VM putting their prices through the roof caused me to stumble across Yayzi, so signed up for 2.3g pro etc and was given an installation date of 5th of March. I’m pretty excited at the prospect of getting these kind of speeds.
Couple of questions if anyone can assist please…
1 - A driveway will need to be negotiated to bring the service to my house, VM had to do this too - how will this be arranged? The road where the backbone is located is at the road at the end of a drive, with my neighbours property between us and said road. VM had to run via our neighbour’s property under some concrete and via a drain etc…
2 - When I setup the DD it stated that there will be a £99 setup fee, however I would like to use my own router - I dont see an option for this?
Generally if crossing a 3rd parties land, you need a signed wayleave agreement, but if ducting for example is already in place, then you should be fine.
I’ve had two different fibre installs at this point from two different providers, generally the most direct path is taken, grass is cut in at an angle and lifted as opposed to trenched (remember this if doing any work in future as it’s shallow and zero protection to the tube the fibre sits in!), block paving or patio/cement tends to be cut/lifted as appropriate - everyone is using 3rd party installers, so quality can and does vary, but they seem to prefer a simple life and the less disruption required, the happier they are. Discuss it with them on the day if you have a specific route in mind and obviously get the neighbours input if they need to do any destructive work on that property. In my case, slab’s were reinstated with sand/cement to make good at one property and the other was just grass so no issue.
DD wise contact support directly before they send you the hardware and ask them not to and for the charge to be removed, but do it ASAP as the router tends to ship quite quickly iirc.
Unfortunately not, it went underneath next doors front window just as they were having block paving done so the timing was perfect. It’s all been concreted down now so any new cable would need to be done via a new route, which would mean bringing concrete up. Gut feeling is it’s going to be a no go.
Complete balls us up here, Cityfibre turned up yesterday to install presumably and the wife mistakenly sent them packing. Long story but some confusion over what we had agreed when we were looking at ISP’s etc.
Anyway, what is the quickest way for me to get in touch with customer services to correct things?
Router wise the supplied HX220 on the gigabit packages is surprisingly not awful, I normally run Untangle or OPNSense, but for basic functionality, I actually quite like the TP-Link kit. 2.5Gb gets a little more interesting though, the cheapest option is the Yayzi supplied router at £99, after that it’s something like the Flint2 running OpenWRT, the SMB TP-Link stuff is twice the price and usually brings you into the Omada ecosystem (think Ubiquiti Unifi but not for posers). You can of course go with a Topton box - can we please stop calling them NUC’s as they are not a NUC just because they are small - but you’re then looking at OPN/Untangle/OWRT/IPFire anyway and adding wifi yourself. The catch is you ideally want the newer i226, but support on some of those is not available, so i225 rev c. becomes the next best choice bare metal. As long as the router OS supports WAN VLAN tagging, it’ll work though, and if it doesn’t, then workarounds exist (Proxmox tagging VLAN 911 on virtual interfaces for example).
So would you say the supplied router is no good for the 2.5gig package then? as I have 2.5gig wireless adapters and Ethernet for PCs etc so would want to best possible wireless speeds
The 2.5Gb router is the EX820v, nothing obviously wrong with it and it should do what most people need from a router and more. My usage isn’t atypical, so flip the question, what do you need that isn’t possible on the supplied router and i’ll suggest an alternative?
Also irrespective of who you are with and whatever kit you buy, no reasonable person is trying to do fast/low latency data transfers via wifi. You run a cable. Wifi is a convenience for mobile devices and IoT.
Yeah so unfortunately it’s not possible to run Ethernet to both computers as the internet box I have installed now is the opposite side of house and Ethernet is out the question unless somehow cityfibre can install elsewhere. I transfer large files & Movies etc for work as I do alot of editing. Also I will have PS5,Xbox,Media server, 3 iPhones also my partners laptop which will be connected most days for work. I also stream via Twitch.
I have one of the N100 NUCs as well (from Aliexpress) - works perfectly; significant upgrade from my old Celeron J1900 based NUC, hopefully it lasts just as long too.
It feeds a bunch of 2.5Gb+10Gb SFP no-name switches which are also surprisingly good (I am sure that a branded switch would have far greater backplane bandwidth but I’m not dropping £500 per switch to get it!) and they power and feed a number of Unifi APs around the house for coverage. I will say that if I wanted outright speed, Unifi wouldn’t be the way I’d go for APs but, again, you’re spending several times the money to get faster 4x4 MIMO or greater APs.
I did spend a week chasing my tail over incredibly low upstream bandwidth from just one Windows laptop … but that turned out to be the horrid Intel WiFi NIC (in the end I had a brainwave and disabled Large Send Offload in Device Manager - upstream went from 0.5Mb to 300Mb via WiFi!)…
Then unfortunately, you are stuck, as wifi is a technically horrible solution to your problem no matter what you buy or who you’re with. The reason nobody moves data in volume via wifi because the latency and variability sucks and is beyond your control, it just can’t compete with a cable, be that using Ubiquiti, Rukus, OpenWRT or Aruba based 2.5Gbe AP’s or a random box from TP-Link.
In terms of ‘can’t’ have you thought about external runs round the property if possible and back in on the other side? What about up and into the loft space and then back down? Flat cable (it’s not ideal) under the edge of carpets or behind skirting? I managed to loose almost a full box (305m) of bright purple 5e in a house from the late 1700’s without too much effort, it just took a little lateral thinking.
Obviously it really might not be an option for you which is fair enough, but you’ll have a much better time wired than over wifi, even if it’s only to get the router to a better position relative to the workstations.
I could possibly go up through the loft area and back down to the spare room and setup router there once installed. To be honest I have never thought of doing this. Thanks for reply you have helped a lot👍
Pull out the stops to go wired, just had this argument with the old man. He wanted a wifi security camera to avoid cabling, didn’t listen to me in the end, and went wireless. Security and stability issues from day one. The protocol overheads with csma/ca in wireless transmissions are the reasons why people don’t use it in secure environments or for moving large volumes of data around - just can’t rely on it.
PS - When you run the cabling, don’t just run one either!
