Ben's Talk3G Blog

It happened.

Friday 28th October was the eventual glorious day when the etherflow was provisioned by my ISP Spitfire, following a 'fit and test' by Openreach on the 26th. The gear they've installed is rather nice; just a single fibre is used these days for transmit and receive, with 3 spares, and the fibre modem, or "BT NTE", has dual power supplies for redundancy and 21CN (21st Century Network) branding. It supports redundant fibre inputs, but the spare isn't being used in my case. A 1U box coils spare fibre length and handles the conversion from white internal tubing to bright orange 'tail', connecting to another 1U box which is the NTE itself. An ethernet cable between that and my router completes the setup, though I note that this NTE actually has a fibre port for the customer should they want it. Cool. Makes the NTE at the office look rather ancient.

The fibre was originally invoiced on 24th December 2010. Over the course of some 11 months, Openreach closed roads (and dug them up), slung cables over electricity poles (after obtaining way leave agreements), and upgraded backhaul in order to reach me. Each duct blockage was a 30-day turnaround process of acquiring permission from the council and booking up contractors to do more digging. Just when it seemed I was over the final hurdle, a new collapse in the duct running under my own front lawn resulted in that having to be dug up, too.

One obvious thing of note. BT, well, Openreach ducts aren't in very good condition. There's a massive amount of duct repair work going on around Canterbury at the moment as BT try to prepare for FTTC, which serves as yet more evidence that the ductwork has been allowed to fall into disrepair. By contrast, getting my cable hung on the electricity poles happened rather quickly, though I appreciate this is far from ideal and may result in an increased risk of breakage at some point in the future.

The first thing I wanted to do was move Vodafone Sure Signal from the miserly 256kbps ADSL and enjoy half-decent phone service at home for the first time in over two years. But it doesn't work. Just won't connect. It seems that perhaps Vodafone only allow certain IP ranges of UK ISPs they're familiar with, or something to do with the connection technology is hampering its attempts to hook up, but I'm liaising with Vodafone's eforum and getting nowhere fast. Hopefully I'll get it sorted, but, as it happens, now the only thing plugged into the ADSL is the Sure Signal it's actually performing much better. Previously a few other devices that were latency sensitive were using it (some things just don't work over satellite), but any encroachment on the tiny amount of bandwidth would pretty much kill Sure Signal, and any sort of usage of it like a call, on the spot. Very infuriating I can assure you.

After that initial stumbling block everything else has been dreamlike. I'm pulling a full 10MB in both directions. The Playstation has been hooked up for the first time ever. The XBox will now actually be usable for COD. I'd tried COD a few times previously for private games of Zombies, but only one audio channel could be used at a time, which made communicating hard, and something didn't seem 'quite right'. It was only when we played some of the other maps that we realised characters on our connection were a good few seconds behind everyone else, jumping from one place to the next. And that was on the (pathetic) ADSL - the Satellite was just a no-go. Tell you what, waiting for XBox updates on that ADSL connection was severely unpleasant.

Oh, I've finally been able to update the Macs to Lion and do various other bits of software and firmware. Seems a few previous Apple TV updates must've failed, because it updated itself twice more once on the fibre. No surprise there, really, not a single firmware update via iTunes ever worked while I was on satellite, I had to use a download manager and find the URLs myself. With that all updated, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about re: The Only Way Is Essex, so I bought season 1 on iTunes and started watching on Apple TV immediately. Siri works on my 4S now. Uploading pictures to Facebook is actually possible. A million other little things are infinitely quicker and easier.

To conclude, it's rather life changing. It's going to take me a while to 'get used to' having proper Internet access at home again. I've become very accustomed to deferring things I once would have been able to do at home until I get into the office, and stopped doing a number of things I used to enjoy, like PKR and World of Warcraft, entirely. I'm already finding my old MacBook Air just isn't sufficient anymore, because now I'm not limited to pretty much just being able to check my email. It all feels like a very stark contrast, and a reminder of just how important the nationwide rollout of fibre for Internet access truly is if the UK is to remain, or become, depending on your viewpoint, a global technology leader for the future.