London Broadband ISP Community Fibre Launch Fibre to your Room Installs
Internet provider and network builder CommunityFibre, which has deployed their 5Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 1.342 million homes (inc. 185k businesses within 200 metres of their network) – mostly in London, has today launched a new installation option – “Fibre to your Room“.
The provider, which is currently being backed by funding of c.£1bn and has connected over 400,000 customers, said that their new Fibre to your Room service allows customers to choose the optimal location for their fibre broadband installation for maximum performance in any room of their property, such as in the study.
Once agreed, CommunityFibre’s engineers will then “neatly and discreetly” install fibre cables to help unlock speeds for more devices to game, work and stream. The tidy, bespoke engineer installation is available for all new and existing customers, on all broadband packages and contract lengths, at a one-off £75 fee.
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The provider added that they will deploy up to 40 metres of full fibre cable from the point of entry to reach your chosen location, which should be enough for most regular homes. But CF does say that “there may well be internal drilling (with a pencil-sized hole) if required to go from one room to another. Any internal holes will be filled/fire stopped, as with the externally drilled hole. Garden rooms, garages, or outbuildings not attached to the main building will not be eligible for installation.”
In fairness, most network operators will allow you to choose where to position the ONT and thus router on the day of installation (with some restrictions), but it sounds like this approach is a bit more flexible and probably akin to the premium installation option on some other networks.
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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Saves you having to run ethernet cables through to the ONT, I suppose – but ultimately the same amount of work / disruption / hole drilling. Do people think it will actually make their network “faster”? Only if they have an insane 8Gbps fibre connection and a mere 2.5Gbps-capable internal network, I suppose. Fibre to the 10Gbps SFP port in my machine!
I’ve seen plenty of cases where the customer was unhappy with where the engineer installed the ONT. I’ve seen customers go so far as refuse installations based on proposed ONT location. So hopefully this option solves for that.
I just hope Community Fibre and their engineers don’t abuse this – “I’ve just going to install your ONT in your shower cubicle, and if you want it somewhere else, that’ll be £75 please”.
In London you only have one room, so it was easy to sell this as it’s no change to a normal install.
Properties in London are tiny, I cant imagine this having a high takeup
This does make sense in several cases:
Availability of power sockets for ONT/Router may not be ideal for the most straightforward entry point
The entry point may not locate the router in the best place for wider coverage of the house (not everyone wants to deploy mesh boosters which take more power and sockets elsewhere in the house)
And some people do prefer to connect their main (work) computer or gaming rig to the router via ethernet cable instead of Wifi
They could focus on upgrading their poor box broadband areas to match the quality of their community fibre regions. That would be much better than offering this new service, in my opinion. I’m sure some customers will be interested, but I doubt there will be many.
The complaint is usually the one wifi point at the front of the house doesn’t reach the office at the back of the house or the garden office. Bending the incoming fibre all over the house could lead to light issues.You can’t beat a good cat6a back haul mesh set up for whole house coverage.
With London being so pact, I’m not too sure this will get much take-up (at least honestly). When we had ours installed, I just asked the engineers to route the fibre around the front of the building instead of the back, so the ONT would be in the front room rather than the bedroom. Didn’t seem too much hassle for them!