The Journey to YouFibre

TLDR: I've just had YouFibre 8000 installed, it's great! There were many chapters to the story to get to the conclusion but I'm there now, and all is good... mostly. But it is a long tale... hence the TLDR.

I've recently had FTTP broadband from YouFibre installed but boy, has it been a journey. Heres the tale of that journey and some thoughts about things that could have gone better. Side note... it looks like their branding is "youfibre" but the company is YouFibre Limited. I'll be referring to them as YouFibre.

Back in March 2023 I replied to an ispreview.co.uk tweet, it was about another ISP adding more towns to their planned FTTP rollout. My response called out all "altnets" on how they all seemed to mostly just use Openreach's PIA product and anything more complicated didn't get looked at; specifically calling out Netomnia because of their plans in my area. Netomnia were planning to build, or were already building in the area but checks on my postcode showed they weren't coming to me.... but were coming to properties 200m up the road. Their CEO, Jeremy, replied asking for my details so he could look into it.

This was the start of 2 years worth of conversations with Jeremy and the build team at Netomnia. The reason behind my road not being "in scope" was because of the "JUP"s on my road - or Joint Utility Pole. Openreach use UK Power Network poles along my road (and many others in my village) to provide service; without any poles or ducts available via PIA, Netomnia decided to put my road on "indefinite hold". I had many conversations with Jeremy, who as CEO of both Netomnia and YouFibre really does go out of his way to talk to customers when they have issues and ultimately it looked like there may be a way to get things rolling but it wasn't to be for "reasons" - it sounded like a UKPN issue rather than a Netomnia one. I have a 15 response deep email thread with the build team trying to figure out how to get around this UKPN issue but that all came to an uphappy ending.

All was not lost though, based on Netomnia's data, they were going to deliver their network down the main road behind mine, and in direct line of sight of my house was a Openreach pole so I was pretty sure a Netomnia CBT would likely end up on top of it, I just had to wait. Fast forward to the 8th of January 2025 when I noticed a CBT being put on it.... it wasn't Openreach so I knew it was most likely Netomnia. Over the next few weeks I saw more works going on in the area and eventually what looked like an extension of the Netomnia spine fiber, with a man in a van splicing all these new CBTs into the core of the Netomnia network on the 28th of January. On Sunday February 2nd, I checked again and saw the CBT was live for orders.

Now onto the first thing that could have gone better... I emailed the Netomnia build team explaining the CBT was in my direct line of view, and was around 50m from my house and could they possibly serve me from that. I got a response the following day saying "your address is on indefinite hold", as though they hadn't even read the email. I also live chatted YouFibre and got told "we don't service your address". I wanted to give this company my money, they want to serve as many properties as possible to be able to pay off their build costs etc etc. Surely there was a way to get this thing done. Luckily, I'd entered my details on the YouFibre search against the property on the road behind me... a doctors surgery and it was classed as a business address. I got a call from the business sales team on the Monday, I explained the situation and by the end of Monday they called me back saying all was good and we could move forward; by Tuesday morning the YouFibre website was telling me my address was "live" and ready for service (I even got a knock on the door from the local YouFibre rep because the house had gone live). Imagine getting something done that quickly with Virgin Media or BT.... but I don't understand why the business sales team needed to be the ones to push it forward... I gave the build team at Netomnia the exact same pictures explaining the situation - it should have been a simple "that makes sense, lets do that"

Anyway, everything got sorted Tuesday, with a survey offered for Wednesday which I couldn't do due to prior commitments so they came on Thursday instead... The survey turned into an install and by lunchtime I had a 50m drop cable from the pole installed over to my house, an ONT connected to it and the ONT connected to my Unifi Dream Machine Pro. Fantastic. As part of the business service you get a static IPv4 address instead of YouFibre's default of CGNAT and unfortunately this was initially missed from the order but a bit of comms with YouFibre over live chat and with my business manager and that was fairly quickly resolved. However I was getting odd speed test results, this was before I enabled IPv6 on the UDM Pro... I'd get 2-3 Gbps down and 6-7 up against multiple speed test servers. I really didn't understand it. Then I went and enabled IPv6 on the UDM Pro and I got the full 8 up and 8 down.... Fantastic... but something was still wrong with IPV4 traffic....

A quick note of the next small disappointment, the next day, I found the remaining unused part of the drop cable in my wheelie bin. I'm not sure how much there was but it wasn't nothing... I appreciate fiber probably isn't easily recycle-able (???) but surely if every install results in such waste, and if all this waste was collected... something could be done with it.... instead of it going to landfill or burned. It just seems like a missed opportunity.

I hadn't been given a YouFibre supplied router as part of the install, the Netomnia team didn't have one with them. And so I wondered if this odd speed was a me issue or not and so decided to wait until I could use their supplied router. Saturday came and here is the next thing that could have gone better. I had a 8am til 1pm window for an appointment.... 1pm came and still no engineer and no phone call to tell me of a delay. I both live chatted and called YouFibre. I was in a queue for 33 minutes on the phone before someone answered the call. I was waiting for an agent to be assigned to the live chat for 20 minutes before I closed the conversation because someone had picked up my call. Waiting 33 minutes for the phone to be answered, on a business service, isn't good enough, and waiting 20minutes for a live chat agent isn't really good enough for 24/7 service. It then took a further 40 minutes for "someone will come, but I can't tell you when" response. It feels like YouFibre have some things to work out in terms of support resource.

An engineer finally turned up and I eventually did some tests, I got 8 gig up and 8 gig down on both ipv4 and ipv6 being enabled... so it wasn't a network problem like I thought! A side note here.... they've just started installing "YouFibre Hub Pro" routers - in the past they've given people on the You 8000 tier an Asus AXE16000 (I think). Now they have this own branded YouFibre Hub Pro which offers 10 gig wan, 10 gig lan and 4 1 gig lan ports as well as a phone port and it looks like it supports Wifi 6E...maybe wifi 7? I'm not sure. I haven't seen anything about this router online and was told by the engineer he had only installed 1 other of these.

When you have a static IP from YouFibre their ONT gives out this static IP via DHCP but this is limited to a 1 hour lease and so moving from one router to another is a pain. I decided to clone the YouFibre router wan MAC address to the UDM Pro to remove this headache so I didn't have to wait the hour.... I did another speed test on IPv4 expecting to still see the weird speeds and instead I got 8 gig both up and down! Whether the YouFibre engineer adding the router to my account, or using the YouFibre router's MAC address made the difference, I have no idea and I really don't want to mess with it further needlessly to find the answer.

And if you came here looking for information on what the IPv6 prefix size is... its 56. The YouFibre router tells you this (because it all gets provisioned automatically), and random information out on the internet from other users tell you this.... but theres nothing on the YouFibre website - just a "we use dhcp, just plug in" in their FAQs. There are also claims on forums that business customers get a 48 sized prefix. Mine is definitely 56. It would be great to have more of this information available on their FAQs.

All in all, I used to get 1 gig down and 100 meg up with Virgin Media Business via their DOCSIS network (and a weird tunnel for static IPs), which meant 24ms pings to Cloudflare and 30ms pings to Google... now I have 8 gig up and down with 3ms pings to Cloudflare and 5ms to Google. Do I need 8 gig symmetric internet, no. Was it much more as a business to give me the flexibility to use whatever I needed up to 8 gigabit for the next 2 years, no not at all.

If you're interested in taking up YouFibre, and this was helpful, my referral link is https://aklam.io/pElnmm , you get some money and I get some money too.

There are some learnings from this journey with Netomnia and YouFibre and I hope they see them as constructive criticism - I've followed them as companies for years, long before they announced plans for my nearest town (and village) and I really want them to do well. For the first time ever, I've now got an ISP who gives me native IPv6 with proper FTTP and is future looking and that's just fantastic. They're already looking at allowing greater speeds on their network this year. Will I upgrade? Unlikely.... but its great to know you're on a network that could support it at not a ridiculous price that you'd pay for a leased line of such a speed.

One other ask for the YouFibre team would be to install a Ubiquiti Speed test server on their network alongside their Ookla Speedtest server. It would be great to be able to test directly from the UDM Pro against a YouFibre server - more information can be found at https://community.ui.com/questions/Host-your-speedtest-server/23e8e2c8-6fdb-4e08-8016-6cea98cabfdc, you can even make it so only YouFibre IP addresses get offered it!

Thanks to Jeremy and the YouFibre business team for getting it done! Here's to living in 2025 with FTTP internet with both native IPv4 and native IPv6.