It's been a long haul (since beginning 2015) to get fibre into our estate (Broadacres Country Estate). When I started with this project, Vumatel and Greencom were already busy in Lonehill and moving towards Fourways.
When I contacted all the FTTH providers beginning of 2015, no-one had any interest (our estate has 230 free-standing units and 80% of them expressed interest) to run fibre into our estate. In August 2015 I then learned that Dark Fibre has literally circled our estate with fibre and ran it all the way through to Steyn City and Dainfern. MTN has started a fibre-project across the street (Cedar Lakes). I then again approached Greencom, Vumatel and a number of providers with a committed list of 120 signups and again no takers.
In November 2015 SADV approached us but neither their offering, their demand for a 5 year exclusivity and their lack of transparency (they said that they offered fibre with every major provider, but when I contacted MWeb, Afrihost, Vox, they knew nothing about it) was convincing. Eventually it turned out that their open-network and multi-ISP support was based on a letter of understanding with Vodacom without a tangible product offering or having signed up any ISP.
In January/February 2016 both Vodacom and MTN provided offers which were not only very expensive (especially out-of-bundle at R7/GB and no uncapped offering) but also restricted us to only their network without any chance of ever switching.
By March 2016 I was about to throw the towel when I reached out to Metrofibre and was surprised (and also suspicious) when they came back with "Sure, we can get you lit up before xmas". The initial discussions, site surveys and signing of letter of intent took longer than I hoped, but by mid June 2016 it was all project start date.
I am not sure what it technically entailed to get the mysterious fibre-cabinet installed close to our security office, but I watched people sitting under umbrellas for weeks which looked to me like splicing cables and running fibre to the individual houses. It turns out that the majority of our public sleeves and man-holes in the estate were filled up with sand and muck and it took Metrofibre quite a long time to clear them out in order to run cabling.
Beginning of November I got the call that the fibre-line will be pulled into my house. I unfortunately did not take pictures of the manhole itself, but they used a draw-wire to pull the fibre through the existing ducting (where also the Telkom line runs), ran it into the roof and then into the study where it was connected to a really boring looking white box (the MyPassport is there for size illustration) which is called the ONT (Optical Network Terminal):
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Within two weeks all houses received their ONT installed and in most cases this went smooth. In some rare cases the installers had to cut the Telkom cable (as the ducting was too think to pull the draw-wire through with the Telkom cable) and then use the Telkom cable as a draw-wire to pull the fibre and then use the draw-wire to pull the Telkom cable back and repatch the copper line (one resident said that his VDSL line worked faster after the engineers repatched it).
Today was the big day where the modem (it is a Calix 813G) was installed. This also was not very spectacular and looks like this:
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The Calix 813G:
Has 4 Gigabit ports and I chose the smaller version with 2.4Ghz Wifi as most of my "serious" equipment is wired and Wifi is only used for phones, tablets. Laptops are connecting through Airport Express which are running through wired switches connecting to the Calix. There is also a bigger Calix version available which has 5Ghz and I think more than 4 ports.
Once the Calix was installed the activation normally takes 12 hours (thanks to one awesome MetroFibre MyBB member I had my Service light flash within a few hours - thanks you ROCK!!!!). The Calix has all the typical router configurations you need (QoS, port-forwarding, DHCP, custom IP ranges, firewall, DMZ etc). It does however lack VPN functionality (my VPN sits behind the Calix via another device).
The configuration for me was really straight-forward, as I run my own DHCP, DNS and it was literally just necessary to lock down the Calix, configure MAC-filtering for the few wireless clients connecting to it.
Speedtests look awesome (I just took at 25Mbps fibre at the moment to get off Telkom and will then switch it up once Telkom/VOX is cancelled). Metrofibre does not have a customer portal yet (it is in the works), but does offer access to most major ISPs on their network (I might switch to Firestream in January once everything settles)
Over the last 2 years I learned:
- That I have no clue how fibre is configured and what technology is behind it
- That there are many "dodgy" FTTH providers out there and they make promises which they can not keep
- That many FTTH providers try to lock you into exclusivity
- That most FTTH providers have no interest in doing the groundwork (even after handing them over 120 confirmed signups which would have resulted in at least R150 K/pm many could not be bothered)
- That big providers such MWeb, Vodacom, MTN do not really care and have no flexibility
Speedtests (remember - this is on 25Mbps fibre uncapped) - I personally don't rely on those too much, as results are often very inconsistent:
Please note about speedtests: During both the 25mbps and 50mbps I ran the test "unclean" (kid was playing Overwatch/Steam, and a total of 8 devices connected)
Local - Jozi:
Local - to the mountain:
Intl - London:
Intl - New York:
Intl - Munich:
Switched to 50mbps - Jozi:
Mountain - 50mbps:
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