Fibre’s coming (to my) home

Part 0

No, it’s not football this time but a fibre line into my house. A German telco operator offered to install an FTTH line directly into my house at no cost, the only thing is that I have to buy internet and phone access from them for a minimum of 2 years. Since I will get a higher bandwidth at the same price as my current DSL contract the decision to sign up was easy.

Part 1

I ordered the fibre line in January 2023 online and I was told that the installation will happen in Q4/23. So a bit of time to wait for it. No urgent need because the 50/10 MBit/s ADSL contracted line (that’s 50 MBit/s in download and 10 MBit/s in upload direction) works great at 58/12 Mbit/s. No reason to complain.

Part 2

So Q4 is a long time to go from January and I never heard anything from the telco company until I came back home one day in early October and found the walkway in front of my house ripped apart and an armada of workers busy digging in the ground and dropping empty conduits to carry the actual fibre.

Because the telco company did not inform me nor my neighbors I was a bit worried that my order somehow got lost in the process. So I asked one of the workers, the only thing he could answer was, that he does not speak German. But he called one of his colleagues. After a bit of back and forth they showed me the end of the conduit in front of my house that one day shall carry the actual fibre. It was simply buried under a bush in our front yard. Time to drop blood pressure.

Apparently, no one told them how to use ear protectors when working in loud environments. It looks like they think it’s a vital part of or for the machine.

Anyway, by the end of the day the walkway was back in the condition it was in the morning. Great job.

Part 3

Four weeks later I was surprised to see them digging up the walkway again. Since one or two of the workers were discussing and measuring the depth of the empty conduit, I was wondering what the hell they were doing. It turned out, that they did not dig deep enough in the first round, so they had to redo the job and add another 20cm.

Part 4

Nothing happened in the coming months. It was March 6th 2024, when the company doing all the work called me and said, they will show up tomorrow to bring the fibre into the house. I asked them if they always do the planning from one day to the next or if I could get some lead time because I had to remove some stuff and prepare the work in my cellar. They declined that they can do that. Well, what can I say. The next day, they opened the front yard and brought the cable into the house.

Part 5

The company called again and said, that on March 20th they will install the first part of the home installation. Simply the passive point where the fibre from the street terminates and an in-house fibre patch cable will be attached to reach the fibre modem. The guy was done in 45 minutes, so no big deal. He was Greek too, but at least spoke decent English. But of course, the poor guy did not have any more information about the next steps.

During the next days, I installed a new power socket close to where I want my fibre modem to be installed in the cellar.

Part 6

A few days later, I received a letter from my current operator stating that the contract will end on April 15th. No information from the new operator that they will finish the work (the modem is still missing) until then.

Part 7

April 3rd and still no sign from the new operator. So I called their customer support to figure out what is going on. After contacting their sub-contractor (the company with the Greek people who does the actual work) for some more information, they stated that I will get a call from them and that they will install the modem until April 12th. If they do not get the fibre line up and running until April 15th, I will be without internet and telephone in the house. I saw two problems arising:

1. All members of the family will have no access to mails as they are hosted on a server in the house and
2. this situation will probably last until late April, because I will be out of the house during that time.

Meanwhile, I found out, that one of my neighbors got his modem installed but it appears to be not working properly. Fun times ahead.

Part 8

April 12th and no news. So I called the new operator again and talked to a very nice lady. She informed me that the switch from DSL to fibre is scheduled for the 25th. That’s partially good news, but on the 25th I will not be at home and none of the family members is in a position to modify the installation and configure the network. At least, the lady confirmed that the old operator will provide service until they really perform the change. Partial good news. Since she opened a service ticket in my name and I have access to it, I added my times of absence to it. Let’s see what will happen.

Part 9

Nothing happened until June 13th when the fibre company (not the telco operator) called when I was not home. The next day they tried again and they asked, if I would be around for a technician to show up and check the signal in my place on the following day. Since I agreed that someone would be present, he showed up a bit before time, hooked up a modem to the fibre line, saw some positive feedback and attached a magic number to the plate that was installed in Part 5. He left and soon after, I got an e-mail from the new provider that the line will be activated and service switched from the old to the new provider on July 8th. I am still missing the modem but until early July we have a few weeks left. Also, I have to run an ethernet cable from my central switch board to the location the modem is about to be installed. Parts are ordered.

BTW, the line at my neighbor’s house is still not working even though he has his modem already installed.

Part 10

On June 29th, a package from the new telco operator arrived and it actually contained the modem. Since I had some spare time, I installed it in the cellar. Now I need to run the line from the modem to my central RJ45 panel. I have a few days left until July 8th. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Part 11

The CAT cable between the RJ45 socket next to the modem and the panel in my rack is established and working. I setup a new VLAN on my switch which will serve as transport between the fibre modem and the router. Also using this VLAN, I can access the modem’s management interface (at least, I thought so. See below for more on that)

In the picture above you see the gray conduit carrying the fibre patch cable the RJ45 socket with the line to the switch panel on top and the yellow patch cable to the modem. The small yellow cable with the green plug is the actual fibre patch cable. The black cable is the power cable (12V) for the modem with the power supply to the far right. In the back of the modem I placed the extra 3m of fibre patch cable in circles to avoid sharp bends.

Part 12 – D-Day

Finally on July 8th, I received an SMS and email that my fibre line is ready to be activated. So I did as the instructions told me but I did not get a connection to the internet. The router said it could not make it to the internet even though I did (I think at least) everything as was presented in this AVM video. After a while, I thought that the only difference is the switch I placed between the router and the modem. Removing it solved the problem. Later I found out, that the router and modem require VLAN 7 which I had not assigned to the ports.

Access to the internet was working so it was time to check the phone. Since the VoIP parameters are certainly different from the old provider I searched the new ones on the net. My Fritz 7590 did show only a selection of my current provider and Other provider. So I selected the latter and filled in the parameters. The overview did not change and still showed the old provider so I checked the settings again. The combo box was showing the old provider but when selecting Other provider I saw the parameters I entered. I was adventurous and saved the settings nevertheless. Using my mobile, I called home and it rang. Wow, great. Problem: outgoing calls did not work at all.

Taking care of the outgoing calls took a while. The web did not provide any answers to this problem. So I thought, I start from scratch. Since I have 4 phone numbers on this extension I simply deleted the one I don’t usually use (anymore). Setting it up again now showed the full list of providers and setting it up was easy. I checked an outgoing call to my cell phone and voilà: it rang. It was just a matter of repeating this procedure for the other three numbers and I was back in business.

Next check was reaching the server at home from the net: no problem, all was still working.

Speed comparison between the VDSL and fibre line:

BTW, the line at my neighbor which was not working in early April is still not working. Still no light on the fibre cable.