As regular readers of GNC will recall from the first episode, I need to upgrade my current broadband connection to something faster in order to move from Sky TV to Freeview and streaming. My existing data connection is provided via an old-school copper telephone line and maxes out at around 30 Mb/s. This isn’t much better than the minimum needed to stream 4K UHD, so with two gaming children in the household, an upgrade is definitely needed. It will help considerably on those days when both my wife and I are working from home and need to be on Teams calls.
Fortunately, full fibre connections have been advertised for my neighbourhood so for relatively little additional money (extra £8), I’m able to go from 30 Mb/s to 500 Mb/s. Order placed!
And today’s the day that I get that new connection. I’m not too sure how it’s going to work and how the fibre connection will be made as it’s all underground. I’m hoping that there won’t be too much digging up the path or drilling holes in walls (spoiler alert: there isn’t).
“J” from BT Openreach turned up right on time and got to work. On opening up the master socket (that’s where the phone line comes into the house) in my hallway, he was able to run a fish wire through a duct from my house back to a junction box. You can see the yellow wire disappearing down the duct in the picture. No digging or drilling required at all but the weather was terrible – I did feel sorry for him when he was out in the rain.
The fibre was then pulled back from the box to the hall, where J fitted a new termination unit in the place of the master socket. He then did a bit of configuration work and collaboration with colleagues to turn the connection on. By the way, I make no apologies for the wallpaper.
After that, it was simply a case of getting a new modem / router out of the box and plugging it in. Total downtime was about an hour. Great job by J.
Inevitably, I had to enter the new password for the wireless network onto all my devices to get back online – I didn’t know I had so many – and I use Devolo’s GigaGate bridge system to deliver high speed connections round the house to devices that think they have a wired connection. Even though it’s about 7 years old now, it still works really well.
I’ve been running a few speed tests and I’m getting the advertised 500 Mb/s. When I started in business back in the 1990s, the whole office ran off a 2 Mb/s network and now I have 500 Mb/s to my home. How times have changed.
Streaming apps on my TVs are definitely snappier when starting programmes. So far, it’s all looking good and the journey away from Sky TV seems well in hand. Next up is some new hardware.