Thoughts on YouFibre - Great when it works, not good when it doesn't.
I used to be with Hyperoptic, knowledgable staff available with quick reply on their Zendesk tickets, got a static IP assigned within 5 minutes, very knowledgable and fast replies although this is when I signed up in 2018 with them.
Signed up with YouFibre in 2022, good to start but then a few months later I wanted a static IP. Static IP took over a 1 week to be applied, their first line support is generally useless although that might have improved now. When we got our static IP, we lost our phone service. Took them 3 days to fix the phone, then we lost internet. They fixed the internet when I called them but then we lost the static IP and had to wait 3 days for them to reapply it.
Fast forward to Feb 2023, notification of works being done. No problem, time goes by and there were no issues. Then 4 days later the internet suddenly goes off at 1am. No internet for the rest of the day, I call them later that day and was told that an upgrade was done to the ONT and customers are now required to use the 1G ethernet port rather than the 10G ethernet port, no idea why but hey okay. Swap over the port, still nothing. I offered to switch back to the Eero to help debugging, plugged in the Eero, internet is back, no static IP, and guess what, no phone line either.
Got the static IP back after a few days, phone line a few days after that. I don't see how they think it's acceptable to go without a phone service for several days at a time, I think going forward it will be best to purchase a VOIP service and ditch them for the phone. Also I switched back to the 10G port on the ONT as my POE splitter couldn't negotiate gigabit on the 1G port for some reason and it works fine now, so I imagine the thing about having to use the 1G port with the new update was a load of crap.
Other thoughts on them:
- It's frustrating that the static IP is tied to the MAC Address of the router, it makes it more difficult to swap between routers, although now I've settled on just spoofing the MAC address of my own router to match the Eero.
- Latency seems to be better with the CGNAT address, when we got our own static IP it added on a couple of ms, no biggie
- Loaded latency on the 500mbps package is terrible, at the full 500mbps download our ping goes up to around 200-300ms, full 500mbps upload does not exhibit the same problem and the loaded latency is about 25ms. Normal latency is around 7ms. I get this with the Eero and my own router. Not a huge issue as I can fix with traffic shaping on the router but I didn't get this with Hyperoptic.
Also, still no IPv6 in our area, which is disappointing for an ISP that uses CGNAT as while CGNAT is understandable, there's no P2P connectivity options for standard customers without resorting to NAT hole punching. Aug 2022 we were told it would be done by the end of the year but still no IPv6.
Going to stick with them for now as the alternative is Virgin Media and if they get their customer service in order then it will be a great service.