floof.org

Pippin friendica

Oh, grrrr. When I moved into this house last year I noted the Swish Fibre toby box in the pavement outside, and found via their web site that I could get symmetric gigabit over fibre. I set up an Openreach fibre line to get started with, using my own reseller account, intending to get Swish installed later. I also asked Swish whether they could do a point-to-point connection, like a leased line, and the clueless customer service people didn't have a bloody clue what that was.

But I still intended to get a line from them, which would be independent of Openreach, and hopefully would give me the same resilient connectivity I was used to at the old house, where we had a VDSL over Openreach and DOCSIS from Virgin Media (plus my own OSPF-over-tunnels setup to my colo network routers in the datacentre to make switchovers seamless).

But I've just gone to look at Swish again and it now seems they've merged with other altnets and apparently stopped providing connections over their own network in preference for just reselling Openreach - if I search for my address they just return the same asymmetric offerings you'd get from any Openreach-based ISP and claim they can get me connected without an engineer visit, which can only be the case if they're using Openreach. Just... why!? Why build your own fibre network and then throw it away? Why buy a company with its own network just to not use that network? Do I really have to order a full leased line just to get a second (wired) net connection at this property? Grrrrrrr.

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Pippin friendica
Looking around for leased line quotes (which are hard to get without having to submit a quote request and give them your phone number and email address so you can be on their pestering list forevermore), the cheapest look like nearly Β£300/month. That'll be not including VAT, either. Urgh.
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