what?

We had a fiber to the property install last week as openreach offer it in my area as of a few months back.

We definitely don’t need it but this 1.6gbps is cheaper than what we were paying for gigabit previously!

notes at the bottom on the settings which let me run the ONT directly into my unifi stuff, skipping the EE router altogether (which was not well documented, so i figured i’d post what worked for me :) )

how did the installation go?

The engineer took around 4 hours, I didn’t appreciate that it came in overhead from the telegraph poles.

They went and fetched some rolled up fiber from the telegraph pole

drilled their ladder into the wall (for safety!),

added an anchor for the fiber to come in to, i think along with some metal stranded cable (so as not to stress the fiber itself presumably)

attached and tensioned this between the telegraph pole and the house

ran the fiber down to the ground floor, presumably so that neighbours can be split off from there, and then ran a cable back up to the first to enter the property.

The fiber comes in to a tiny box (the openreach ONT)

A few trips into the house during install for the engineer, checking the install location, drilling the hole and passing out the fiber cable which presumably gets spliced onto the incoming cable from the telegraph pole, and a final check of the connection in to the ONT (and a line light level reading which I was told -25 is the limit and mine was -16, which is strong, dunno what the unit of measurement is, but given it’s a negative i’m going to hazard maybe dB still.)

The amount of engineer time and energy was impressive; they advise 3h or so, our installation took just under 4

openreach ONT

behaves as I would expect a modem to. Mine has three ports and a power button, plus four lights.

• the ports are fibre in, 2.5GBE out, power in
• the lights are power, PON, LOS, LAN

configuring my unifi stuff to work with this directly

So we have the unifi UXG fiber for routing at home; intentionally chosen a few months back for a likely fiber upgrade to our incoming connection.

I was hoping to either put the EE router into modem mode, or run direct from the ONT into my unifi stuff.

Thankfully, after I found the EE router has no modem mode, and after establishing that things were working on that device, I popped it back in its box and plugged the cable straight into the WAN port on the UXG.

Rebooted a few times to no avail, found this page on EE’s site

which states :

1Fibre and Full Fibre 
2    Username or login name: bthomehub@btbroadband.com
3    Broadband password: BT (or leave blank)
4    Authentication: CHAP
5    DNS: Auto or Obtain from ISP (we'll automatically provide these when you connect)
6    VLAN: Active (Full Fibre only) 
7    VLAN ID (802.1q): 101 (Full Fibre only) 
8    VLAN ID (802.1p): 101 (Full Fibre only) 

Unfortunately, this didn’t work.

With some trial and error i found that removing the VLAN tag fixed. Overall my settings changes to the internet section in the unifi menus is :

 1Advanced: Manual
 2    VLAN ID: unchecked
 3    MAC Address Clone: unchecked
 4    Smart Queues: unchecked
 5    UPnP: unchecked
 6
 7IPv4 configuration
 8    Connection: PPPoE
 9    Username: bthomehub@btbroadband.com
10    Password: bt
11    Additional IP addresses: blank
12    Auto DNS Server: checked
13
14IPv6 configuration: 
15    Disabled

might revisit IPv6 later, since the EE hub definitely defaulted to having that enabled when i was looking at it.