from Hacker News

London ISP CommunityFibre Discount 3Gbps FTTP Plan to £50

by MikeAshley178 on 5/28/22, 1:47 PM with 69 comments

• by traceroute66 on 5/28/22, 6:13 PM

  CommunityFibre, the ISP that works of some of the most un-necessarily aggressive marketing I've ever seen.

  Experience round some of my friends in their catchment area was their reps will attempt endless rounds of doorstop selling, on top of that they will then bombard you with marketing letters (which are carefully addressed "To the occupier" so as to avoid being caught by anti-junk legislation). I've seen the junk, and I've been round people's houses when the greasy sales reps have knocked on the door touting their wares.

  If you call them or write to them to ask them to stop, they ignore it and continue.

  That alone would put me off Community Fibre for life. I have a policy of not dealing with spammers.

  I would also encourage people to read the small print.

• by samwillis on 5/28/22, 8:30 PM

  There's something really interesting happing in the UK at the moment. We are awash with PE funded FTTP (fiber to the premises) startups, in my town there're two pulling their fibre through the BT ducts and putting small boxes on the top of telegraph polls. We can now get 1gb finer for under £40/month.

  It's basically a repeat of the 90s / early 00s, their exit strategy is clearly for a larger player to build a conglomerate out of all of them, just as happed with [lost of small cable tv companies] -> NTL & Telewest -> Virgin Media.

  I assume CommunityFibre is one of these PE funded startups, the larger their user base the larger the exit for the funders.

• by Nextgrid on 5/28/22, 5:01 PM

  This is pretty good. They provide real fibre with IPv6 as well.

  The only downside is the “router” they insist on is a Linksys Velop mesh Wi-Fi system that only has 2 Ethernet ports (one would be used as WAN port) and heavily insists on an app (and no doubt a “privacy” policy and an online account) to configure it so I’d really recommend you bring your own equipment.

• by hkt on 5/28/22, 6:37 PM

  I find it deeply, deeply annoying when companies that are very obviously not owned by the "community" use the term in their name. I looked thinking they might be a cooperative and it appears they are not.

  Not totally on topic I realise, but does anyone else find this misleading?

• by zimpenfish on 5/28/22, 3:57 PM

  Currently on their 1Gbps package and it's been pretty good - apart from a couple of weeks ago when they remotely disabled the ethernet ports on the router and threw everything internally networked into chaos.

• by forty on 5/28/22, 7:59 PM

  In France there are 8Gbps offering for around 50€ (cheaper the first year(s), depending on whatever their current promotion is)

• by TacticalCoder on 5/28/22, 7:40 PM

  It's 3 Gbps down and up and the router has a SFP+ 10 Gbit/s port (AFAICT), so that's good. But it's "only" 50 GBP for 24 months, then it's the full 99 GBP (about 116 EUR).

  I'm in France atm and received my fibre router a few days ago (but it's not installed yet): next week the technician should bring the FTTH and then we should be able to plug it in the router. I'll be enjoying 2 Gbps/down and 600 Mbit/s up. The router OTOH shall not offer a 10 Gbit/s SPF+ port so I'll be "stuck" a 1 Gbit/s on my desktops (I don't think the router offers 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet ports). Cost is 72 EUR / month.

  Crossing fingers because it's a house in the middle of nowhere and it's been years they promised fiber was coming. I'll believe it when I'll see it.

  It'd be a big upgrade compared to the 50 Mbits/ down // 6 MBits/up I'm currently using.

  (as a sidenote France had a plan for 100% fiber coverage for 2022 but things got delayed a bit due to covid and due to the issue of training enough technicians to install the fiber)

• by SpaghettiX on 5/28/22, 4:48 PM

  Though g.network is slower, it is £22/month for 150Mbps. I was comparing ISPs in London last year. https://www.g.network/. And £50/month for 900Mbps

  I don't use any of them now, because my new building doesn't support either.

• by BonoboIO on 5/28/22, 10:55 PM

  That’s an amazing offer.

  I live in Austria in a new (5 years old) flat an have fibre in it. So Speed would be unlimited in theory but my provider, which is A1 (biggest provider in Austria, was state owned in the past) only delivers 300/30 Mbit.

  Everything other is „business“ level. The most they offer is 700/80 Mbit for 180€ per month with 24 month minimum.

• by matthewmacleod on 5/28/22, 9:27 PM

  I’ve got the 1Gb service from them and I have to say it’s exactly what I want - for £50 a month they just pipe a full native IPv6 connection with gigabit up and down into an XGS-GPON terminal that I can plug whatever I want into, and then send me a bill. It does exactly what it says and there is no other nonsense to deal with.

• by markwillis82 on 5/28/22, 7:07 PM

  And here I am with 40 down and 16 up on the south coast costing £50/month.

  One day we will have fibre…

• by yurishimo on 5/28/22, 4:14 PM

  How many people is this available to? As a tourist, my experience with London's local wifi was trash when I visited a month ago. Coffee shops and my hotel were dog slow. You'd think that someone would see the value of fast wifi to all of the people working remote, especially in a major city. I was only there for a few days, but I would have visited the same place multiple times had I found one with a fast connection.

• by baisq on 5/28/22, 4:36 PM

  What is FTTP? How does it differ from FTTH?

• by Baeocystin on 5/28/22, 8:21 PM

  Meanwhile, in Gilroy (southern end of Silicon Valley), my choices are massively-oversubscribed cable (good luck getting usable speeds during Netflix-O'Clock, and straight-up outages are common) or, finally, StarLink, even though I live in town, in a suburban area. I can't help but shake my head at how far behind we are at times.

• by DeathArrow on 5/28/22, 6:37 PM

  In Romania 10Gbs FTTH costs about €10.