London ISP Community Fibre Deploy New Linksys WiFi 7 Broadband Routers
Alternative broadband ISP CommunityFibre, which has invested c.£1bn to deploy a 5Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across 1.342 million UK homes (inc. 185k businesses within 200 metres of their network) – mostly in London, have today announced that new customers on their fastest 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps package will now get a WiFi 7 capable Linksys router.
The official announcement doesn’t clarify exactly which model(s) the provider has chosen to bundle, but it appears to be the Linksys SPNM62CF. This is a tri-band (BE11000) router with 2 x 2.5Gbps LAN ports and 2 x 10Gbps LAN ports (one also does WAN). The device also features a USB-C port for power and another one for “charging“.
In addition, the provider has also thrown in a free £50 Xbox voucher (offer ends midnight on 22nd Dec 2025) with both of their 2.5Gbps (symmetric) speed full fibre broadband packages on a 24-month term, which are currently priced from £39 per month with free installation (prices increase annually by £2 each April).
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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https://support.linksys.com/kb/article/9034-en/
Linksys SPNM62CF Pinnacle 2.2 Mesh Router
SPNM Service Provider Network Model
CF usually means Community Fibre
Tri-band BE11000
One (10 Gbps) internet/WAN port
One (10 Gbps) ethernet/LAN port
Two (2.5 Gbps) ethernet/LAN ports
Well spotted.
How are Linksys routers these days in terms of the stock firmware, is it better than something like BT/Plusnet/EE hub firmware? I’m about to join community fibre 2.5Gbs Premium, I would be happy with 1Gbs but I don’t want to be on CGNAT.
Hardware is OK. Firmware is not as although it’s Linksys-maintained it’s locked down to CommunityFibre and you can’t manage much on the device eg change DNS.
Community Fibre seem to have a big disparity between marketing, legal and support teams who are all less than useless. For example they scream in T&Cs that you have no say about CGNAT on residential tariffs, must use their router (despite it being illegal to mandate anything beyond the demarcation point) and couldn’t answer any questions related to their network as support; only to troubleshoot the router.
But their NOC team seems to have a clue. CF’s network is solid, and a very standard vanilla setup which means it’s very predictable and operates exactly as you’d expect (very normally). They don’t seem to suffer much from aggregation issues. There’s never induced lag, no extreme buffering, and latencies are extremely good. Basically: exactly what you want.
You have no say what IP you get. Sometimes it’s CGNAT (and proper RFC 6598 compliant), sometimes an actual IP. It’s a bit random as I get a direct IP despite not being on a premium tariff.
That all said, there’s nothing stopping you using a 10GbE router and managing the WAN directly. IP will be issued via DHCP and seems to be sticky to the MAC address whatever you use and whether the IP is CGNAT or not.
Also their engineers are good and will happily give you their SFP+ ONT if you need it, so you can avoid any copper whatsoever.
The mesh is brilliant – I’ve have no dropouts. The only complaint I have is that the Linksys app is pretty poor. It get’s its knickers in a twist and want to reboot the network so that it can read your network – which is totally unnecessary. I use the direct link to the router and ignore the app. Just as an FYI – I have the !gb package and get 400-500 Mbps upstrais using the mesh. When I plug my laptop in to the mesh in my office I get 600 up and down!