North Shore UFB Install

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rhysb

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#107746 18-Aug-2012 17:55

Thought I'd share some pics of my UFB install on the North Shore with Snap.

I signed up on Wednesday 1/8 when they announced their plans and the install was shceduled for Wednesday 8/8. Unfortunately Chorus had an issue with the cabinet, so they pushed it back to Friday 10/8. The guys arrived around 11am and worked through to 4:30pm, but didn't finish the install. They came back first thing on Monday to finish off inside and connect the ONT.

Unfortunately their was still an issue with the cabinet, so the ONT wasn't getting a connection. Apparently a power spike had taken out some gear at the Glenfield Exchange. It started working about mid-day on Tuesday.

The FAT. This one is mounted in the existing Chorus pit. A bit full of water too. Blue fibre cables connect the FAT to the cabinet.

Chorus Fibre roll. This runs from the house down to the FAT. This cable contains two Fibres, protected by various layers of insulation and kevlar. Apparently it's not as good as the cable that Chorus first started to use.

Each tray is for a houses fibre pair and they are coiled and joined.

Each FAT can connect about 24 houses.

The Splicer is used to join the fibres. Apparently very expensive. This one is worth about $10k.

The fibres are incredibly fine.

The black fibre that connects down to the FAT is joined to white fibre that runs into the house. This fibre also has two copper twisted pairs.

The fibre is joined to a short fibre lead that plugs into the ONT and doubles as the wall bracket for the ONT.

The red ligh means the ONT is not getting a signal from the cabinet. You don't want a red light.

Success! The light turns green and we are good-to-go.

I was previously on VDSL with Hosting Direct and had a pretty good connection, 40Mbps/10Mbps with pings of ~5ms. The plan I'm on with Snap is 100Mbps/50Mbps, but speedtests top out at about 40Mbps/30Mbps with pings of 25ms. I was actually expecting it to perform a bit better. Hopefully Snap can improve this.

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#674051 18-Aug-2012 18:36

Nice write up well done. I presume this is Albany?

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rhysb

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#674052 18-Aug-2012 18:38

You presume correctly :-)

mjb

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#674057 18-Aug-2012 18:46

Yes, very nice pics, and congrats... will be several years before I can get connected.

rhysb: ..... The Splicer is used to join the fibres. Apparently very expensive. This one is worth about $10k.

Try $30k ;)

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Zeon

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#674070 18-Aug-2012 19:50

Inspired me to email our ISP to enquire about connection. We are more than 15m from the street and in a MDU I think! Lol will be complicated.

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rhysb

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#674074 18-Aug-2012 20:19

Great. I guess the sooner you get the ball rolling on those ones the better.

Masada

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#674103 18-Aug-2012 22:41

The topology of GPON is radically different from DSL. In DSL your next IP hop from the home is the DSLAM at the cabinet (as I understand it). In GPON the next visible Layer 3 hop will be significantly farther back in the service provider network. Not always, of course, but certainly possible. It may be that the handover location of the UFB service you bought is somewhat farther from the speedtest than your VDSL service had been (simplified statement). I don't know anything about your service provider's network design. But if I were to hazard a guess to explain your performance I would say that the test tool may not be adequate for 100 meg tests and/or your route to the test server is being hampered by distance or bottlenecking.

My posts reflect my best attempt at understanding and do not represent the views of my employer.

ChrisNZL

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#674104 18-Aug-2012 23:18

Nice photos!

ashnizzle

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#676984 25-Aug-2012 23:33

are telecom doing any UFB trails? i remember there was something a while back where you could sign up or something, cant remember if i did

Zeon

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#676985 25-Aug-2012 23:58

I don't think so. They are apparently going to be ready to offers services sometime in 2013. Getting beaten to the punch by lots of other ISPs offering UFB NOW.

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Zeon

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#677020 26-Aug-2012 09:18

Masada: The topology of GPON is radically different from DSL. In DSL your next IP hop from the home is the DSLAM at the cabinet (as I understand it). In GPON the next visible Layer 3 hop will be significantly farther back in the service provider network. Not always, of course, but certainly possible. It may be that the handover location of the UFB service you bought is somewhat farther from the speedtest than your VDSL service had been (simplified statement). I don't know anything about your service provider's network design. But if I were to hazard a guess to explain your performance I would say that the test tool may not be adequate for 100 meg tests and/or your route to the test server is being hampered by distance or bottlenecking.

The DSLAM is not a layer 3 device. The next layer 3 hop you will see is most likely your providers DSL concentrator (or whatever they call it). UFB is the same, layer 2 all the way till after the handover with the ISP.

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Masada

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#677029 26-Aug-2012 09:38

I couldn't recall if the DSLAM had a gateway built in. Thanks for the clarity. I guess the fundamental difference being that DSL establishes a IP connection via the residential gateway within PPPoE type connection, but UFB will not. UFB will be establishing VLANs between the ONT and an Ethernet Switch. The VLANs will be presented to the Service Provider. Your home becomes part of the provider's LAN. Theoretically you could plug your PC right in to the ONT and pick up DHCP or whatever for IP address assignment.

My posts reflect my best attempt at understanding and do not represent the views of my employer.

rhysb

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#677085 26-Aug-2012 12:33

Why are they bothering with pppoe then? Or is that just to make their billing easier?

kyhwana2

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#677096 26-Aug-2012 12:58

That flash based speedtest isn't going to cut it for speedtests at 100mbit anymore. You'll need something like iperf in various places on the net.. or try grabbing an actual Linux ISO via bittorrent, a well seeded one, obviously.

sbiddle

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#677100 26-Aug-2012 13:07

rhysb: Why are they bothering with pppoe then? Or is that just to make their billing easier?

For ISP's offering Chorus services the UFB handover is virtually identical to the existing HSNS and EUBA based VDSL or ADSL2+, it's delivered using QinQ and in effect is a layer 2 bridge between the customer and the ISP network so anything goes.

PPPoE is in many ways the easiest way to offer services and offers compatibility with existing DSL based services. In many ways DHCP82 based DHCP is the best option, but each solution has pros and cons.

sorceror

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#677494 27-Aug-2012 11:00

kyhwana2: That flash based speedtest isn't going to cut it for speedtests at 100mbit anymore. You'll need something like iperf in various places on the net.. or try grabbing an actual Linux ISO via bittorrent, a well seeded one, obviously.

i've successfuly used the flash speedtest to test speeds up to a gigabit - the reason why the OP is not getting the full 100/50 is most likely due to his router.

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