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A mini island of FTTPoD in an FTTP sea

DIA 1G/1G circuit have here is provided by Focus Group (Virtual1) using EAD from Openreach. Really happy with all aspects of the service and install and the price is pretty decent.

I had a bad experience with 2Connect using Virgin tails so I would avoid them.
 
Thanks both! Daisy seemed to think there may be (subject to site survey) some excess charges involved up to a few thousand. The person seemed surprised there were any at all, saying we were a 2.1 area and they'd expect this with a 3. I have no idea what that means, but I can suspect from context. Tried a few others - some suggested no excess costs, but had much higher rates. Will have another go with some others on Monday, actual work got in the way!
 
If I was in your position I'd try 4G first, look on cellmapper.net to find the nearest mast(s), go close within line of sight to each of them and see what they can provide, then presuming you find one with good upload speed, buy a Poynting XPOL v3 (5G ready) and mount as high as possible (for good upload speed) facing it and a Huawei B525 4G router.

You could then setup a Pfsense box to load balance your connections either as backups or combined with firewall routing to tell it where you want traffic to go.

Even when downstream is congested on 4G you can usually get good upload speeds (20-50Mbps) with proper antenna placement.
 
Thanks! Before we moved I did do exactly that - we had SIMs for all four providers and tested them out. While EE is slightly faster, the acceptable use policy (based on our usage patterns) would end badly, so we opted for Three. Though when I was offered the 5G router, I didn't realise it didn't accept an external aerial - I thought I was being sensible by future proofing..!

We get about 30Mbit download and 5-10Mbit upload, so similar upload speeds to Starlink. It's possible with a bit of wandering around the house we could get more, but I'm not sure. There WAS a stronger signal when we were stalking the property pre-move as there's a cell tower 250m away, but Three has turned off that cell tower (we're connecting to two quite some distance away now) and it's just EE using it at present. I keep hoping Three will come back and it's just temporary!

At some point soon we will indeed be looking to get a box and do load balancing, as it's pretty much the only option left at this point beyond a leased line I think!
 
EE have a better AUP for business and don't complain if ordinary consumers buy a business sim if they expect to break the AUP for consumers, oddly its cheaper too. I load balance an EE 4g router and a Thee 4g router into a Draytek 2925 bought cheap off ebay.
 
Thanks! Hmmm, maybe I should play around with EE some more - I do get better upload just with my phone (EE) - 15-20Mbit in the garden. Presumably with a decent external aerial mounted up high, I would get better than this? The usual connection indoors to my local mast is band 20 (5Mhz) though there is a band 3 (20Mhz) pointing in slightly the wrong direction which is the one I think I caught from the garden. Also band 20 for Three (15Mhz) a few miles away.

Three have planning permission for a 5G mast just under 3km away but that sounds like it won't reach, especially as we're slightly higher than the top of the mast here.

Then we can look into load balancing with Starlink as the download for that is decent! Would be far less likely to hit any AUP threshold if we're load balancing as well.

Is it reasonable to think that we won't be excluded from FTTP forever - that at some point in (say) the next decade we would get it? Given it's not like we're up a mountain or anything, we're barely outside the M25!
 
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External antenna for 4G and 5G can perversely quite often be detrimental to signal received due to the losses involved on the cable and connectors. Playing around with the position of the router is probably more valuable initially. Maybe try the loft if you have one?
 
External antenna for 4G and 5G can perversely quite often be detrimental to signal received due to the losses involved on the cable and connectors. Playing around with the position of the router is probably more valuable initially. Maybe try the loft if you have one?
100%.

Ever wonder why two extremely popular, well known and reputable manufactures like Poynting and Panorama (other than both having names starting with P 😅) ever only ship their antennas with at most 5 metres of, let’s face it, quite thin and lossy coax?

Thicker coax would reduce losses quite substantially but punters would (a) object to the extra cost (b) complain that it’s too thick, inflexible and can’t fit through narrow openings. (c) any more than 5 metres and the antenna + cable starts to be a net “loser” rather than a “gainer” from a signal perspective. Quite the opposite generally of what one is hoping for.

Often or not, using an external antenna is tantamount to basically positioning the router where the antenna is situated - rather than any huge gains in signal. Not taking into account any differences in MIMO capability.
 
Three have planning permission for a 5G mast just under 3km away but that sounds like it won't reach, especially as we're slightly higher than the top of the mast here.
Being higher than the top of the mast might be a good thing. What matters most is the lie of the land in between. You could try the Ubiquiti tool here:
 
Then we can look into load balancing with Starlink as the download for that is decent!
Load balancing works best when the pings are similar between the different Wans, I get 40 to 60 ms on my 2 4G with EE slightly better than Three.. With the Draytek you can set the speeds of the WANS manually or leave it to the router which WAN to send the packets too, which will be more dynamic based on actual speeds at the time.
 
Thanks all! Lots of very useful info - much appreciated!

Something to consider about an external antenna then I guess - though it looks like (from doing a lot of wandering round the house) fortunately the best spots do seem to be by the window near where we currently have our main router. We did try the Three 4G in the loft when we first moved here, but it was no difference - however, I since discovered that it wasn't connecting to the mast I assumed it was!

I also discovered that the O2 SIM I have (via Virgin, included with our old package - weirdly they've not disconnected it yet) has around 20Mbit download but 35Mbit upload in the best spots. This is on the local band 20. I can't find the cell ID on Cell Mapper, but a search for the eNB suggests a tower elsewhere in town which shouldn't reach us (though the cell highlighted was last scanned in 2018 - could they have moved it or something?) Network Cell Info Lite - which says it can't find the tower - has it well into the green, by far the strongest signal locally (EE and Three are usually yellow) Tempted to use that instead of EE for uploads now. Interestingly EE also does not report a tower through Network Cell Info Lite, but I assume it's the local one. I feel I have a LOT to learn about mobile signals :-)

candlerb - my mistake, I meant the top of the mast was lower than our house - slip of the brain! We're uphill a bit, unfortunately. Though the Ubiquiti tool is very interesting - not seen that before.
 
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Just to update with a completely unexpected happy outcome!

Our upload speeds remained frustrating for work purposes, and I heard Starlink is introducing 250GB/month data caps (or pay a lot more) in France which was very concerning. Locally on forums people are talking about Openreach rolling out to the local town now they've covered the villages first, and realising they were basically not yet finished in the area, I decided I had to be cheeky and go for the long shot, the last ditch attempt. So without a lot of hope, I emailed the CEO, explaining everything, asking if he could at least find out what the actual "engineering reasons" were for excluding us.

I felt like I was in a parallel dimension or something, because he replied five minutes later, passing my case over to a very helpful person who confirmed just as quickly all I had been saying. She said she'd get the local engineers to report back in a few days on what they could do.

Just a few hours under a week later, I am 100% not exaggerating, we have a shiny new box in our house with a nice bit of fibre optic cable on the other end of it. We're just waiting on the database stuff to come through (hoping this part does not take too long!) then we can order from an ISP and they can do a remote switch on.

I am pretty much speechless, and overwhelmed with gratitude at everybody involved at Openreach who took the time to listen, help, and get us FTTP and in such an insanely quick time frame. The engineers were lovely, very friendly and helpful, and worked super hard. They cleared out some existing ducts (as expected, our copper was buried, but they found some ducts they could use) and even brought the fibre into the house for us to save more time.

I feel quite guilty as I never asked and certainly never expected this level of treatment (realistically I was just hoping to find out why we couldn't get FTTP!) but from what I've since heard, it sounds like we should not have been left out of the rollout in the first place - they don't know why we were. It passed through here in about May I think, just before we moved, which probably explains why they were so keen to sort it out especially as they're still very much in-area right now. It seems I picked the right time to flag our property up.

Apparently there are four other properties that can now get it too who were missed out along with us, and at least two of those (our neighbour, and a farm over the road) came out to ask the engineers if they could get it now. So maybe this has bought us some brownie points locally as recently new residents!

Anyway, hopefully in however-long-it-takes-for-the-database-stuff-to-kick-in, we'll be sorted!

Meanwhile my entire world view about large corporations and response times for significant infrastructure work has been blown to pieces. Believe me, due in part to this forum, I know how incredibly lucky we are!
 
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