A review of County Broadband
County Broadband has been in the village for a while now and it is pretty well accepted as the norm for users of the Internet. The speeds are far in excess of most users requirements but I guess that we are "future-proofed" for a while.
The fibre gateway router comes preconfigured but you can change its settings if you know how.
Having Fibre Internet is in my opinion a bit of overkill. In most cases you don't require the speed but it is definitely the way of the future. With streamed services becoming the "norm" a "digital" connection is also going to be the way that services are provided in the future.
Living in a very rural location Internet options were, and still are, very limited. The ADSL offerings from BT and other providers were a "no-go" as the speed over telephone wires was worse than dial-up (not that many know what that is these days!).
County Broadband "rolled-out" "Fibre to Home" Internet (FTTH or FTTP) in Belchamp Walter late 2020.
Update March 2022
So much for reliability! I think that I can safely say that the service is LESS RELIABLE than it was when it was point-to-point radio Internet.
We are also paying too much for the service and CBB do not seem to want to offer a service at a lower speed and 400Mb/sec is the minimum.
16Mb/sec was fine for around £20 and was more reliable. - £40 per month is too much!
Update 11 August 2021
Over the last couple of weeks the reliablity of the County Broadband service has been abismal. It has been down for hours at a time over multiple days.
Quite frankly this is not acaceptable. Another communication with CBB is going to be made. See the communication that I had with them before about digging up roads in the village.
The install
This page was meant as a mini review of the service and to post some things that were not explained fully at the time of the installation. This is not meant as a critisism of those that performed the various installations as it is realised that they were on tight schedules and could not be expected to explain evrything in detail to the very few customers that this would mean anything to.. I mentioned my communication with CBB reagrding the installation of the infrastructure on a previous page.
First of all an information sheet on the router was left by the technician. Whie this gave a brief explaination of the lights on the box it was not really that informative. I provide a link to the router (Fibre Gateway) as that may be of interest to those that want to know.
GR241AG - FGW - Fibre Gateway
The login to the gateway is 192.168.1.254 - you will need a User Name and Password.
Performance of the install was as exected and downoad and upload speeds of 400Mbyes were achieved.
Ports Blocked?
This will make little sense to those just looking for a review of CountyBroadBand Fibre, but I don't seem to be able to connect to FTP when I try from a wireless hotspot connected to the powerline adapter on my internal network.
GR241AG - Management
The CBB router can be managed in a number of ways. Below is a list from the operators manual:
I have not tried the Telnet or investigated the other methods listed above, yet!
At first glance Remote access to router via OMCI and TR-069 seems to be a bit of a controversy.