Previously, I blogged about my decision to sign up for Ultra Fast Broadband.
A few days before Christmas, Chorus sent a technician out to the house to scope out the preparation for the actual installation of UFB a week later.
The technicican asked us where we wanted the fibre cable to terminate into the house. A few years ago we had our whole house cabled out with CAT 6 network cables, which allows us to share our network into all of our rooms. We then converted our study wardrobe top shelf into a network patch panel. Each of our bedrooms has a network port and from the network patch panel we can provide it connectivity to our network.
The Chorus man then dug up the cabling on the front edge of our property. The green cables I’ve circled in red are fibre, and are connected to the cabinets that supply our suburb internet connectivity. One of the green cables is for us; the other will be for our neighbour when they get UFB installed. The other black cables are the old copper connections.
Yes, I did this with my phone Photo: Unknown
As we live in a fairly new suburb we have 20mm cabling pipe. This is tubing from the corner point of your property to your house. A 20mm pipe means that they should be able install the copper and fibre to the house with little effort. The technician told me that most older houses (a.k.a. those built prior to five years ago) only have cabling of less than 20mm installed – not enough room to install both copper and fibre.
This is where your driveway may have to be dug up to install the 20mm piping. Keeping the copper is considered an emergency measure, as during a power cut, unless you have an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) machine, the fibre connection will go down, but copper will continue to work.
Chorus will pull out the copper if you ask them, but some ISPs will route your internet through your new fibre and your phone line through the copper. (There are some other reasons as to when Chorus may pull out the copper line to your house.) We’ve chosen an ISP who provides our phone service over the fibre connection, which is referred to as Voice over IP (VoIP) phone.
After this first visit, which took approximately an hour, a Chorus technician returned to work on our property the weekend before the actual installation. He installed a box on the outside of the house for the telecommunications cables; we took off the cover and took some photos for you...
By the day of the install, my excitement had grown.
The Chorus team arrived at about 9am, and they left almost a full seven hours later. For me, it was a little bit of a stressful time. The Chorus technician kept bursting out that our communications cabinet (where we wanted all the cables to terminate inside our house) was too small, in the wrong place and that the room was too hot. He also struggled to get into our roof space to install the fibre, though we knew it was possible because we’ve had electricians installing other cables in the house before. I do see how less tech-savvy people could end up with boxes and cables where they don’t want them.
In the end, the technician called a colleague to come and help him, and they finished the job together. The technician also mentioned to us that our copper cable by the street was not insulated well and was degrading already, so it was lucky we’d signed up for fibre, or we may have experienced poor internet speeds without knowing why.
Once it was all installed, the technician plugged in the modem Snap had sent us before hand and got on the phone to someone. Green lights started to flicker and we had internet. I was itching to do a speed test and see what our download and upload speeds were.
Our connection speed on ADSL2+, before we started:
My new speed with a wireless connection:
My new speed with a wired connection:
Some key things to note: My ping has gone from 31ms to 7ms. Ping, in a basic sense, is the measurement of how long it takes to connect to servers; the lower it is, the faster it connects. For gaming this is very important. So the first thing I did after testing out YouTube and doing some speed tests was to jump on my Xbox 360 and try some first-person shooters online. It was great: I was able to keep up with Australian and US players, and I got knifed in the back less.
One last thing we saved up to purchase was a UPS – an emergency measure in case our power went out. It won’t keep everything running, but will allow us to keep our internet and phone going for an hour or so until we can power it down. And wouldn’t you know it, about a week after we purchased it, our suburb had an outage. It was a short outage, but we were able to keep our internet and phoneline going.
So that was our fibre installation process. I felt it was pretty painless overall. Both Chorus and Snap were pretty open and willing to answer all of our questions. Here’s to all installs going this well.