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Toob - Build to Installation

Thought it was worth summarising the Toob journey (and it is a journey) from build to service activation. There has been lots of good discussions in the area/region threads and by no means is this a typical timeline, some will be shorter and some longer, but hopefully it helps provide some indication of what to expect.

Build Timeline:
For my area of Southampton (Hightown) the build followed this rough timescale.

•Sept 2022 - Green cabinet installed
•Nov 2022 - Purple microducts installed between cabs and floor chambers
•March 2023 - inspection of micro ducts and fibre blown
•May 2023 - Fibre tray installed in green cab
•June 2023 - Final testing
•20th June 2023 - Service live and ready to order.

Toob estimate 6 months once an area is in build, as you can see in my case it was more like 10 months. There were large gaps between activity and I believe that was down to the live network e.g streets nearby not being live until late May. I suspect Toob simply focus on progressing areas that they can connect back to the live network, this would explain why from May activity really picked up pace, as the service came within a few streets away.

Go live: Toob will send you an email once you can order, I was checking daily using their postcode checker throughout June and actually found out I could order before I got the email. Once you order it’s definitely worth checking online to see if you can change your install date, I brought my forward by almost 3 weeks.

Unfortunately I had trouble with the underground duct that serves my property, something I managed to resolve myself,
Toob quoted 4-6 weeks to get a team out to do it. Once this was resolved I got an install date which was 3 weeks away, but managed to call them and bring it forward, so only a short 3 day wait.

Installation: This will follow your Openreach service, so can be overhead or underground. I believe in either case the team installing the service will do their best to get the service to an entry point of your choosing. The team actually came the day before and ran the drop cable, this is the short cable from the cabinet or nearest service point (Normally a connector block for overhead install), into your property.

I decided to have the service enter at the same point as the current Openreach copper service for a couple of reasons. Firstly the location has power and that’s needed for the ONT (Optical Network Terminal), the box that converts light signal to electrical signal, similar to a modem. Secondly I didn’t want a long run of cable externally on the house, the cable comes out the duct and enters the house which is about as neat as you can get it. And lastly, I had already ran a 30m length of Cat 6 (Ethernet) to this point behind some dot and dab wall up into the loft and then into a small data cabinet, this is where I would house a router.

Internal Setup: One of the downsides of Toob is the provided router it’s a Sagecom, parking this in your house somewhere is not going to get the best out of the 900mb connection. Personally I was always going to use my own setup, I have a UDM-SE with Ethernet to my PC which gives 1Gbe to the main device that needs it, for everything else I have x2 U6 Lite Wi-Fi 6 access points covering upstairs and downstairs with both having a 1Gbe uplink back to the UDM-SE.

This provides solid WiFi throughout the house with WI-FI 5 devices getting a solid 300-500mb connection and Wi-Fi 6 devices getting 600-800mb connections. Of course Wi-Fi will never be as good a wired with my PC achieving the full 900/900 speed.

I definitely recommend ditching the Sagecom router or as a minimum extending the Wi-Fi coverage using a mesh to get best out of your fibre connection.
 

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UDM-SE and one of the Wi-Fi access points, in time I will switch my cameras to this platform.
 

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Sounds like your install went well.
So how is the speed. Most I see, just get above the 900Mbps.
Assume you took the static ip, was that ready from day one?

So what router are you using and where is it connected to your ONT. Cannot see it in your photo.
Why do you want that giant ethernet switch with all those ethernet ports ports, Four is normally plenty for most families these days or just add a simple switch to say add another four.
I know many on Toob that use the Sagen router and their wifi spreads well over a good distance around their property. No need for any extra mesh as it pumps out a good signal. Shame its not future proofed for Wifi 6 but then Toob will soon maybe offer one as most ISPs have them in plan for later this year and early next year I hear..
 
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Sounds like your install went well.
So how is the speed. Most I see, just get above the 900Mbps.
Assume you took the static ip, was that ready from day one?

So what router are you using and where is it connected to your ONT. Cannot see it in your photo.
Why do you want that giant ethernet switch with all those ethernet ports ports, Four is normally plenty for most families these days or just add a simple switch to say add another four.
I know many on Toob that use the Sagen router and their wifi spreads well over a good distance around their property. No need for any extra mesh as it pumps out a good signal. Shame its not future proofed for Wifi 6 but then Toob will soon maybe offer one as most ISPs have them in plan for later this year and early next year I hear..

Yeh the install was great, the two guys that did it were done in an hour, they showed me a speed test, I get 934mb via Ethernet. The static IP was emailed to me a few hours after the service went live.

The UDM-SE (giant Ethernet switch) is a router with a 2.5Gbe WAN port, PoE switch and console for running UniFi applications, my network, protect (cameras) , plus a few others like Talk for phones. It has a 3.5” hard drive slot to store your camera video/audio. It only has 8 x 1Gbe ports and 3 are already used by the PC and 2 for the access points, add a couple of cameras, a door bell and the 8 will quickly be gone. It has SPF ports to add additional switches as required, so it’s expandable. It’s 100% overkill for the average user and more of a prosumer / small enterprise type of setup.

You can see the ONT plugs into an RJ45 socket on the wall in one of the photos, this socket takes the ethernet out from the ONT up into the loft and then down into the room with the UDM-SE straight into the WAN port. Another way to approach the challenge of router placement, it doesn’t need to be next to your ONT, and you can run Ethernet cable more discretely than Toob can, running the fibre externally, to get it to a suitable entry point.
 
Am about to do a little decorating and planning my Toob kit position.
Just thinking about my run of cable from the outside box, that will come in through the Porch, into and down my hall on the skirting and into a room in the middle of my house. Probably an estimate of 33 feet cable run between outside box and Toob ONT.

My current Openreach cable runs a similar distance but on the other side of the hall and with a final six feet little under the floorboards into the OR Master Socket, near to the area where Id like my Toob ONT. AS I have laminate flooring over the floorbaods, do not want it now to follow that route. Hense the change to the other side of the Hall.
The Toob ONT will end up near to wher my current OR Master socket and router is now, that is in a perfect position for providing wifi everywhere in house and down a long garden without issue.
Also there are four free sockets there, only two occupied at mo., but that will be three with Toob as it adds the Toob ONT.

Are the internal cables white or black? NOt fussed, just curious.
My Openreach cables are black and white as they pass through a joint.
How long is the cable from the router to the ONT?.
How long are the plug leads on their router and the ONT?
Do they crimp the ends of the cables that go into the outside box and the Toob ONT or do they arrive at set lengths?
 
Am about to do a little decorating and planning my Toob kit position.
Just thinking about my run of cable from the outside box, that will come in through the Porch, into and down my hall on the skirting and into a room in the middle of my house. Probably an estimate of 33 feet cable run between outside box and Toob ONT.

My current Openreach cable runs a similar distance but on the other side of the hall and with a final six feet little under the floorboards into the OR Master Socket, near to the area where Id like my Toob ONT. AS I have laminate flooring over the floorbaods, do not want it now to follow that route. Hense the change to the other side of the Hall.
The Toob ONT will end up near to wher my current OR Master socket and router is now, that is in a perfect position for providing wifi everywhere in house and down a long garden without issue.
Also there are four free sockets there, only two occupied at mo., but that will be three with Toob as it adds the Toob ONT.

Are the internal cables white or black? NOt fussed, just curious.
My Openreach cables are black and white as they pass through a joint.
How long is the cable from the router to the ONT?.
How long are the plug leads on their router and the ONT?
Do they crimp the ends of the cables that go into the outside box and the Toob ONT or do they arrive at set lengths?

Remember that the ONT does not need to be next to your Router, if there is a better place for it without running fibre externally or internally then I would always take that option for a cleaner install. That said Toob will run cable to your desired location even through your loft.

From what I have seen they will run black fibre cable externally clipped to your outside wall and get it to the required entry point e.g where you want the ONT positioned.
The fibre cable is white as it comes into your house and has a green connector on the end which plugs into ONT.

The power cords are about a meter long.

The outside box has excessive fibre coiled up with a connection to the white cable that enters your house, I guess they splice the connector on.

Cable from the ONT to the router is Ethernet, Adtran ONT has a 1Gig out, so technically has a limit of 100m, I think you get a 3 meter cable with the router (it’s bright pink!!), mine is still in the packet, as mentioned I ran CAT 6 cable from the ONT behind my wall, into the loft and down into the data cabinet which is where my Router lives.
 
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That Toob router 1m power cable sounds a bit short.
I like to have the router sit about 4 feet 3 inches or 1.2 meters on a platform by our study area desk. It at that height, with all the previous Sky and other routers worked well in our house to push out a good wifi signal.
Why do they make them so short, will not quite reach easily.

The ONT power cable is not an issue at 1m as it will sit pretty close to the socket.
Really have no where else for the ONT to go, but that position has always worked for us.
 
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Thanks, though all sounds good.
No problem for us having cable runs. Could not care less about hiding them.

Will paint my skirting and walls once again white (never have liked the now out of fashion so everyone keeps telling us, current grey walls and skirting), so the cables can sit back on top. Will wait for the diy till they have clipped it.

All our house kit now is wifi, nothing on ethernet.
For our Sky broadband 75/20Mbps.
Sky Q box and Q minis, three smart TVs, x3 cctv cameras, video doorbell and its chime (connected to wifi via a Vonet wifi bridge, as Chime has only ethernet out), with more security stuff that has indoor security camera, leak sensors, motion and door sensors.
Wifi for our pair of W11, when at home working, laptops, Samsung tablet and Android phones, iPads, that all work fine in all rooms of the house. I'd say the lowest speed in our house can be about 25Mbps down in a few of the far cornered places.
Great wifi also for our tablets and phones on our garden patio of around 20-30Mbps and for the tablet I use way down our long garden to listen to radio or watch Sky Go app for the Sport and occasionally Q recordings via that app and the Q box connection. Shame wifi does not penetrate through the greenhouse as I like to sit in it, have to have the tablet sitting at the door to get the solid connection.
Do have a desktop that used to have an ethernet connection (now wifi) as used to take recordings for the cctv and serve them up through a port forward. But that is all done over the cloud via the ip cameras wifi now thanks to dlink. So cg-nat not an issue either.
Also, have our new electric heaters and pod feed burners heating system controls all run over wifi through an app.

We never get any major glitches with a majority of that running 24/7. Jjust sometimes when a few of the smart Tvs are running 4k and the Sky Q box the same or doing some Sky Q downloads all at the sametime, we see a brief slow down.
Toob faster speed will easily sort that, as any downloads will be so much quicker and the TVs will have more speed to kind of bandwidth share.

The Sky sr203 with its q mesh has done us proud and does really help with its bandwidth sharing (we never needed a Sky Booster), so not sure how the Toob router will do any bandwidth share automatically well.

Have been looking at a friends Google Nest Wifi Pro 6e. He loves it in a bit bigger house, 6 bedrooms with one Google unit (even though he bought two), it really punches the wif signal out well and controls all the devices.
Hes on Toob and has it connected I think with one ethernet cable into the Toob router (do not think it works straight into the ONT) and they only use the Google wifi, so assume they have switched the Toob router wifi off.

For only £150 or even cheaper its a bargain price.
May help a little for me, going forward, as I have a bit more kit on my network than he does, even once again just using one unit.
But will try the Toob router first and see how it plays out.
 
Good wifi speed is only really important on devices that need it, primarily video streaming at high quality, you should be fine unless you have a large house and your far away from your router, you will drop onto 2.4ghz and be maxed out at 100mb, but probably get less due to the distance and interference.

My iPhone only gets half the speed of the connection using a Wi-Fi 6 AP with 2x2 MiMO, but it’s more than enough for a phone.

My desktop PC, where I need the speed, gets a solid 3ms ping, 940mb down/up, it’s the only device likely to sustain the bandwidth on the device when downloading/uploading for example, the only way to get this speed is using Gb Ethernet.

Personally I am going to move away from my Wi-Fi cloud based cameras, for me they are just too grainy and slow, plus I want to be the data owner rather than pay for cloud storage, Ethernet POE for solid 4K pictures is definitely going to be better than slow 2.4ghz Wi-Fi.
 

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Yes my desktop will show a nice 900+Mbps speed test. Probably wont be used now for much else.
I might even reconnect an ethernet cable to our main TV. It shows on wifi with the Netflix speed test 69Mbps currently, so little drop off from our 75Mbps, even with other wifi use. Be interesting to see what speed it will show using Toob, assume it will get near the full 900Mbps. Not that its needed.
Be good too to get the wifi speed up for the patio for the streaming. If that gets 100+ I'd be very happy. It should not drop off more than that.

I used to save cctv video to my desktop locally.
The dlink cloud service though is brill, you have 14 days of cloud recording and can save up to 500 pinned recordings forever and have 5 cameras. Its only £40 a year or less with voucher offers.
Yes, its only 2k video, but its clear and never found it slow. Not sure for any occasions when Id need 4k video.
I check it out live often and its instant, as speak to the pets and family on it.
One thing I like is they are true ip cameras, in that you can have them setup and working via the cloud and also at same time have them working with your home cctv server. I am currently using one camera with dlink cloud and Netcam Studio that saves video locally to my Desktop. I use a tunnel with that server, to view remotely, not port forward anymore.

Just a thought, re the Google Nest Pro wifi. Im not that up with ONTs. Do you think you could just plug that straight into the Toob ONT, not bothering with the Toob router?
 
If you connect your TV via Ethernet and it supports 1Gbe then you should pull the full 900.

Your camera setup sounds better than mine, they only support 2.4ghz Wi-Fi which is the limiting factor for me, plus they only do 1080P.

Yes you can connect directly to the ONT, I believe those Google Nests have a WAN in that’s where the ONT should plug into. I think there is also a LAN port, which you can plug into your switch if you want a few more ports available for things. Those mesh systems create a decent network, if you position one of the Wi-Fi base stations near your patio you should get a decent signal out there as well.
 
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Interesting thread, we are in PO9 area, cables laid to poles, work on cabinets and poles now being done so shouldn't be long now before we go live.

Just waiting on that email from Toob so can cancel Virgin Media which I hope is before 31st October so I can leave fee free.

Over here they are using the Linksys MX 420 AX tri band WiFi 6 router with toob branding on it so guess you can use the Linksys app for it.
 
I'm also in Havant and my service went live on 30th. New Linksys router can use the app, but has custom firmware unfortunately. It's reasonable.
 
Thought it was worth summarising the Toob journey (and it is a journey) from build to service activation. There has been lots of good discussions in the area/region threads and by no means is this a typical timeline, some will be shorter and some longer, but hopefully it helps provide some indication of what to expect.

Build Timeline:
For my area of Southampton (Hightown) the build followed this rough timescale.

•Sept 2022 - Green cabinet installed
•Nov 2022 - Purple microducts installed between cabs and floor chambers
•March 2023 - inspection of micro ducts and fibre blown
•May 2023 - Fibre tray installed in green cab
•June 2023 - Final testing
•20th June 2023 - Service live and ready to order.

Toob estimate 6 months once an area is in build, as you can see in my case it was more like 10 months. There were large gaps between activity and I believe that was down to the live network e.g streets nearby not being live until late May. I suspect Toob simply focus on progressing areas that they can connect back to the live network, this would explain why from May activity really picked up pace, as the service came within a few streets away.

Go live: Toob will send you an email once you can order, I was checking daily using their postcode checker throughout June and actually found out I could order before I got the email. Once you order it’s definitely worth checking online to see if you can change your install date, I brought my forward by almost 3 weeks.

Unfortunately I had trouble with the underground duct that serves my property, something I managed to resolve myself,
Toob quoted 4-6 weeks to get a team out to do it. Once this was resolved I got an install date which was 3 weeks away, but managed to call them and bring it forward, so only a short 3 day wait.

Installation: This will follow your Openreach service, so can be overhead or underground. I believe in either case the team installing the service will do their best to get the service to an entry point of your choosing. The team actually came the day before and ran the drop cable, this is the short cable from the cabinet or nearest service point (Normally a connector block for overhead install), into your property.

I decided to have the service enter at the same point as the current Openreach copper service for a couple of reasons. Firstly the location has power and that’s needed for the ONT (Optical Network Terminal), the box that converts light signal to electrical signal, similar to a modem. Secondly I didn’t want a long run of cable externally on the house, the cable comes out the duct and enters the house which is about as neat as you can get it. And lastly, I had already ran a 30m length of Cat 6 (Ethernet) to this point behind some dot and dab wall up into the loft and then into a small data cabinet, this is where I would house a router.

Internal Setup: One of the downsides of Toob is the provided router it’s a Sagecom, parking this in your house somewhere is not going to get the best out of the 900mb connection. Personally I was always going to use my own setup, I have a UDM-SE with Ethernet to my PC which gives 1Gbe to the main device that needs it, for everything else I have x2 U6 Lite Wi-Fi 6 access points covering upstairs and downstairs with both having a 1Gbe uplink back to the UDM-SE.

This provides solid WiFi throughout the house with WI-FI 5 devices getting a solid 300-500mb connection and Wi-Fi 6 devices getting 600-800mb connections. Of course Wi-Fi will never be as good a wired with my PC achieving the full 900/900 speed.

I definitely recommend ditching the Sagecom router or as a minimum extending the Wi-Fi coverage using a mesh to get best out of your fibre connection.

Hi

In your photo of the external wall what is the white box next to the ONT?
Also in the internal photo is that the Sagecom router or your own router?

Thanks
 
Hi

In your photo of the external wall what is the white box next to the ONT?
Also in the internal photo is that the Sagecom router or your own router?

Thanks
Hi Robbo,
The white box in the external photo is the old BT joint box, where the external copper line terminates to an internal cable. It’s left in situ but I very much doubt will ever be used again, especially as Openreach just announced Southampton for FTTP deployment.

The router is my own, UDM-SE it’s rack mounted in the white cabinet, the ONT ( grey/black box) has Ethernet out which goes into an RJ45 terminal plate, ethernet cable then runs from downstairs to upstairs to that UDM-SE which has a 2.5Gbe Ethernet WAN port. It also houses a hard drive and provides POE for my security cameras (hence why it’s rack U form factor).
 
Thought it was worth summarising the Toob journey (and it is a journey) from build to service activation. There has been lots of good discussions in the area/region threads and by no means is this a typical timeline, some will be shorter and some longer, but hopefully it helps provide some indication of what to expect.

Build Timeline:
For my area of Southampton (Hightown) the build followed this rough timescale.

•Sept 2022 - Green cabinet installed
•Nov 2022 - Purple microducts installed between cabs and floor chambers
•March 2023 - inspection of micro ducts and fibre blown
•May 2023 - Fibre tray installed in green cab
•June 2023 - Final testing
•20th June 2023 - Service live and ready to order.

Toob estimate 6 months once an area is in build, as you can see in my case it was more like 10 months. There were large gaps between activity ...

They've speeded that up around here, Fareham western wards build started around March 24th. and the first live batch will be week commencing 8th. July. 3 1/2 months, not bad. Uses Openreach ducting around here but they did have to dig their own street chambers. Not everywhere will be live yet though, my bit seems to be first.

They appear to have worked at least in part with Openreach, who went live on full fibre a month or so ago. There was lots of activity from both outfits around the same time so presumably this allowed Toob to work with clear ducting.
 
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