YouFibre
Full, fast, fibre to the premises gigabit internet has finally reached my house.
Company
YouFibre are an alt-net and reached my area a while ago.
Package pricing
Pricing for fixed-length contracts (when I was getting it) was:
| 150Mb | £24 |
| 500Mb | £28 |
| 1000Mb | £30 |
| 2000Mb | £50 |
| 8000Mb | £100 |
They also do a rolling monthly version of those packages for slightly more.
If you are locked into an existing contract, YouFibre will supply you connectivity for £1/month until your existing contract ends.
The price is fixed for the length of your contract - no mid-contract rises, or inflation-plus rises.
Installation
Installation was fast and professional. It comes overground, via the telegraph poles, so digging up the roads isn't required.
Fibre connectivity
This is provided by a company called Netomnia.
Hardware
There are two parts required - an ONT (Adtran SDX 631q 2.5GE XGS-PON ONT) which converts the fibre into Ethernet, and then a router (Eero) which gives you Wifi.
The ONT is labelled Netomnia and is wall mounted, and the router is an Eero 6+ (model R010001), 2.4/5GHz, which isn't wall mounted. Both require a 240V mains socket.
Support
5 days after the initial install, my connection died. I rang YouFibre support, they talked me through rebooting the ONT and Eero, but it didn't help. They arranged an engineer for the next day, who came round and after a bit of testing replaced the ONT. It has been working since.
Speed
I went for the 1000Mb option (which is effectively 950Mb up/950Mb down).
Remember that a byte (big B) is 8 bits (little b) - so 1000 Mb(it)/s is 100 MB(yte)/s.
So to download one gigabyte, that is 8 gigabits, or 8192 megabits.
You need specific hardware to be able to use anything over 1Gb/s and to be honest, I can't think of anything I would need over 900Mb/s for. That's 100MB/s - a Gigabyte every 10 seconds.
Running the speed test on the router's app shows 984Mb/s down, 955Mb/s up.
Please note - speeds via Wifi will not be this high. Wifi depends on:
* your phone hardware
* the Wifi band you are using - 2.4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz. The higher the band, the more bandwidth. However, the higher the band, the more the signal is attenuated by walls, floors/ceilings, people furniture.
* your distance to the router. 2.4GHz will travel further, 6GHz will be blocked much more easily.
* other Wifi networks in your house or neighbours
Do not expect to be 10 metres away from the Wifi router, and get 900MB/s on speed tests. If you put your phone right next to the wifi router, you might get 850 or 900.
From a phone that supports 5GHz located in the next room, I sometimes only get 60Mb/s
Also, not every site will be able to (or be configured to) give you as much bandwidth as you can handle. Basically, your speed will only be as fast as the slowest link of the chain. It could be your Wifi, it could be your router, it could be the fibre connection, it could be something in the Internet, or it could be the end site that you're trying to reach.
You can only control the bits inside your house. If you want to consistently get the speeds you expect, you'll have to use wired Ethernet. Buy a little Netgear switch, and run Cat5e around your house. Save Wifi for the devices that can't use wired - phones, tablets, security cameras, etc. Use wired Ethernet for things like PCs, TVs, games consoles, etc.
Symmetric
The connection is symmetric, which means that the upload is the same speed as the download. This probably doesn't matter to many people (who consume more than they upload), but for backing up files, streaming house cameras etc, it's great
Router
The Eero doesn't have a web interface, and requires you to install an app to manage it, and to create an account.
It is a fairly straightforward to use app.
The router is designed for your average home user, and doesn't support more advanced/customisable options.
The Eero can be remotely administered by you, via the app, but also by the ISP, (and maybe Eero itself)?
If you don't like that, or if you need to be able to tweak everything, you're better off buying a router, and installing OpenWrt on it.
IPv4
The default install of YouFibre provides you an non-routable RFC 1918 IPv4 address that is behind a layer (or more?) of CGNAT.
This means that you don't have your own public IPv4 address, and so aren't able to accept incoming IPv4 connections (for instance to open an SSH port, or expose a web server on a computer in your network). This is perfectly fine for 99% of people.
If you need to be able to connect to something on IPv4 in your internal network, you could try one of the following:
* Tailscale
* ZeroTier
* Set up a Tor hidden service and connect over Tor
* Set up a VPS or cloud VM somewhere, and use VPN (Wireguard, OpenVPN, IPSec) software
Probably due to the CGNAT, idle TCP connections time out after a while. I am experimenting to find out what the timeout is. It's greater than 13 minutes.
YouFibre also offer a static, publicly routeable IPv4 address for an extra £5/month.
I haven't tried this, and since I've found that the IPv6 address is (pretty) static, I might just use that.
There are reports on fora that if you go for the static IPv4 address, it removes your IPv6 addresses.
IPv6
The reason I have been referring to IPv4 above rather than just IP is to distinguish it from IPv6.
IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, and has been around for about 28 years now.
It works perfectly, has done for many many years, and for end users, they won't notice a difference.
ISPs and companies are slow to roll it out, as it can require updated hardware in their core networks.
The good news is that mobile networks are getting their act together and you might already be using it on your mobile network. You can see if you are already using IPv6
YouFibre assigns an usable IPv6 /64 for your use.
I am unsure whether this is dynamic, static, or a dynamic allocation that effectively doesn't change, but I have had the same IPv6 allocation for a couple of weeks now.
This means you can assign your internal boxes globally routable IPv6 addresses, and connect to them from anywhere you have an IPv6 address. The Eero router allows you to open up incoming ports to specific IPv6 addresses - by default, only ICMP is allowed through.
I use my IPv6 address to monitor the connection, as the Broadband Quality Monitor can't hit the IPv4 address behind the layers of CGNAT.
I am unsure what the regular packet loss every hour is, but this might be something to do with the IPv6 I am using to monitor it. Perhaps the Eero reobtains the IPv6 allocation hourly? Or perhaps Think Broadband's monitoring system has some sort of issue?
Either way, I don't notice the dropouts. They also don't seem to show up on my IPv4 Smokeping checks.
Ideally, YouFibre would provide more than just a single /64 subnet of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses. A /56 or a /48 would be much more useful, and would allow subnetting of my internal network.
I've posted about YouFibre's IPv6 here
Network quality
I continuously monitor the network from the inside with Smokeping, and from the outside with Think Broadband's Broadband Quality Monitor.
The lowest ping time I get is to 1.1.1.1, and it's around 9ms. Occasionally when playing CoD, I get 8ms to whatever game server I'm connecting to.
A friend of mine on another fibre connection gets 5ms occasionally though, so there's room for improvement.
I need to conduct tests to find out whether the IPv4 traffic going through the CGNAT box(es) increases latency, and also whether the IPv6 traffic avoids the CGNAT box(es), which might mean that IPv6 is lower latency.
Running bufferbloat tests from my mobile right next to the Eero show that the connection is rated A. Latency does slightly increase under full load, but I can't imagine that I'll ever be maxing out the connection for more than a few seconds at a time anyway.
IPv4 vs IPv6
Speed
I have done tests on wired connections using iperf3 to public iperf3 servers, and strangely I have sometimes seen that IPv6 UDP is slightly faster than IPv4 UDP, but we're talking negligible.
Loss
The IPv6 connectivity does seem to be a little more lossy.
Running
ping -q -i 0.2 -c 36000 one.one.one.onegives the following results:
IPv4:
36000 packets transmitted, 36000 received, 0% packet loss, time 7231066ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 8.220/8.639/47.332/0.288 ms
IPv6:
36000 packets transmitted, 35850 received, 0.416667% packet loss, time 7226715ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 8.266/8.680/46.814/0.359 ms
However, I'm just happy to have IPv6 connectivity, even if it's not quite as good as it could be yet.
Overall
Overall, it's a no-brainer. It's cheap, fast, and works well.
YouFibre is doing very well - I hope they continue like this for many years, and don't succumb to any consumer-unfriendly tactics if pressure grows to increase profits.
Questions
If you have any questions you'd like me to answer, leave a comment