Rural Telecoms - A Solution

[Guest Alphonsox]

As documented on a number of threads over the last few years I have been having problems getting telephone and broadband to the new build. I have finally got a working solution and thought documenting it might provide useful information to others in the same sitiuation.

 

The problem -
The new build is in a rural location about 5 miles from the nearest BT fibre enabled cabinet. Open Reach attempted to connect a line to the house earlier this year but the install turned into a dogs dinner which I eventually had to abandon. Even if they had been succesful I was promised broadband at a maximum of 1Mb/s, the neighbour tells me he rarely gets a connection that fast and that 500Kb/s is more typical.

Given the extremely poor fixed line speeds I have been looking at wireless solutions. Northern Ireland has a number of WIMax broadband suppliers (Beacon, Bluebox, Airfibre etc.) however none of them cover my area. I can however get a weak 4G signal from a number of providers.

 

My Solution -
I have therefore bought a 4G/LTE WiFi Router

Plus an external antenna

 

and fitted it with an "all-you-can-eat" SIM from Three, currently £27/month. Three specifically allows tethering of these SIMs.

This is currently giving me a download speed of 50Mb/s, with reasonably low latency and unlimited data.

 

To provide voice telephony I have a VOIP account with Sipgate which gives me a local landline number and just charges me for calls made (1.18p/min to landlines)

To connect the DECT phones to the system I have purchased an ATA (Analog telephone adapter) This provides two separate land lines which will be useful to separate calls to different members of the family. The configuration interface software in this unit is dreadful, however Sipgate provide a useful guide to configuring it for their service.

Still to do
The WiFi coverage from the router is poor so I'll need to set up some Ubiquiti WiFi access points around the place.

 

The 4G Antenna is currently located inside the loft, I should be able to get a faster rate if I mount it externally.
I need to get all the mobiles set up with WiFi calling.

 

Problems

The SIM provides unlimited calls and texts but it is not obvious how to access these using the router.
For various reasons I use/need a static IP address or one determined by DDNS. This seems to be impossible using a 4G solution as you are effectively on the providers private network rather than the public internet. Anyone got any thoughts ?

 

[Mikey_1980]

Have a look at noip.com for getting around the static IP address issue.

 

if you have a mini server you could set up you could look at DDNS as well. Noip would probably be simpler though.

 

 

[LA3222]

Interesting as I was looking at something similar for my own build.  Fibre isn't in the village yet - only to the cabinet which is 2km away, so the best I can get is around 2MB connection.  The 4G signal is good though.

 

When you say "fitted with a sim", does the SIM live in the antenna?

 

TIA

 

Jamie

[ProDave]

That's a competetive price for unlimited data. The local wifi provider here wants to charge us £35 per month.

 

Now all I need is Three coverage here....   Currently all we get is O2 and Vodaphone 2G so not a lot of use other than voice telephony.  It looks like the shiny new EE mast within range is for the emergency service only as nobody has reported getting a public signal from it (one person reported it came to life one day for about half an hour)

[Guest Alphonsox]

24 minutes ago, Mikey_1980 said:

Have a look at noip.com for getting around the static IP address issue.

 

if you have a mini server you could set up you could look at DDNS as well. Noip would probably be simpler though.

 

 

 

I tried Noip (have used them before) but noticed today that it wasn't updating. Following a bit of reseach it turns out that IP addressing is a lot more complex over a 4G network. The IP address seen by the world (including Noip) is a general IP address used by Three and shared amoung a large number of mobile users. Inside the Three internet gateway the mobile network runs its own opaque network to route data/voice to its customers. More details here :-

https://dyn.com/blog/is-4g-ddns-possible/

 

 

20 minutes ago, LA3222 said:

Interesting as I was looking at something similar for my own build.  Fibre isn't in the village yet - only to the cabinet which is 2km away, so the best I can get is around 2MB connection.  The 4G signal is good though.

 

When you say "fitted with a sim", does the SIM live in the antenna?

 

TIA

 

Jamie

 

The SIM sits in the router. The antenna attaches to the router with two coax cables.

The router alone was providing me with ~20Mb/s when sat in the loft, attaching the antenna gave the boost to 50Mb/s

 

 

 

[MrMagic]

Unfortunately its more cost but you would probably want to run some form of tunneling service over the top of the 3UK connection - this would terminate somewhere and give you the static ip you want and full control over ports inbound and outbound.

 

An example of this would be the AAISP L2TP service - all your traffic to t'internet would route in/outbound via AA with your own static IP. https://aa.net.uk/broadband-l2tp.html 

 

Theres probably VPN providers out there also that could do similar although haven't looked at any of these before. You may or may not require additional hardware for this (i.e. another router).

[Ed Davies]

I've got one of those Grandstream 802s. Works fine on Sipgate but I haven't managed to get it to connect the other port to Ekiga yet, but then I can't get Ekiga's own software to connect to Ekiga either. Linphone connects to Ekiga OK, though. Weird.

 

Do you get IPv6 connectivity? A static block of IPv6 addresses?

 

Don't know what your use case is but maybe Pagekite is suitable. Basically, you run a program on one of your machines which sets up a TCP tunnel to their servers and they then relay incoming http://alphonsox.pagekit.com/, https, ssh, etc, connections back through the tunnel to your network.

[MikeSharp01]

2 hours ago, Alphonsox said:

My Solution -
I have therefore bought a 4G/LTE WiFi Router

Plus an external antenna

 

and fitted it with an "all-you-can-eat" SIM from Three, currently £27/month. Three specifically allows tethering of these SIMs.

This is currently giving me a download speed of 50Mb/s, with reasonably low latency and unlimited data.

Very neat combi @Alphonsox and the speed is great, funny thing though - I have a group of 50 Chinese Engineering students who cannot recognise the Chairman or Chief executive of Huawei from their pictures but can instantly recognise Steve Jobs from his - and he is dead while the other two are still alive (I believe).

[Guest Alphonsox]

Thanks for the thoughts - I was thinking of some form of tunnel through to a friends server as a potential solution but both the pagekite and L2TP solution may provide a good alternative. Further investigation required.

 

 

@MikeSharp01Dont be too hard on your students. I came very close to joining Huawei a few years back and I couldn't recognise their CEO either.

 

[Big Neil]

Slight thread hijack maybe but sort of relevant given the topic. Does anyone have any direct experience of the cost involved to 'Fibre-ise' a house. So in this case that would mean laying a line from the cabinet mentioned, to the house in question, for fibre to be an option, and in order that anyone along the route could then connect to that line?

[Jeremy Harris]

37 minutes ago, Big Neil said:

Slight thread hijack maybe but sort of relevant given the topic. Does anyone have any direct experience of the cost involved to 'Fibre-ise' a house. So in this case that would mean laying a line from the cabinet mentioned, to the house in question, for fibre to be an option, and in order that anyone along the route could then connect to that line?

 

No, but I've put in a request for a quote for FTTP a couple of weeks ago.  We're a few hundred metres from the fibre cabinet, but because of a quirk of the way the village was wired for 'phones, the copper goes around in a big loop before coming back to our pole so we have around 4 or 5 times the length of copper than would seem likely given our location.  They've just added an extender box to our fibre cabinet, so I'm hoping that FTTP will be both possible and not too pricey. 

 

Main problem I found was getting an ISP to look into requesting FTTP from Openreach.  Few seemed interested, and it seems that the request to Openreach has to come from an ISP  they won't accept a direct instruction from an end user to run a fibre.

 

I've surveyed the overhead route to the pole in the corner of our plot, where the under ground cable from inside our house runs at the moment.  I reckon the fibre needs to be lifted on to 5 poles in total, all alongside a lane and all seem to have room to take a run of fibre, so my guess is less than a day's work.

[Big Neil]

Interesting that, ii'd never really thought of fibre overhead, but i guess it makes as much sense as power or phone.

[Jeremy Harris]

5 minutes ago, Big Neil said:

Interesting that, ii'd never really thought of fibre overhead, but i guess it makes as much sense as power or phone.

 

I only got the idea when seeing a team running an overhead fibre in the village a few weeks ago.  It seems that in rural areas, where running underground ducts isn't really an option, they are just stringing fibre up on the poles, alongside the copper.  The have pole-mounted combiner/splitters, I believe, so that a single fibre can feed several premises.

[Ed Davies]

3 hours ago, JSHarris said:

Main problem I found was getting an ISP to look into requesting FTTP from Openreach.

 

Did you ask Andrews and Arnold? They were very helpful with getting me connected in the house I'm currently renting when BT had put a stop, for a couple of months, on all new broadband requests while the exchange was being upgraded.

[billt]

If you're talking about FTTP on demand, I had an estimate a few months ago from Cerberus. (Most ISPS, including A & A don't support FFTPoD.)

 

The estimated cost was £16,800 plus VAT. That's about 2km as the wire runs from the exchange.

 

Edit - if you can persuade neighbours to participate you can split the cost, so it might be more affordable.

 

If you're in an FTTP provided area I don't think the costs are much different to FTTC.

Edited November 16, 2018 by billt

[Ed Davies]

What does “on demand” mean? Connection where BT hasn't already laid fibres in the road?

[Big Neil]

6 minutes ago, billt said:

If you're talking about FTTP on demand, I had an estimate a few months ago from Cerberus. (Most ISPS, including A & A don't support FFTPoD.)

 

The estimated cost was £16,800 plus VAT. That's about 2km as the wire runs from the exchange.

 

Edit - if you can persuade neighbours to participate you can split the cost, so it might be more affordable.

 

If you're in an FTTP provided area I don't think the costs are much different to FTTC.

 

 

What now Forest? Will i be able to see boobs in HD when the kids have gone to bed, without things freezing?

[billt]

1 hour ago, Ed Davies said:

What does “on demand” mean? Connection where BT hasn't already laid fibres in the road?

 

In effect it means BT want you to pay for the infrastructure.

 

There are some ares where BT has provided infrastructure for FTTP and you can order it through a normal ISP. These will normally be in towns, but there are some odd areas where it is inexplicably available, for instance Hopton Wafers, a tiny village in Shropshire. They also seem to be installing FTTP in new estates. If BT haven't provided the infrastructure, most exchanges have an option called FFTP on demand. The exchange has the capability to provide FTTP, but the customer has to bear some or most of the cost of the fibre installation.

[Jeremy Harris]

Thanks, @billt, that's very useful, as the only reason I've asked for FTTP is because I saw the guys stringing the fibre through the village a month or so ago.  Opposite direction from where I want it to go; it runs from the newly extended fibre cabinet back along the main street of the village to the Post Office, but at least it seems to indicate that the cabinet is enabled to provide an FTTP connection.  I walked along the lane from the cabinet to our house today and I reckon it's about 230m of fibre slung on 5 poles in total.  The distance could be shorter if they opt to sling the fibre along the power cable from the sub-station, which is something that they can do with fibre with no problem, as long as the DNO agree.  I'm pretty sure distance has little or no effect on FTTP performance, though, so the only real saving would be in installation cost.  Hopefully, running a pole-mounted fibre node in the direction of our house would result in more people our end of the village asking for FTTP, so I'm not sure how they go about amortising the "trunk fibre" cost.

[MrMagic]

If you're planning the FTTPoD route then theres a ton of discussion about it over on TBB - http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/4604719-re-fttpod-desktop-quotes-and-final-prices.html

 

Also someone has summarised the costs that people are being quoted here - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFkK1sLBFQjlGgTwHKUI3aJSdNH-lgFsQ71SMxarWBA/edit#gid=0 - it's a multistage process so you can also see the varience between the initial quote and the final bill.

 

Just to summarize the jargon as it can be confusing - 

FTTP/H - Fibre to the premises/home - usually on new builds but also rolling out across cities and some select rural locations. Proper fibre all the way to your home. Order via your ISP, "normal+a little bit more" cost

FTTC - Fibre to the cab - what most people can access, what you will normally be using if you order "fibre broadband" from Sky, TalkTalk, BT etc, green cab down t'street (normally) has another one installed near it. Copper wire still from cab to house. Order via your ISP, "normal" cost

FTTPoD - Fibre to the premises on demand - your area/exchange is fibre "enabled" but Openreach will quote for and build dedicated fibre infrastructure to your house (or group of houses). Order via selected ISPs, bespoke pricing depending on lots of factors

 

...plus all the other options depending on where you live - Virgin Media, Wireless, GFast, B4RN, Vodafone Gigafast, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, etc etc etc. They don't make it easy...

 

Edited November 17, 2018 by MrMagic

[Guest Alphonsox]

A quick update on the original post....

The Reolink IP cameras are working well with the new system, as is the Texecom alarm system.

The Three DNS system seems a little flaky so I have switched over to the Cloudflare free DNS with OpenDNS as backup. I still haven't got around to setting up PiHole here as yet.

 

The cost of the "all you can eat" data SIM has dropped from £27/month to £20/month as part of the Three Black Friday Deals. This looks like a major bargain to me.

http://www.three.co.uk/Store/SIM/Plans_for_phones