Dev Blog

Having recently moved from ADSL, to Fibre broadband, I thought I’d share my experiences about the differences it’s made.

In the middle of December, I started getting calls from BT pushing their BT Infinity service, so I thought I’d check to see if our local exchange (Brookwood) had been upgraded to Fibre. I wasn’t expecting that it had, since it was scheduled to be the end of March 2011. Surprisingly, it had as I saw on SamKnows. So, I ordered an upgrade from my ISP (Zen internet).

They put the order through, and a BT engineer was scheduled to do the upgrade on 6th Jan.

The BT engineer, came, did his job and left me with a Fibre (VDSL) modem (Huawei Echolife HG621) connected to the box. Sadly, I couldn’t use my existing Router as it only supported ADSL (it was a Belkin N1, but too old a version).

So, thanks to Amazon, I ordered a Netgear WNR2000 Wireless router, which is the one that Zen recommend. Having received that, changed the default password, and connected it up, I’m now surfing through a fibre.

Everything seems to be working just fine so far. The router is servicing my WP7 phone, the Kindle and my work laptop through WiFi happily, and also servicing the desktop, and the WII (for iPlayer mainly) through the Powerline sockets in the house.

All in all, I’m pretty happy at this point!

Thanks to Zen for sorting everything out, thanks to BT for upgrading the Exchange 3 months early, and thanks to Amazon for supplying the Netgear router promptly.

Update – 4th February 2011
Ok, so we’re now on our second Fibre modem (the Huawei thing), as apparently, they are prone to overheating. Ours overheated, but not with, like, fire or anything. Just a ‘ceasing to work’ thing. Anyway, BT guy came out, had a look, held the box, said these overheat quite easily, and replaced it. Quick and easy job for him. He also recommended mounting it on the wall, and proceeded to do so. Great job BT guy. So, if you are getting one of these, then get it wall mounted.