 700/80 Mbit for 180€ per month with 24 month minimum.

I’ve got the 1Gb service from them and I have to say it’s exactly what I want - for £50 a month they just pipe a full native IPv6 connection with gigabit up and down into an XGS-GPON terminal that I can plug whatever I want into, and then send me a bill. It does exactly what it says and there is no other nonsense to deal with.

And here I am with 40 down and 16 up on the south coast costing £50/month.

One day we will have fibre…

Hey Mark! Same here up to now but Trooli are just starting to install cable in our area. Having looked at their service, T&Cs and reviews I'm going to wait and see as none inspire confidence, but seeing as Virgin missed out our area as "not commercially viable" and BT have no plans for FTTP then I doubt I'll have any other options.

I found https://bidb.uk/ tonight which is useful to see what's going on...

Thank you for this, I have been searching for something like bidb for months. We're moving soon and this is the exact data I need. Up until tonight I'd just been googling local providers and trying to find their maps.

How many people is this available to? As a tourist, my experience with London's local wifi was trash when I visited a month ago. Coffee shops and my hotel were dog slow. You'd think that someone would see the value of fast wifi to all of the people working remote, especially in a major city. I was only there for a few days, but I would have visited the same place multiple times had I found one with a fast connection.

> How many people is this available to?

I have Community fibre 1GB. I got it soon after it became available in my area. So it's not available to everyone. You can find a map and postcode checker here: https://fairinternetreport.com/Community-Fibre

> my experience with London's local wifi was trash

Community fibre, in my case, is residential wired internet. The wire is an optic fibre, it's in the name. Yes they supply a router for a Wifi AP and some ethernet ports but fundamentally, they supply the wires, the WiFi is not their domain.

IDK if they supply internet to small businesses such as "Coffee shops and hotels" but quite often the nature of the business means that configuring it well isn't a high priority.

It could also be a decision to have poor WiFi in a cafe.

The cafe might prefer several customers, to one who sits for two hours with one drink.

(Your first question is answered in the first line of the article.)

Also I don't think many people are still that bothered by WiFi, when a £30 data plan probably gets you as much as you need (I never hit the cap on an £8 plan, but I don't work away from home/office, so I rarely use much data). If it's for work, it's a minor cost for a good connection.

Snooping around for free WiFi feels like a fairly noughties kind of an activity.

Finding sockets: now that's the real trick if you don't have a laptop with a big and/or hotswappable battery or very good power management.

Local Wi-Fi has gone to shit everywhere because everybody has significantly faster and more reliable data on their phones. I haven’t used a public hotspot in half a decade.

Same. I'm to the point now I don't even use wifi at home or my family/friends house. I only pay for 100mbit/s at home (my local ISP charges too much for anything faster) which is the same or less than what I typically get on my phone so I see little reason to bother with wifi at all.

Same for me. I never use wi-fi for my mobile. I've got enough data on my tarrif, the speeds are pretty good and I really dont trust the wifi much.

Mobile data can get quite congested in London. 5G helps a bit but it's still not a perfect experience. Outside of London, local Wifi can still be very useful as there are still plenty of not-spots.

Is there 5G yet in the stations and tunnels of the London Underground?

> Is there 5G yet in the stations and tunnels of the London Underground?

By the end of 2024, I believe.

London Underground were slow adopters, especially in tunnels, because for a long time they (rightly or wrongly) claimed "security" as a reason not to do it.

They also don't have the room in the tunnels

Why charge 100 quid for a fast connection when you can charge 100 quid for a slow one?

Coffee shops and hotels do not generally invest in better internet than is necessary to run their card readers and meet brand guidelines. If you want fast wifi for work, you can pay for it in London quite easily - it's called hotdesking.

> How many people is this available to?

Community Fibre are one of those cherry-picking networks (same as Hyperoptic and others of their ilk).

They only go for the low-hanging fruit, i.e. large residential blocks in BT monopoly areas where BT have not yet rolled out fibre.

Sometimes they'll stray from that, but mostly that's how those companies operate.

HyperOptic are annoying in that respect, but Community Fibre are at least arriving in my area and I have had some marketing from them.

I currently have an OpenReach 900/100 connection so I'm not in much of a hurry but CF do seem to be a lot better than HyperOptic

What is FTTP? How does it differ from FTTH?

Fiber to the pole.

It's copper from the telephone pole to your home. It's cheaper to implement and gives you less overprovisioning.

Fiber To The Premises. Meaning the fibre optic cable comes right to your home as opposed to FTTC Fibre To The Cabinet which means only as far as the telephone cabinet and then copper to you. It is unfortunate that fibre has been used so widely as a marketing term it's now often nearly impossible to tell what technology is actually being advertised.

No, this is Fibre to the Premises, IE actual fibre all the way to your house.

No, that's FTTC (Fiber to the Curb)

Fibre to the Cabinet, in the UK

Fibre to the premises, the same as FTTH

Fibre to the premesis. For a large building, the fibre terminates in the basement and further distribution is with ethernet.

(But see also the first paragraph of the article.)

G.fast is common in older blocks where rewiring with ethernet or fiber isn't feasible.

Others have given the technical differences.

The practical differences are that FTTP is normally fibre provided by openreach. Openreach being the dominant heavily regulated monopoly. They provide the link, and ISPs resell over the top.

FTTH is normally fibre provided by the same company as the ISP, and so has a much smaller area of coverage.

No: FTTP and FTTH are the same thing. It’s just that in the case of FTTH the Premises in FTT”P” is a Home. It’s a colloquial difference and doesn’t represent any difference in technology or provision.

Perhaps I should have been clearer, FTTP is what openreach calls running a fibre to your house, FTTH is what most over companies call it.

As others have said, it just distinguishes between "Premises" and "Home". They're the same. They differ from FTTN (Node) or in the UK apparently FTTC (Cabinet) which is one of the boxes outside "near" your home or office, much like DSL works.

They're not (always) the same, a distinction can be drawn in the case if blocks of flats (and perhaps terraces, especially where council/mgmt company managed?) whereby FTTP means it's fibre to the block and copper to the flats. FTTH in such cases would afaik be pretty unusual, but hypothetically would mean that each flat has it own fibre termination.

FTTP aka FTTB (Building). The nomenclature's all a bit ridiculous IMO.

Meanwhile, in Gilroy (southern end of Silicon Valley), my choices are massively-oversubscribed cable (good luck getting usable speeds during Netflix-O'Clock, and straight-up outages are common) or, finally, StarLink, even though I live in town, in a suburban area. I can't help but shake my head at how far behind we are at times.

In Romania 10Gbs FTTH costs about €10.

Scales with income

30€, median income adjusted to UK, then.

This is a London ISP

Adjusted for purchasing power it is still cheaper.

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