This is surreal: We are getting fibre to the home!!!

Red Squirrel said:
Haha there is a transport fibre cable that passes very close to my house, it's always bugged me too that it's RIGHT THERE and I can't use it. Heck, if it requires a OME fibre shelf to handle the transport/splitting I'd host it. The service we're getting is even better though as it's 1 strand per customer right from the CO, much like POTS works.

The system appears to be all Alcatel-Lucent based. I'm not too familiar with the tech but it looks quite sharp to see all those fibre shelves. I think there is more equipment to it out of town though, what we have here is probably just termination equipment and transport.

And yeah with this much bandwidth I'll definitely stream lot of stuff now. I might even download the internet so I can have an offline copy right here. :D
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Interesting.

That's the company platform we work on for cell tower backhaul. I wonder what it is? The system we work on is Alcatel 7750 aggregators(or Juniper MX480) from 7210 CPE. The 7210 can feed 10gig links to the 7750, so I'd guess you would have another type of neighborhood level switch in the access layer. (looks like it is probably 73xx gear, specifically for FTTH) look like this ?

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I'm in Austin, and Google Fiber's coming here within the year, but, that's not necessarily a good thing for me, as I work for a competitor ISP.

The company I worked for previously, installed the first fiber to the home network in Texas. In fact, I built the training program for the field install techs for the pole to house drop. We provisioned 622mb/sec to the first friendly... about 9 years ago. Unfortunately, they ran out of $$$, and with a family to feed, I moved on. One of the most interesting networks I've worked on. Marconi fiber-in-the-loop equipment, that is still bringing 100meg service to about a 10th of Austin and San Antonio.

Before that, I worked for Alcatel, deploying ATT's DSL equipment(ASAM1000s) in their CO's, so Alcatel has been at this a long time.
 
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The 1st one I believe is the box we have, though there are more ports and there is a POTS port too.

Interestingly, there is 2 10gig links going out of town to more equipment. From what I understand the stuff in our CO is just mux equipment. There is also some passive muxing happening at the light level, I'm not sure where those boxes are, I think they are throughout the neighborhood, there are beige corning cabinets, I think it's probably those.



They're getting closer!



This pic taken from my house. Guessing they'll continue to run along that street which connects to mine. My wires are behind the house so they'll pull the cables through. I think by end of week they might have my street done too. I did not get my notification yet to schedule my install but I think I may possibly get it this week. I can't wait!
 
So up/down is nice and all, but what is the ping like on fiber? That might be a stupid question. I don't know yet. Feel free to let me know.
 
LostStorm said:
@ Red Squirrel

Any further updates
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I saw them at the other end of my area yesterday morning, now they are back around where that pic was, but they are now pulling cable to one of the side streets.

It's hard to tell now what order they are going in as they seem kinda all over the area. They did not do my street yet, but from what I've been told they do multiple streets a day at a pretty quick pace, so I imagine they'll have mine done by end of week. They are also working past 5 so they could even do mine today depending on their order.

At that point I'll probably get called to schedule the actual drop install to get the service.

A few of my coworkers got theirs already, I can't wait! Lot of people can't get it though. Sucks. They only do overhead as it's too costly and too much logistical issues doing underground.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I cannot believe this is actually happening and I never thought I'd live to see this, but it's been officially announced that we will be getting fibre to the home service here! It has TV, internet, and phone in one fibre stand that terminates to a termination box that has it's own battery backup. The internet service will be 50mb down and 30mb up. This is just incredible. Will be a huge upgrade from my current 8/1 connection.

I work for the ISP so I knew about this for a while as I saw each piece of equipment go in, but I could not talk about it till recently. It feels like this is all a dream, I just can't believe we're actually getting this. I'm not sure when the actual installs are going to take place, and they're not quite done running all the cabling throughout the city yet, but the fibre shelves are up and fully operational. I'm so excited, I can't wait to get hooked up!
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I wanna feel this feeling :(
 
Meanwhile in central Philadelphia, I can choose between Comcast cable or Verizon 4/1 DSL. US infrastructure sucks. I wouldn't mind sharing that feeling either.
 
TBH we're one of very few areas in Canada that gets to have this, I'm still amazed at the fact we can get this. The US is light years ahead of Canada, just look at the speed test thread with everyone and their 100mpbs+ connections and stuff. The competition here can give up to 200/10 with shared coax though, but it's shared, and it's only 10 upload. They also cap it. Though the fibre service I'm getting does have a cap for the service that's faster than 50/30, so I will stick with the 50/30, which still blows away the 8/1 adsl I have now. :D I keep being scared I'm going to wakeup and this is all a dream.

Worse, I'll wake up, and it will be year 2000 again, with dialup. :eek: *piches self* OUCH! Ok, this is real. :D
 
For whatever its worth, the DSL I've had for 6 years has been a 3/768 line that was under provisioned to 2.6/328 to maintain sync. I don't very far outside of Atlanta, Ga. If you arent right in a metro area youre toast in a majority of the US.
 
It's not super rare in Canada. Here in SK they are rolling out province wide FTTH and I know Telus in AB has been doing some as well. Just need to come to the west ;) .
 
I feel for guys still stuck on adsl, I've had ftth since around 2000. The speeds are great but the best thing is reliability, connection has dropped only once that I can remember and that was due to me unplugging the power supply to the ont.
 
I find it funny that living in the states now right in the center of a major city (3 blocks from city hall...), I have a slower internet connection than I had back in 1998 while still living in Helsinki, Finland. The only other option here is cable.
 
Where I live we have no Cable, just ADSL 2+ I get between 1/1 and 3/1, we have limited GPRS, no 3G and no 4G. I live about 3 miles from a large town

As the world goes more IP its is now starting to limit access to certain services (streaming TV etc) and the lack of mobile coverage is a real pain as I have to leave my phone is a certain part of the house. There really is a massive divide between areas, some areas have 75/20, 100/10, 200/50 from multiple providers. For me Its like going back in time almost 13 years!
 
Jay_oasis said:
Where I live we have no Cable, just ADSL 2+ I get between 1/1 and 3/1, we have limited GPRS, no 3G and no 4G. I live about 3 miles from a large town

As the world goes more IP its is now starting to limit access to certain services (streaming TV etc) and the lack of mobile coverage is a real pain as I have to leave my phone is a certain part of the house. There really is a massive divide between areas, some areas have 75/20, 100/10, 200/50 from multiple providers. For me Its like going back in time almost 13 years!
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This is where it's kind of nice to have a monopoly to some degree. For years there was a monopoly telco here that everyone had and they had no choice of anyone else. They eventually allowed other providers like Shaw and Access but by then, everyone had and just stuck with the original Telco, Sasktel. They then rolled out DSL in the 90's and since everyone had the infrastructure and they had fiber EVERYWHERE since the 70's, they were able to provide very stable DSL and decent speeds to towns of just 200 people even. Everything has been FTTC since the start. Now they are rolling out FTTH with 200/50 packages to the 8 main cities which is 80% of the population.

You always get the speeds you pay for with them. They did it right from the start with Fiber to all cabinets. Shaw and Access are both cable and they can't even compete. they are always slow at peak times, constantly have DNS server issues and outages.
 
They started my street! Cable is partially run, it's mostly hanging on the ground but all the temp hooks are there. Another step closer to 50m/30m internet!

 
My install is scheduled! Getting it on the 23rd. I'm like a kid waiting for Christmas. Do I leave milk and cookies for the technician? :D
 
That's a plan. Beer BEFORE he starts, then talk him into the 250 meg package for the same price. :D
 
Well this sucks, was suppose to be today, I got up early because I worked night shift so normally I'd sleep till like 2-4pm. I called in just to confirm that it's today, and turns out there was a screw up, and it's only September 9! This soooo sucks. I prepared everything and was fully ready for today, not to mention I sacrificed sleep so I can be up and ready when they come. The anticipation was killing me now I have to wait all this time. It's funny since I had a bad feeling. It was just too good to be true, that I was getting it so soon. I guess I just have to be happy I'm getting it at all. Lot of people can't get it because the utilities are underground.
 
Drop and NID was installed on Friday (grey box at bottom, Bell one is the existing copper NID), the rest of the install is tomorrow.

 
You guys with FTTH are lucky (although everybody in a location other than a mine shaft should really have access to this kind of infrastructure by now surely!) - I am still stuck on ADSL2+ (until October 2013) with a face palming 5Mbps down / 1Mbps up. :eek:
 
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Tech is here! This all feels like a dream. By the end of the day I will have 50/30 internet.

He has to rerun the drop though, apparently they broke the fibre when they ran it on Friday.
 
@ Red Squirrel
:D So dreams do come true
Hopefully it will be completed fast and we can see speed test results soon
 
My DSL:

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Just swapped to the new net. Tech is finalizing stuff.

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:biggrin: This is awesome!

I got torrents going on too.
 
Awesome. But I assume they have plans faster than 50/30? FTTH is cool, but those speeds are pretty much midrange for existing DOSCSIS 3.0 deployments.

Also - 32ms pings stink...
 
Oh yeah it goes up to like 250 though the upload is still 30, and they cap it. 50/30 is the fastest available that's not capped.

And yeah ping does seem a tad high considering even the DSL one is lower. The issue I think is that the service is "muxed" all the way to the east coast before it actually goes out so it adds a bit of latency.
 
The equipment:


Alcatel ONT and UPS (I added that board myself, I don't think they provide it, but they do provide the little shelf)


phone splitter, one wire going down to the patch panel (just below that)


Modem/router. The TVs and my firewall plug into this. That plugs into the ONT.


The HD box / PVR.
 
Got it. So its FTTH using GPON/ONT design (similar to FIOS). Mux'd downlink towards you and a dedicated uplink (which is why the uplink stays 30Mbps regardless of plan).

If they are carrying it back to the east coast the ping could reflect using the wrong "speedtest" server. Speedtest will select based on where you are - but you really want to use a server near where your ISP meets up with the rest of The Internet. If you can figure out what city they are in you might try re-setting your speedtest server to one nearer to that in order to get a more accurate "ping" time.
 
I think it's doing that by default because I'm no where near St. John which is what it picked.

I wonder if the double NAT would cause latency, probably not much though. I have to use the router/modem as that's what handles stuff like making the TV work.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I think it's doing that by default because I'm no where near St. John which is what it picked.

I wonder if the double NAT would cause latency, probably not much though. I have to use the router/modem as that's what handles stuff like making the TV work.
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I wouldn't be surprised if they are sending the IPTV on a different VLAN which is why you "need to use their router." You may be able to use your own if it supports QinQ. That is if it actually is sent over a different VLAN...

Usually the internet comes on VLAN 35 and the IPTV needs to bridged between internally and externally and is on VLAN 34. What you can do is create your VLANs on the WAN interface, assign DHCP to vlan 35, but don't give vlan 34 an IP and just bridge it to say an internal NIC dedicated for IPTV. Then you have to set QOS with a mark of 4 for the IPTV. This should be doable with your PFSense box.
 
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I was reading that about the vlans, but the tech was telling me it does not actually matter what port you plug into, so to me I can't see how it would be vlans. But it IS separate streams, since the internet wont affect TV, and vise versa. I need to read up more on it. I eventually want to be able to bypass that box.

On the other hand, the double NAT will come in handy when I want to test VPN related stuff since I can get an "outside" connection. With DSL I could just plug a switch straight in the modem but pretty sure this service is mac locked and I can't pull multiple IPs. But still got lot of playing around to do. I did not even login to the admin interface of the router yet.
 
What do you mean it doesn't matter what port? On the Actiontec? The TVs, what? Where do the runs for the tvs run to? Does it matter what port on the Actiontec they plug into? I'm talking about completely bypassing the Actiontec.
 
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