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Best FTTP infrastructure

CityFibre is cheaper and has symmetrical speeds. Openreach is still a little more reliable however.

With that said, CityFibre isn't unreliable. But they do definitely have more downtime - Mostly isolated to routine downtime the early hours of the morning once every 6-10 weeks in my experience and 2 hours is the longest I have seen.
 
For downtime I have had one period of downtime (few minutes) confirmed to be CityFibre since I started using them around April/May of this year. So my experience is better than Koda's.

No experience on OR FTTP, but most of my outages in the xDSL days were either ISP or wholesaler related (bear in mind BT wholesale as an example isnt OR). Overall my downtime experience in this era of my broadband history wasnt great, far more than both cable broadband and CF FTTP.

Bear in mind CityFibre also run the national backhaul many of their partners use meaning they responsible for a bigger chunk of the packet transportation than OR is.

I cant comment on local loop quality, homes passed on PON split etc. there is some members here who seem to have knowledge of that though.
 
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So, who has the best FTTP infrastructure now, Openreach or CityFibre?
Depends on your definition of "best".

For coverage, Openreach is clearly the best by a mile. It also has the fastest roll-out rate, and a much larger choice of service providers you can order from.

At the physical layer, much of Openreach infrastructure is in proper 52mm ducts, buried to at least 30cm, repairable and long-lived. Much of Cityfibre's, especially in the early days, was in thin microduct buried a few centimetres below the surface, easily damaged and very difficult to repair. Nowadays I believe they more commonly piggy-back on Openreach ducts and poles, like other altnets.

In general, Cityfibre uses street cabinets, which are easy for engineers to access but potentially could be knocked down by traffic. Most of Openreach's FTTP infrastructure is safely underground.

At the optical layer: Openreach is currently GPON. Much of Cityfibre is also GPON although they are upgrading to XGS-PON.

Both have similar split ratios. Cityfibre have a lower market penetration, so you will likely be sharing the PON with fewer users, but those users might be heavier users on average. Cityfibre offer up to 2G/1G (i.e. almost the entire PON bandwidth can be taken by a single user) whereas Openreach offer up to 1.8G/120M. However in Cityfibre XGS-PON areas you can get 2.5G/2.5G with very little risk of contention.

On the network management/support side: anecdotally, Openreach has better processes for updating the availability database in the case of an error. I've seen reports of people who have a Cityfibre connection right outside their door but can't order it because "computer says no", and have been unable to get it corrected. In cases where the network has reached physical capacity (e.g. no more CBT ports), I'd say both networks are equally poor in dealing with this situation.

Putting all this together: if I could *only* have Openreach or Cityfibre outside my door, I'd choose Openreach (which is actually what I have). But if I had only Cityfibre, I wouldn't be unhappy either. In reality, most people who have the option of Cityfibre are also going to have Openreach available, and that's good, as it keeps downward pressure on the pricing and upwards pressure on the service quality.
 
At the physical layer, much of Openreach infrastructure is in proper 52mm ducts, buried to at least 30cm, repairable and long-lived. Much of Cityfibre's, especially in the early days, was in thin microduct buried a few centimetres below the surface, easily damaged and very difficult to repair. Nowadays I believe they more commonly piggy-back on Openreach ducts and poles, like other altnets.
This is one thing that does concern me. One of my neighbours in the next street over has had their CityFibre connection damaged because it was directly buried beneath the surface and got broken when the electrical cables had to undergo emergency repair.

They tried to apply for Vodafone broadband and had the installation cancelled on the day when they realised this. The order was canceled on them and it seems that’s that. It’s been over a month and no sign of any effort to repair it. I do wonder if as an existing customer they would repair my line or if I would just get released from contract and sent on my way if the same happened here. Especially when like you say they are asking for damage given the location and minimal protection.
 
One of my neighbours in the next street over has had their CityFibre connection damaged because it was directly buried beneath the surface and got broken when the electrical cables had to undergo emergency repair.
Direct-buried blown fibre micro-ducts: it's the modern-day equivalent of direct-buried copper telephone cabling by BT back in the day.

Sounded like a great idea to the bean counters but has subsequently been proven to be a very costly mistake.
 
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Looking at the specs, CityFibre should be the more advanced network, but then that is not difficult. Not that i want to use either.
 
I've been using FTTP through OR for give-or-take 4 years now and I honestly have seen zero downtime (probably jinxed it now!).

There is downtime just like on DSL - very occasionally at something like 2am the pfSense PPP session reconnects and takes like 30 seconds. Whether that is OR or my provider doing something like LNS rebalancing / updating L2TP servers or whatever it may be I do not know. But with different providers I have seen the same thing with VDSL2 and before that ADSL.

It's not unusual for the PPP session to be up for 70 to 100 days at a time.

So basically in my experience, even with VDSL2, extremely reliable via Openreach.
 
I think both of them are generally extremely reliable, thats one of the benefits of FTTP.

Things are of course as only as good as the weakest link, so if you pick a poor ISP, you might see frequent outages from the ISP side but that wouldnt be a FTTP infrastructure problem.
 
Openreach have a connector on your ONT, and one at the CBT, and then nothing back to the exchange where everything is kept in a nice warm building probably a couple of floors up.

CityFibre has a connector at your ONT, a connector in the box on your house outside, and a connector in the little green cabinet where your house is plugged into their network, which then runs back to a climate controlled modular container thing that lives at ground level.

CityFibre is more susceptible to a car being able to wipe your service out, though if your Openreach service is overhead then this is also a possibility. Your Openreach service could be impacted by another network doing PIA messing around and causing issues, which can't happen to CityFibre as they don't have a duct access product (if your CityFibre area is PIA then both networks are as physically vulnerable as each other).

I'm not sure anybody can state which is the better network. Anecdotally Openreach seem to be better at repairing things in a timely fashion, and there must be a reason why ISPs offer delayed repair compensation on Openreach and explicitly not on CityFibre, but really if you want reliability then you need to be thinking about a backup.
 
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Openreach have a connector on your ONT, and one at the CBT, and then nothing back to the exchange where everything is kept in a nice warm building probably a couple of floors up.

CityFibre has a connector at your ONT, a connector in the box on your house outside, and a connector in the little green cabinet where your house is plugged into their network, which then runs back to a climate controlled modular container thing that lives at ground level.

CityFibre is more susceptible to a car being able to wipe your service out, though if your Openreach service is overhead then this is also a possibility. Your Openreach service could be impacted by another network doing PIA messing around and causing issues, which can't happen to CityFibre as they don't have a duct access product (if your CityFibre area is PIA then both networks are as physically vulnerable as each other).

I'm not sure anybody can state which is the better network. Anecdotally Openreach seem to be better at repairing things in a timely fashion, and there must be a reason why ISPs offer delayed repair compensation on Openreach and explicitly not on CityFibre, but really if you want reliability then you need to be thinking about a backup.
I wondered why openreach spliced and city fibre used a connector on the outside box.

I use cityfibre and if their install around our local area and the install around my house is anything to go by I'd say Openreach are better.


I do have a 4G backup failover though.
 
It's cheaper to not have to give your techs fusion splicers and training in how to use them, they blow or push a pre-connectorised fibre through microduct, clip the plug housing on one end, plug it in and stash the excess in their version of the CSP.
 
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