zen

1 Week on

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I’ve had Zen’s FTTP 900 product now for just over a week and whilst I’d love to say so far I’ve absolutely thrashed it, sadly I’ve been caught out with a bout of Covid (first time) so wanting to protect the family I moved out into isolation for a week. this meant I wasn’t at home and able to use the connection but the family were still benefitting from multiple streams but I also benefitted vastly from the enhanced upload.

Having nothing to do but stare at walls, I worked my way though a load of my old Plex content, streaming the original files was an absolute breeze and regularly I was peaking 20Mb of upload bandwidth and that was fairly consistent across most of the days I was away. No issues there.

Hopefully I’ll have something a bit better to be able to trumpet about the amazing new connectivity.

Go Gig or Go Home

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Install day was today and I’ve finally gone to FTTP. Installation was an absolute breeze, I’d put in a draw cord to get the fibre into the house and the Openreach engineer even took down the copper as well so nice and tidy. I have a neat little ONT in my house next to the living room patch ports and we are running a CHR with Gb internet.

Before install from a wired in connection during a working day.
Following install but before ONT upgrade
After ONT upgrade and a PPP drop and reconnect, this was Steam downloading a game on my CHR.

As you can see, the move wasn’t flawless, following the upgrade, my download speed held at the 55Mb I was profiled at previously but following an ONT firmware upgrade and then a PPP disconnect and reconnect from the CHR, we released the full power. My laptop couldn’t even manage to get the throughput due to the USB dock for a speedtest so a Steam download on the main gaming/editing PC was in order to show it off.

Less than a week

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We’ve just dropped below a week until my new FTTP service is scheduled for install. I’ve been doing a bit of prep work in anticipation as well, the CHR is back alive on a new server, low powered Xeon this time rather than monster. With the new efficiencies of RouterOS it’s now more capable than ever and I am “only” going to be pushing 1Gb max.

I’ve also upgraded it to ROSv7 so I can take advantage of the newer queueing algorithms, FQ_CoDel being the main one I wanted to get my hands on but I will try with CAKE once things have settled down although I hopeful that with a 1000/115 connection I shouldn’t need to QoS much of anything.