Sponsored Links

Community Fibre build in North London

Because if there are no nearby areas with service it will probably take longer for new areas to be enabled as it means the whole fibre trunking needs to be done first.
East Barnet is done but it seems like they're going to launch everywhere in Enfield at the same time. I think they've spent 5 months at least working in Enfield and they don't seem like they're going to be done any time soon. I'm not expecting anything until September at the earliest although for all I know they could be ready by the end of July
 
East Barnet is done but it seems like they're going to launch everywhere in Enfield at the same time.
I somehow doubt that.

At a guess, the model followed on the Enfield side of Barnet will be followed again in Enfield (probably west of the A10 to start with).

The first thing that is needed is the "spine" fibres. These will go from wherever the active equipment is, to areas being served. The next thing to build is fibres out to the "telegraph" poles, then boxes on the poles with splitters.

Streets or small clusters of streets going live at a time would be my guess.

It's worth the wait!
 
I somehow doubt that.

Streets or small clusters of streets going live at a time would be my guess.
Who knows but it seemed that's what happened in (east) barnet at least. One one hand it doesn't make sense to do the whole borough at one time, they're potentially going to have very long waiting lists if they do that but then again most people probably aren't waiting for this like I am
 
I somehow doubt that.

At a guess, the model followed on the Enfield side of Barnet will be followed again in Enfield (probably west of the A10 to start with).

The first thing that is needed is the "spine" fibres. These will go from wherever the active equipment is, to areas being served. The next thing to build is fibres out to the "telegraph" poles, then boxes on the poles with splitters.

Streets or small clusters of streets going live at a time would be my guess.

It's worth the wait!
Agree with this.

I’m in Whetstone and this was the approach they took here. Mass go-live doesn’t do anyone any favours. There’s a whole balancing act of installer availability, equipment availability, capacity availability etc. CF tend to release each area as and when it is connected to the core spine. Allows for a quicker ROI too.
 
I live in bush hill park, they’ve been doing work around my street for the past month. I spoke to community fibre and I’ve been told there’s no plans to install on my street however. It’s all a bit of a mystery.

We don’t have telegraph poles all the telephone lines come in via underground conduit. I can see they’ve installed two chambers on both sides of my street. Could community fibre just have no clue or are they missing my road?
 
I live in bush hill park, they’ve been doing work around my street for the past month. I spoke to community fibre and I’ve been told there’s no plans to install on my street however. It’s all a bit of a mystery.

We don’t have telegraph poles all the telephone lines come in via underground conduit. I can see they’ve installed two chambers on both sides of my street. Could community fibre just have no clue or are they missing my road?
Those could be to run fibre to other streets initially, and eventually yours too. From what I have seen in my area CF seems to be focusing only on overhead installations with telegraph poles. The streets where they didn’t install all had underground telephone lines. I believe using poles via PIA is cheaper so they are probably trying to maximise their ROI and connect as many premises as possible with the money they have. I think eventually they will cover underground premises too but it makes sense to do the cheaper/easier streets first.
 
I live in bush hill park, they’ve been doing work around my street for the past month. I spoke to community fibre and I’ve been told there’s no plans to install on my street however. It’s all a bit of a mystery.

We don’t have telegraph poles all the telephone lines come in via underground conduit. I can see they’ve installed two chambers on both sides of my street. Could community fibre just have no clue or are they missing my road?
I've noticed Community Fibre installing CFL-110/106 chambers in my area in places where the houses are ducted and virtually all telegraph poled areas already have community fibre. Some of these chambers have been around for months. There is even a ducted street near me that has had a cabinet since last year and doesn't have any availability.

My theory is community fibre are installing infrastructure to do ducted installs but haven't actually launched ducted installs.

I don't know of any area that actually has availability through ducts to individual properties.
 
My theory is community fibre are installing infrastructure to do ducted installs but haven't actually launched ducted installs.

I don't know of any area that actually has availability through ducts to individual properties.
Wait for Openreach to unblock all the ducts then swoop in with a better product?
 
I've noticed Community Fibre installing CFL-110/106 chambers in my area in places where the houses are ducted and virtually all telegraph poled areas already have community fibre. Some of these chambers have been around for months. There is even a ducted street near me that has had a cabinet since last year and doesn't have any availability.

My theory is community fibre are installing infrastructure to do ducted installs but haven't actually launched ducted installs.

I don't know of any area that actually has availability through ducts to individual properties.

Some roads near Whetstone (Barnet) have in-ground installs. They have their own Toby boxes mounted in the pavement, next to Virgin Media Toby boxes.

Given the significant amount of work to install these, I suspect they’re heavily focusing on poles and once they’ve reached a certain level of penetration, will continue with ground based installs… that being said, they don’t have to if they’re happy with their numbers.
 
Just spotted a massive CF box outside Southgate Methodist Church. It's on The Bourne near the junction of Queen Elizabeth Drive. I did see they were doing some work there last month, maybe that was it although for all I know it's been there for ages.
 
Just spotted a massive CF box outside Southgate Methodist Church. It's on The Bourne near the junction of Queen Elizabeth Drive. I did see they were doing some work there last month, maybe that was it although for all I know it's been there for ages.
cfl normally goes live in a big chunk, sadly.
 
is there a photo of the inside of CF boxes? How do they handle the aggregation etc? My fibre years working for Cisco was back when dual 2Mbit fibre backbone was godlike :)
 
is there a photo of the inside of CF boxes? How do they handle the aggregation etc? My fibre years working for Cisco was back when dual 2Mbit fibre backbone was godlike :)
They run back to an OLT just like any other xPON-based provider. The OLT is the primary means of ‘active’ aggregation - otherwise the PON itself provides passive optical aggregation of a sort.
 
They run back to an OLT just like any other xPON-based provider. The OLT is the primary means of ‘active’ aggregation - otherwise the PON itself provides passive optical aggregation of a sort.
Im not familiar with the way that ISPs in the UK build or rent their backbone. What's CFs core network capacity? The guys that installed the fibre on my street told me they work for OpenReach but one of them told me that its better to go with CF :P :P
 
"What's CFs core network capacity?"

I've not seen anything in the public domain about Community Fibre's infrastructure (other than some documents about the IPv6 implementation).

One might imagine that the "optical" part of the network ends up on some active equipment in an exchange (or similar building). At this point the data from each subscriber is aggregated onto links that (directly or indirectly) end up at at some infrastructure in the large Internet data centres.

A look at "PeeringDB" suggests that there are at least 3 significant sites, 2 in Docklands and one in Slough and one might expect leased circuits from the location of the local active equipment to at least two out of the 3 (to give some degree of resilience).

While individual consumers are offered what seem to be very fast connections, obviously few produce or consume lots of data all the time. Hence the connections "out" of the internal network and at points within the network can have some degree of diversity applied.

While exactly how much diversity can be assumed is clearly part of the design process for an ISP, a quick look at my router suggests that on my 150Mb/s connection I average 1.3Mb/s over a few days (which actually seems surprisingly large).

Going with that figure (and discounting the possibility that my calculation is flawed!) then 100:1 would be OK for lots of people like me, although in practice there needs to be an allowance for peaks in the data flows.

Back in the days of ADSL I recall that a 50:1 contention ratio was mentioned. This may well still be the design target for consumer services today.

To state the obvious, the availability of fast connections allows consumers to use more data so whatever is designed needs to allow for both more customers and more data per customer.

I'm not sure that I've made much more of a contribution then @Pheasant's "Enough" but my practical experience is that I never notice any sign of general network capacity issues with Community Fibre.
 
Hi i have 2 question i hope the members can help me,
is there anymore info when n3 area will get 900mbit ? i see a lot of work in n3 openreach,cf,optpus maybe wrong spelling many different isp but when i use the postcode checker its say my area is not live yet.
second question how will i get 900mbit if i live in a block of flats,from my knowledge every flat has to have a ont box,i know this because of 2 new builds in popes drive and shakespere road have ont in each flat
i hope for a postive reply …
 
Many of CF's OLTs are contained in active roadside cabinets. They may also make use of BT exchange space but I have no evidence for or against that other than the presence of some BT exchange codes in their traceroutes.

From looking at rotues to and from CF subscriber IPs, and known ranges of CF OLTs/routers, it appears to me that there is a sensible degree of resilience built into their architecture. It's not uncommon to find OLTs connected via three or four paths to other OLTs (which may, admittedly, be multiple interfaces aggregated on the same physical route - but it looks like they aim for at least two physical routes from each OLT).

Their current deployment is I believe based on the Adtran TA5000 series, and given that they talk about 4000 premises per cabinet I suspect the TA5004 is frequently used, which offers 4x 10Gbps uplinks.

Routes tend to go from subscriber OLTs via a few more *acc* hops before ending up at an *agg* following which they end up in THN or LD8. I'd suspect that they do as much as possible on their own fibre or leased dark fibre from *agg* nodes to the core DCs. Leased lines may have made sense in their early MDU deployments but I doubt that is still the model.

Would be interested to know more about how they do it.
 
Top
Cheap BIG ISPs for 100Mbps+
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Vodafone UK ISP Logo
Vodafone £24.00 - 26.00
150Mbps
Gift: None
NOW UK ISP Logo
NOW £24.00
100Mbps
Gift: None
Plusnet UK ISP Logo
Plusnet £25.99
145Mbps
Gift: £50 Reward Card
Large Availability | View All
Cheapest ISPs for 100Mbps+
Gigaclear UK ISP Logo
Gigaclear £17.00
200Mbps
Gift: None
Community Fibre UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Virgin Media UK ISP Logo
Virgin Media £22.99
132Mbps
Gift: None
Hey! Broadband UK ISP Logo
150Mbps
Gift: None
Youfibre UK ISP Logo
Youfibre £23.99
150Mbps
Gift: None
Large Availability | View All
Sponsored Links
The Top 15 Category Tags
  1. FTTP (6024)
  2. BT (3638)
  3. Politics (2720)
  4. Business (2439)
  5. Openreach (2405)
  6. Building Digital UK (2330)
  7. Mobile Broadband (2143)
  8. FTTC (2083)
  9. Statistics (1899)
  10. 4G (1813)
  11. Virgin Media (1762)
  12. Ofcom Regulation (1582)
  13. Fibre Optic (1467)
  14. Wireless Internet (1462)
  15. 5G (1404)
Sponsored

Copyright © 1999 to Present - ISPreview.co.uk - All Rights Reserved - Terms  ,  Privacy and Cookie Policy  ,  Links  ,  Website Rules