A long, long time ago... On a telephone pole not that far away... Digital Infrastructure mounted a grey box with fibre in it.

Since then theyve done nothing with it. Literally nothing. BeFibre (who use that infrastructre which seems to now be "Fibre Heroes"), have sent me 3 emails saying it's available and emailed me regularly with offers to get me to sign up, for a service that wasn't active.

However, 3 weeks ago Virgin Media got fibre to our telephone poles. Then the VM Connector Terminal appeared halfway up the poles before being moved to the top of the poles about 2 weeks later. Then one evening (about a week later) we noticed a Virgin Media car on the road. I checked online, and their site had gone from saying they disnt serve our area, to "You can order now!"

After a smooth ordering process we're now awaiting installation which should be in just over a week. Ill update this post as the pre-install and then install happen.

For anyone interested, the service ordered is their "Gig1 Full Fibre" package with the upload speed boost active giving 113Mb/s down and up. I plan on putting their Hub 5 in to modem mode and passing through the connection to the UDM Pro which runs our home network. To do that needs an SFP+ module (as the connection is over 1Gb/s, and could be a 2Gb/s connection as it is available to us). The UDM Pro will only negotiate 1Gb or 10Gb on it's SFP+ ports, but fortunately MikroTik makes a module that will negotiate a 10Gb connection on the SFP+ side, but allow more negotiation on the RJ45 side. The model is MikroTik S+R10 (Amazon Affiliate link).

Update - 11/04/2024

Virgin Media have now installed the fibre to our property (outside). Looks like we're on scheduled for the internal install on the 18th. Our end date for our current G.Fast internet from EE is the 19th. I've also noticed that recently EE have had a lot of drops and outages, causing diconnects for our streaming video etc which has been frustraiting. It has meant that I have now added local monitoring for latency and uptime within our LAN so that will be good to look at the performance of Virgin Media over the next 6-12 months.

Update - 18/04/2024

The FTTP has been completed. We now have 1Gb/s symetrical installed in to the house. Simon from region 20 was awesome with what I would guess is a non-standard install. Our comms area is two storeys up so not something that is normal, but he installed it perfectly! I'll do more of a write up soon, but wanted to note that the Hub 5X that was installed now has a 10Gb/s port on the back. So the specific MikroTik SFP+ module may not be needed but it did work fully for me in my UDM-Pro. Now excuse me, I need to go run Speedtests over and over to gawk at having this speed at home.