Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => FTTC and FTTP Issues => Topic started by: spudgun on May 26, 2020, 03:36:20 PM
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I'm thinking of saving a few quid (approx £25 a month) and going back to 80/20 fttc from my current g.fast connection, but staying with my current ISP, Zen.
I am out of the minimum contract, so no issue there and I have spoken to the provisioning team today at Zen as when I went from 80/20 to g.fast they royally screwed it up and left me without a connection for several days as they were very new to all things g.fast and whilst i was all synced up etc. when the Openreach engineer left no authentication could be sent and it took nearly a week for Zen to figure out what they had done wrong when provisioning the regrade and to get it working. I thought I would ask them, in advance, if this would be easy as I don't want to risk a repeat of the previous downtime.
The response I got was that this is straightforward and "this is done remotely at the exchange".
Now, and I may be wrong here, but I thought a g.fast connection took a different route to a fttc one and that a g.fast line is connected via the pod on the side of my pcp and not the fibre cabinet that is about 40 yards away from it and, as such, if I want to switch back to fttc then there will need to be work done at the cabinet level and this isn't something that can be done remotely?
Have I got the wrong end of the stick here or should my alarm bells be going off and i shouldn't really progress this as I could be heading for trouble?
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The response I got was that this is straightforward and "this is done remotely at the exchange".
I cannot see how that can be true. Work will be required in the cabinet to re-jumper the relevant tie-cables.
Have I got the wrong end of the stick here . . .
No, not at all. If I was in your situation I would be asking for Zen to put that statement in writing, with a signature from an appropriate manager or director.
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Thank you very much for that, I thought as much.
I do have that statement in writing as it has come from an email exchange earlier today and I'm now thinking of how best to phrase a reply.....
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It definitely needs a visit to the cabinet to change the tie pairs.
No need for an engineer to be booked to visit your premises so that might be making Zen customer services think it's remote work.
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Thanks John, I'll try and find someone who knows what they are talking about at Zen tomorrow and see what they say
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Quick update, this isn't going particularly well. Trying to find anyone within Zen who has the level of understanding of whether a regrade from g.fast to fttc can be done and, if so, how it would be done on their ordering system in order to trigger the right series of jobs for both Openreach and Zen to do in order to make this happen is proving to be rather frustrating.
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I wonder if asking on the AAISP IRC chat might at least give you some clues of where to point Zen staff?
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In a word, the answer to this question is 'no'
Zen don't seem to have any systems in place to allow for this type of transfer and I'm really struggling to get to talk to someone there that understands the situation
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@spudgun
Were you able to move back to 80/20 FTTC? I'd be intrerested to understand how helpful Zen support was...
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All i know is they apparently use BTwWBC for g.fast but tend to have their own gea cable links for fttc... so its kind of like migration to llu.
My daughter is also likely giving up their g.fast at some point in the future but will probably move to another ISP.
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@spudgun
Were you able to move back to 80/20 FTTC? I'd be intrerested to understand how helpful Zen support was...
I finally managed to speak with someone at Zen who has a grasp of the situation and we've talked it through today and he has assured me that their provisioning system can handle this type of transfer and it will trigger the necessary Openreach work at the cabinet to move the tied pairs. I'm going to sleep on it and make a final decision as to whether to switch in the morning.
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I had no doubt Zen could have the necessary order.
The CS rep suggesting everything was done remotely seems to have caused the initial confusion.
That's the G.Fast rolled out officially stopped for now (they will have a think about it and look at it again next year).
I'm sure for those who benefit from it it's been welcome but in my opinion the rollout was a bit of a disaster.
Pods taking over 2 years to be activated (some still sitting idle), pods being overbuilt with FTTP (some before the pod was even live) and pods that serve less than 10 properties.
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Having slept on it, I decided to make the switch this morning and I am tracking the progress of the order online.
It seemed to go through several initial stages, very quickly, but has been stuck here for the last 7 hours: "Wait for response from WBC Gateway - FAILED"
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j0hn stopped by openreach nationwide?
Leicester situation with openreach ultrafast is really odd, no announced FTTP in entire city and county even though is ultrafast competition with cityfibre and VM.
Announced g.fast but according to an openreach employee I know in the area not a single cabinet has had a pod installed. Seems odd, but of course we do have covid19 issues at the moment so there is likely some disruption.
I am wondering if the lack of g.fast activity is potentially indicating a shift to FTTP in the area, and hoping an announcement will confirm that, but no new cities announced by openreach for ages now. :(
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Yes, nationwide.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/06/openreach-confirm-g-fast-broadband-rollout-paused-until-2021.html
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Quick update, despite promises that this would work fine and that the systems could handle it, it took several days to get past all the errors that were thrown up in the ordering system and to get an install date of the 13th.
Wonder if it will all actually work when it gets transferred over - i'm sceptical but hopeful!
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This seems to have gone without issue this morning :)
xdslcmd info --stats
xdslcmd: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Retrain Reason: 0
Last initialization procedure status: 0
Max: Upstream rate = 31883 Kbps, Downstream rate = 86600 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 19999 Kbps, Downstream rate = 74997 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: VDSL2 Annex B
VDSL2 Profile: Profile 17a
TPS-TC: PTM Mode(0x0)
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 6.1 15.4
Attn(dB): 12.1 0.0
Pwr(dBm): 13.0 -1.2
To my uneducated eye, that looks like a standard interleved 'new' fttc connection and hopefully g.inp and 3db will follow over the course of the next couple of days to hit the full 80/20 or have i overlooked anything?
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This seems to have gone without issue this morning :)
That is looking good. And no, you have not overlooked anything.
You are "nearly there" with a 6 dB SNR margin . . . Expect G.Inp activation and a stepwise reduction to the SNR margin to follow shortly.
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That is looking good. And no, you have not overlooked anything.
You are "nearly there" with a 6 dB SNR margin . . . Expect G.Inp activation and a stepwise reduction to the SNR margin to follow shortly.
Anyone who gives up G.fast doesn't deserve full VDSL sync rate. :P
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So, it has been 10 days now since the switch and everything has gone to plan. G.Inp and what I believe to be full speed was achieved about 40 hours after the switchover (just after midnight on the Wednesday after a 9.30am switch on the Monday).
Overall, the trickiest thing here was getting quality information from Zen and being sure that their systems would cope with the change, but once that was done everything went fine. Pings are a little higher on FTTC (12-14ms) rather than G.Fast (10-12) and, of course throughput speeds are much lower (29 meg a sec on G.Fast to 9.24 on FTTC), but in terms of the majority of my day to day usage there is no significant difference and it is only when downloading a game or a large update from Steam that I notice anything. I've gone back to my trusty HG612+AC68U and have saved about £300 a year and I might add to that by selling the MT992 on the bay if they are still going for a few quid.
Hopefully this thread will help someone else if they ever decide to do something similar in the future or go for a G.Fast product and wonder if they will ever be able to make it back to FTTC after their minimum contract expires.
Thank you, as well, to all of those that have offered their opinion and advice on this thread, it has been very much appreciated.
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I'm pleased to know that the outcome is satisfactory.