TL;DR: Seriously way too long, don't read
Finally had CF installed today. Very exciting day. I was thinking about making another thread about it, but I think it makes sense to post here with the additional context leading up to the install.
So it all went well. The guys were great, two showed up, one "outside" and one "inside" guy. I had pretty specific requirements for how I wanted the outside cable routed and they accommodated me as much as they could, made some suggestions themselves where in the end we sort of combined our ideas and it worked out well.
The only thing that kind of sucked was they had to drill a pretty large hole in the front of my building to anchor their ladder for safety, which left a big hole that they filled with silicone. I'm waiting 24 hrs to paint over it... as much as you can paint over silicone, but hopefully it'll look ok. I just generally try to minimise the amount of holes drilled. They also drilled holes along a section of the wall to put plastic inserts for cable clip nails, otherwise they said they wouldn't go in in that section... even though another cable was affixed just a few meters above it with clips going in the wall no problem, but they drilled those holes before I could stop them.
Anyway, overall it was good though, they routed the cable well. The cable is very thin, so in my case the best way to conceal it is to just paint over it, which I am doing tomorrow. The front of my building is painted bricks, so it's already sort of "bumpy", so having a thin cable with those small 3mm cable clips routed along edges is hardly noticeable when painted over. I actually recently noticed an old telephone line going into the building that I didn't even know was there because of how well the paint had concealed it. But if you have a plastered/flat wall without many elements or angles to route around, this may not look so good.
I should also say the guys were very friendly and answered all sorts of nerdy questions I had, and we had a nice conversation. This is my first fibre service that I'd been looking forward to for years, so I was excited to see it installed. The splicing was fun to see, they showed me the actual fibre which is the size of a human hair.
They put the junction box outside my network cabinet, I routed the indoor cable inside to the ONT and connected it to my network. At first I had an issue where my Asus router could not get an IP, it said "Your ISP's DHCP does not function properly". To fix that I had to use the MAC Clone feature to copy the ISP router's MAC and that immediately worked. I think alternatively I could have called them to let my router's actual MAC in. I'm surprised this is a thing they haven't fixed yet, how many calls do they get from people trying to use 3rd party routers. But anyway, it was an easy fix.
The first Speedtest was glorious as expected, although the needle doesn't instantly reach 930 mbps down, it takes a few seconds, on every server I've tried. That's probably normal. But on the upload it's an instant 930 mbps up. 4ms latency to the CF London server, jitter and bufferbloat are good without any need for QoS or anything, not stellar but definitely good enough. CGNAT kind of sucks, but I knew about it and have planned to work around it. I'll still ask for an IPv4 public address even though I know they don't honor those requests anymore, but doesn't hurt to try.
Speaking of account management, one thing that sort of shocked me is that CF doesn't have any. There is literally no way to log into your account online, you need to contact them for everything. I don't know if they email statements, it's kind of crazy that there is just nothing online. I haven't even set up any sort of user name or security information, if I contact them I have no idea how they'll verify my identity. I guess it's one less thing to manage, but wow that's sort of insane, I've never seen that before. They're not a small ISP, they should have some sort of online account management. It's probably a cost saving measure, although I wonder if that's offset by the increased amount of customer service calls.
Sorry I'm typing so much, I doubt anyone is going to read all of this, but I'm using the opportunity to summarise my thoughts. It was exciting to get symmetric gigabit as you can imagine, especially for the price. I went through TopCashBack, so I got a £120 Amazon voucher + £66 cashback, so for the first year I'm basically paying £11/month. This is really the reason I got it, I don't actually need it otherwise to be honest and I may cancel after a year. It was fun to plan and anticipate, but after that first speedtest, it was kind of a "ok, now what" moment, because the reality is 99% of my needs can be met with a 50 mpbs connection, but hey for the other 1%... this will be fun. Maybe I'll downgrade to the 150 mbps service next year. I kind of want to keep jumping around introductory offers to save money, but I'll see if that will be worth it in the end.
Random final thought if anyone actually got to the end - is it possible to log into the ONT at all to update firmware, etc. or is it totally locked down? I don't think I'll try anyway, but I'm curious.