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Community Fibre build in North London

In some respects it doesn’t matter, but I’ve been wondering if Community Fibre have space in a local exchange and will build out from there.

For the fibre loss calculations to work they will need active equipment somewhere in the North London suburbs.
In my part of South London there are cabinets such as this one which as far as I can tell contain one Adtran OLT each. The smaller cabinet beside it is for the electrical supply required.
 
The AFNs have 32 ports, which are each individually spliced into a dedicated fibre. I don’t believe any optical splitting happens in the AFN. The splitter node is somewhere else, most likely in one of the ground chambers nearby.
In my area I understand the AFNs have 24 ports, like this one.

I wouldn't be so sure that there is no splitting taking place in the AFN. For starters, the standard deployment in my area was a 12-fibre unit to each pole. A significant number of poles carried two AFNs, but only one 12FU was blown to the pole.

Observing splicing taking place at one AFN, the technician definitely didn't make 24 splices per AFN. The number was closer to 6... and looking at the standard parts list on the AFN linked above, it comes with 6x 1:4 splitters. This would seem to be a sensible way of reducing the required splice count at the AFN, and also allow for one 12FU to supply 2x 24-port AFNs.

What we don't have any information on is where and to what extent the 1:4 splitters are further split. It is likely underground, as CF have built chambers in what seem sensible locations for this. XGS-PON can be also deployed sensibly with more than 32 customers per PON, so there will be a calculation somewhere on whether to do 1:32 or 1:64 splits and plan for a longer XGS-PON lifetime without ever touching the optical plant, or whether to do 1:128 (or more?) and revisit it to segment the network when demand requires, buying more line cards for the OLT etc.
 
Some interesting info in this thread over at TBB from about a year ago..


Seems like they were shooting 12-fibre bundles up to the AFN in that deployment in SW London. Uncertainty also in that thread over the split ratios at the AFN - but I would expect CF would want to cover the highest number of property connections served from a single pole (possibly around 36 or so in some very high density victorian terrace housing situations).

It's likely the triple-lid footway chambers are where the primary splitters are located. So a two-level split is going on. I don't think CF would be splitting at anywhere near the PON theoretical limit of 128 even if they have far shorter cabling distances from the street cabinet situated OLTs than say Openreach with OLTs sitting in exchanges 15 miles away...more than likely they are splitting 32-ways with two levels of split...

So I reckon it's 8-way splits in the primary splitter (footway chambers) and 4-ways splits at the secondary splitter in the AFN.
 
And we’re live!

After a 1.5 week delay, the service finally went live. It appears there was light at our pole almost the entire time but for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right light, with the ONT showing no connection. I can only assume there was some form of misconfiguration at the OLT, or paired to the wrong PON.

Either way, 940mbps up and 940mbps down with 1ms ping, hitting the gigabit ethernet ceiling.
 
And we’re live!

After a 1.5 week delay, the service finally went live. It appears there was light at our pole almost the entire time but for whatever reason, it wasn’t the right light, with the ONT showing no connection. I can only assume there was some form of misconfiguration at the OLT, or paired to the wrong PON.

Either way, 940mbps up and 940mbps down with 1ms ping, hitting the gigabit ethernet ceiling.
Amazing, enjoy!
Called them up, it doesn't look like they are going to cover my area of Enfield this year, so I'm going to renew my Three contract for now.
 
Hi everyone

I signed up to add some info on our local area which is that the CF engineers have appeared today in Brookside South, which runs north of Hampden Square.

Does anyone have a realistic idea of how far away that means potential connection to the service would be? CF website still only capturing data, not offering service.

I confess to being disproportionately excited about getting FTTP, not least as I am still on 80/20 after 10 years or more. That's not right for a major capital city. We have a family apartment in a small Spanish village that has gigabit fibre in it!
Thanks to all for answers. I am no closer to getting a date and am yet to hear from CF, having registered my interest on their site. All good things come to he who waits eh?
 
Thanks to all for answers. I am no closer to getting a date and am yet to hear from CF, having registered my interest on their site. All good things come to he who waits eh?
Will be interesting to see where they end up drawing the line. I know they they’ve done deployments south of Hampden Square. In fact, that’s where I first saw all their activity prior to coming towards Whetstone, which a lead engineer told me was done before their company got involved in the roll out.

I do know that they’ve also done Parkside Gardens, along with Openreach and their STILL yet to be mounted (6+ months taped up) CBTs. Fingers crossed they’ll continue around the corner and meet up the two ends.
 
For what it is worth, I spotted someone undertaking what looked like “rod and rope” with a Community Fibre van parked nearby in Monkfrith Way (by the roundabout) a few weeks ago as I drove past.

I think they are still working on the area of interest to Miraboy.

A few houses local to me seem to have taken the Community Fibre offer (judging by the houses with two “drop wires”).
 
To complete the story, I had Community Fibre installed a few days ago.

I was clear how I wanted the installation done and their installers did exactly what I asked for.

It was a very neat job by what seemed to be staff installers and it works well.

My thanks to the contributors to this thread particularly Matt R and Pheasant.
 
To complete the story, I had Community Fibre installed a few days ago.

I was clear how I wanted the installation done and their installers did exactly what I asked for.

It was a very neat job by what seemed to be staff installers and it works well.

My thanks to the contributors to this thread particularly Matt R and Pheasant.
Thanks for the mention. Glad it was a smooth install for you and trust the CF service will work well for you 👍
 
I saw a flurry of activity around Mill Hill East not long ago from CF, it all seems to have gone quiet now. I keep checking the CF site and it keeps reporting 'Soon'. The flurry of activity was about 1 mile away by road.
 
I saw a flurry of activity around Mill Hill East not long ago from CF, it all seems to have gone quiet now. I keep checking the CF site and it keeps reporting 'Soon'. The flurry of activity was about 1 mile away by road.
They were most likely surveying the area and potentially inspecting ducts.

From experience, there were a few months between inspections and base infra work before the AFNs and local cabling started. There’s still roads in my vicinity that have fibre coiled up and haven’t been touched for months. I suspect it all comes down to registered demand, logistics and ultimately, cost.
 
To provide some indication to people in other locations, the first sign of activity that finally resulted in service by Community Fibre in my street was probably 12 months before the service was available.

It was a survey team with test equipment running rope through the ducts (or more accurately generally failing to and marking the blockages on the pavement).

Some months after that I could identify that the work was on behalf of Community Fibre as I spotted a large drum of fibre with their name on it.
 
In my area, the first sign of hope was spine cabling work about 7-9 months before anything went live. This was confined to a single route via what became cabinet sites. Marking of blocked ducts was about 4-5 months before service was offered.
 
Thank you, looking on one.network I can see what appears to be spine works and overlaying being carried out at a junction box which I believe my green cab is connected to (my copper line goes 1 mile to the green box, then back down to the junction as far as I can see then down to the exchange, in a big V shape). So fingers crossed. Community Fibre (and Open Infra) have given "planned for summer" so we will see
 
@mandelbuga couple of observations.

1) while Community Fibre (and I guess others) use the Openreach poles and ducts the architecture doesn’t mirror the Openreach FTTC approach so the “green boxes” that contain the FTTC equipment are irrelevant to other networks.

2) on the assumption that you are currently served by an overhead cable, watch for blue rope appearing at local poles, this is often an indicator of installation in the near future.
 
@mandelbuga couple of observations.

1) while Community Fibre (and I guess others) use the Openreach poles and ducts the architecture doesn’t mirror the Openreach FTTC approach so the “green boxes” that contain the FTTC equipment are irrelevant to other networks.

2) on the assumption that you are currently served by an overhead cable, watch for blue rope appearing at local poles, this is often an indicator of installation in the near future.
FTTC is pretty much irrelevant for Openreach based FTTP in any event - well other than knowing your in the vicinity of an aggregation node that perhaps feeds the cab and feeds the local FTTP distribution network - splitter(s) et al.
 
To provide some indication to people in other locations, the first sign of activity that finally resulted in service by Community Fibre in my street was probably 12 months before the service was available.

It was a survey team with test equipment running rope through the ducts (or more accurately generally failing to and marking the blockages on the pavement).

Some months after that I could identify that the work was on behalf of Community Fibre as I spotted a large drum of fibre with their name on it.
I can confirm this is about right its been over a year here and the 1st lot of flats should be going live in the next 2 days. We have been told within the next 7 weeks the area will be done but I won't hold my breath. Been a lot of delays as there has been a lot of blockages so we wait and see. One network, better Internet dashboard and tfl Road works will provide a good overview of any works 👍🏾
 
Hi everyone, just signed up to comment. I spotted some Community Fibre work going on near East Barnet School. They've been digging up part of Cat Hill and the side road on the south side. These are detached/semi-detached houses BTW. I tried checking the website but it seems they're coming soon to everywhere in London, so I have my doubts about the accuracy of that. However a postcode in the area I saw the work returns a message that service will be available in the next few months. Some postcode testing suggests that this doesn't include properties to the east of Mansfield Avenue or west of Belmont Avenue. It does include properties up to Oakhill park, including those in Brookside. It also includes the whole of Belmont Avenue and Heddon Ct Ave but not Freston Gardens

Background for those interested: I live in enfield and was one of the first people in the country to get broadband when I had my Telewest installation in 2000/2001, so it's crazy to me that 22 years later I'm watching as Open Reach and other networks are springing up all over but suburban North London, the very place you'd expect to be willing to splash out on gigabit+ fibre.

Telewest became Virgin and got increasingly expensive. I moved not to far and was plagued by outages. While it didn't happen often when it did we'd be offline for hours at a time. No compensation from VM either, at least not automatic. So I've been checking the news for any sign that City Fibre might build here or Openreach will upgrade their existing network but neither one looks likely to happen soon. City Fibre's prices and symetrical speeds are very attractive although it seems that community fibre is actually cheaper, at least compared to Vodafone Gigafast (£43/53 for 500/1000), although they do include 4G backup
 
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