For the last few years, I've been with Upp - full fibre to the home, gigabit up and down. It's been great.
Then, this year, I got a notification that they'd been bought out by Virgin Media, and the messaging has been ludicrously confused, nobody seems to know whether the symmetric speeds will be kept as they are, or if we'll be migrated to the crappy 100Mbit/s upstream they put on their normal service. With that in mind, I managed to get another local symmetric fibre provider (there's only one other, lightspeed.co.uk) to install, which they did on Tuesday.
First problem, which I realised immediately, is that they actively block port forwarding - that causes me massive headaches, as I need it for work (and the forum, occasionally). They say they'll get back to me within a couple of days, and I heard nothing more.
Got up this morning to find that the whole connection was down. Call customer services - "We don't have any engineers working and we can't provide you with any alternative".
FFS. They wouldn't even attempt to diagnose the problem from their end. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to cancel my previous connection, and given the port forwarding issue I put off cancelling just in case. So...now I've got the old fibre cable coming in through the window, and I've told Lightspeed to come and collect their shitty Nokia router and remove the cable.
Unfortunately, this means my only remaining option is to switch to Virgin Media when they take over the connection. Bloody annoying.
There is no point to this thread, other than me ranting and complaining. Not a great start to the long weekend.
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Near as I can tell, it's because they're proxying or NATing all the traffic - the router IPv4 address is completely different to the IP address external services see, although weirdly they're both public IP addresses. They say it's because there aren't enough IPv4 addresses, but then they still NAT all the IPv6 addresses anyway, so there isn't even a solution there.
EDIT: Looks like Virgin have XPS-PON built into their hub, rather than the separate ONT and router I've currently got with Upp. On the other hand, the hub does support a DMZ of sorts (basically just a host on the local network that has all its ports exposed), so I'll most likely set up an old NUC with OPNsense or similar and put it in their faux-DMZ, then run my network behind that. It does seem like their Hub 5x (the only one supporting full fibre) actually has a 10Gbe port, which is awesome - they appear to be the only ones who've realised that local wired networks might be more than gigabit (I've got 2.5Gbe throughout the house, with a couple of SFP+ ports for 10Gbe if I ever need it on every switch).
Good luck.
I refused to give them permission to cross my land a year or two back because they won’t let other companies use their cable, so if you let them in first you’re stuffed for using anyone else. Unfortunately BT “have no current plans” to cable our area. Their fibre to the box/copper to the house works well enough, luckily.
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Obviously the answer is to avoid ISPs that do this sort of thing (which you had done until this change of circumstances was forced on you!)
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Great, I thought, I'll have that. Went to check out and it wouldn't let me. Phoned customer support and they were baffled and they wanted to know why I thought I could have full fibre.
Because your website is telling me I can, that's why. They then told me it must be a mistake because full fibre isn't coming to our area for a while yet. Just checked and ETA is December 2026! FFS!
I find this wholly crap because I was here only a few months ago when a big BT Openreach van parked up at the end of our path with a massive coil on a trailer. I popped out to ask what they were doing and I was pleased to learn they were putting fibre under the street. We just happened to have a telecoms manhole just outside our gate.
Quite why it's going to take them another few years to connect it up and make it operational is beyond me.
So we're on a hybrid fibre thing, download speeds are ok most of the time at about 60+ Mpbs, but upload speeds are painfully slow, as I'm finding out trying to add a load of GoPro footage to the cloud! I swear they've throttled it too, earlier in the week it wasn't so bad, but I added about 110GB of data last night and it's still uploading 16 hours later.
I have another 500GB or so to add once that's complete, could be here for weeks!
If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!
There is no 'H' in Aych, you know that don't you? ~ Wife
Turns out there is an H in Haych! ~ Sporky
Bit of trading feedback here.
I mean, I've got 8 x 3TB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf that are never going to get used now that I've moved to SSDs. Grab a SAS card for £25, get some cables for another £20, and repurpose an old PC that's lying around (or get one for less than £100). Very little effort to turn that into a NAS.
There is no 'H' in Aych, you know that don't you? ~ Wife
Turns out there is an H in Haych! ~ Sporky
Bit of trading feedback here.
There is no 'H' in Aych, you know that don't you? ~ Wife
Turns out there is an H in Haych! ~ Sporky
Bit of trading feedback here.