It turns out my router was the limiting factor in my previous speedtest results.
As you can see, it is possible to get > 1 Gigabit/s with the right hardware.
This result is using a different virtualised router (Sophos XG) which runs Linux instead of FreeBSD, and therefore doesn’t encounter the same performance issues with PPPoE. Connected with 2.5Gbe LAN.
In early September this arrived in the post:
Fibre was now available to order where I live!
I placed the order online. I chose the 1 Gb service (with the hefty £135 p/m price tag!). The entire online process was very straightforward. Within about a week I was booked in for a pre-visit by one of the installation engineers. They turned up, confirmed where I wanted the ONT box to be installed and also worked out where the fibre would be coming into the house.
2 weeks later, and the fibre installation engineers turned up to install the service. The fibre itself comes out of the ducting in the road, and then goes to an external distribution (splice) box:
The white cable then ran a fair way along the outside of the house to the location where the ONT is installed internally. This is all handled by the installation team and the quality of the external workmanship is very neat & tidy.
This is the ONT installed inside:
The ONT requires a power socket, so there needs to be one nearby. The white fibre cable comes into the house and then attaches using the green connector on the left. The ethernet cable then needs to connect to your actual router, which does the connection using PPPoE. The ONT also serves as the termination point for your phone line – the copper line is disconnected as part of the installation so your home phone wiring is connected into it.
Here is a shot of the underside of the ONT:
POTS1/POTS2 are your phone lines – the ONT seemingly supports up to 2 separate external phone lines should you have them. What interested me the most about this picture, though, is the “10GE” port – is that 10 Gigabit Ethernet? (spoiler: yes, it is!). More on that later.
There is a black cover that goes over the bottom of the ONT, so it looks tidy once the cover is on.
Pretty impressive! 930Mbps is about the limit of what is possible when connected using Gigabit ethernet. This is due to the overhead involved in the ethernet frame and the TCP/IP stack. Also, take a look at that very good 2ms latency figure.
Some more tests below:
This time, I used a speedtest server in London rather than on-island. This resulted in a slightly slower result which is to be expected. It’s still very fast though.
Now a test of an actual download:
Using Steam to download a game update, I got a peak of 878Mbps.
The vast majority of Guernsey Fibre users are likely to be using 1 gigabit ethernet between the ONT and their router, and then 1 gigabit ethernet on the LAN side of their house. However, the ’10GE’ port piqued my interest. So I purchased a couple of 2.5Gbe PCI-E cards to slot into my server, and connected it to see if it would sync up:
Answer: yes it does! The 10GE port is capable of 2.5Gbps, therefore I can only assume that it is also capable of 5Gbps and also 10Gbps BASE-T ethernet.
This is a massive assumption, but is the underlying fibre service actually XG-PON (i.e. 10Gig fibre)? and hence the ONT has a 10GE port for future proofing, in case Sure offer a service faster than 1Gig? Such a service is unlikely to be necessary for residential users, but some business may be able to take advantage of it, if such a service did exist.
I also connected the LAN side of my router up using 2.5Gb ethernet, so the entire path from ONT to Router to PC was running at 2.5Gb.
This result gets very close to the headline speed of 1 gigabit.
I should also point out a disclaimer: I am using virtualised OPNSense as a router, and it is notoriously poor at handling PPPoE at very high throughput, even with fast hardware. Therefore, it is entirely possible that my router is the limiting factor at this point.
Update: For a more accurate speedtest result which isn’t as limited by my router, see the later post here: https://www.fastinternetblog.uk/?p=438
Even to Jersey, the speed remains very high at ~980Mbps.
Overall, I am very impressed with the service. The installation was handled extremely efficiently. The headline throughput speeds are as claimed, and real-world download performance (e.g. Steam, etc) is very acceptable around 800-900Mbps.
My only minor gripe, at this point, is the upload speeds. 50Mbps upload on a service costing £135 p/m is too low, in my opinion. Sure’s “Pro Fibre” service has a speed of 1Gig down/200Mbps up, but this costs an eye-watering £213 p/m. The residential 1Gig service should have a 100Mbps upload speed. I suspect it’s limited in this way so that if you want or need the higher upload speeds (i.e. businesses) you are forced to pay nearly double the amount.
When I first got broadband in Guernsey, it was a 1Mbps ADSL connection (in 2004). In 19 years that speed has increased by 1000x. What speeds will we be getting in 2043, I wonder?
Last year, it was announced that Sure was finally going to be rolling out an island-wide FTTH service to connect to all properites by 2026.
However, it did take £12.5m of taxpayers money for them to finally do so. Potentially without the States’ intervention, we would be stuck on VDSL forever! Nevertheless, this is a good thing for the island and on balance a bit of public funding for something as important as broadband is probably worth it.
My only minor concern regarding this funding, is exactly what kind of deal the States and Sure have. Unfortunately, it seems the actual agreement between them has not been made public (which isn’t great from a transparency perspective). Was the £12.5m just a lump sum of cash handed to Sure to use however they like? Or, is there some sort of clawback mechanism so that if Sure ends up making a greater profit off the service compared to before, they hand some of the money back? (The UK government subsidy scheme for fibre rollout had a clawback mechanism).
Regardless of the deals that happened behind closed doors, we do instead get to see the end-user pricing for the new fibre services:
| Service Name | Download Speed | Upload Speed | Monthly Price* |
| Basic Fibre | 30Mbps | 3Mbps | £43 |
| Essential Fibre | 50Mbps | 5Mbps | £52 |
| Superfast Fibre | 100Mbps | 10Mbps | £58 |
| Ultrafast Fibre | 300Mbps | 30Mbps | £69 |
| Gigabit Fibre | 1Gbps | 50Mbps | £126 |
My immediate impression when I saw these prices, was that they were expensive. We have already gotten used to paying more for our telecoms in Guernsey compared to the UK (which is somewhat understandable given our location and smaller market size). However, the new fibre pricing is problematic for I think a few reasons:
I thought it would be a good idea to do a comparison of the fibre plans against other jurisdictions, namely within the UK (BT and Gigaclear) and within Jersey (JT). Whilst I fully accept that as a smaller island we are always going to pay a bit more for the same level of service, I think the graphs below demonstrate just how big a difference there is in pricing.
I have split my comparison up into 3 ‘tiers’: ‘Budget’, ‘Mid range’ and ‘High range’, to try and compare like products with each other. In order to capture introductory pricing (i.e. a discount for the first x months of service) and also to capture that Sure doesn’t provide a free router (you effectively pay £72 for one) , I averaged the pricing out over 5 years. This gives a fairer idea of pricing.
The bar charts are displayed over two axes. The blue bar represents the 5 year cost, on the left hand axis, whilst the yellow represents the headline speed, on the right axis.
First, the ‘Budget’ services. Sure is undoubtedly the most expensive service in this category. It is also the slowest, by some margin! In fact, the next fastest service to compare with is BT fibre and this is 3x faster. BT is also nearly £600 cheaper over the 5 year period. Note here that I chose to use Sure’s 50Mbps product instead of the 30Mbps product. Whilst the 30Mbps service is slightly cheaper, it is even slower and it didn’t seem right to compare this with services in the 100’s of Mbps range.
Now is probably a good time to mention that in Jersey, JT have usage caps on their services. I have chosen to use their middle tier product offering which comes with a 100GB data cap during daytime use (I assume this is monthly). Sure is unlimited.
Next, the ‘Mid range’ offerings. Sure is again the most expensive here, by some significant margin. JT is over £1000 cheaper in Jersey over the same time period, and is also offering a faster service (caveat: but with data caps!). The UK providers come in significantly cheaper, and in BT’s case faster than what Sure offer. I would actually argue that the ‘mid range’ service is the most competitive area for Sure. Despite the highest cost, the speeds are competitive with the others in this segment.
Finally, the ‘High end’ category. All of the providers here offer 1Gbps services. Again, JT’s service has a 300GB data cap during day usage, the others are all unlimited. In the UK, BT actually comes in cheaper than Gigaclear, but it is worth mentioning that all of Gigaclear’s speeds are symmetric (1Gbps upload and download speeds). Here we really see the high cost of Sure’s 1Gbps service. It is approaching 2x the cost of the UK providers, and 1.5x more expensive than our neighbouring island.
A few quick points that need highlighting:
Overall, I do feel that the pricing for fibre broadband in Guernsey is too high when compared to the UK and Jersey. In particular, the ‘budget’ services are very poor value for money and the gigabit service is insanely expensive.
I think a fairer service offering (for the consumer at least) should look something more like this:
| Service Name | Download Speed | Upload Speed | Monthly Price |
| Superfast Fibre | 100Mbps | ||
| Ultrafast Fibre | 300Mbps | ||
| Gigabit Fibre | 1Gbps | 100Mbps |
After waiting and waiting for Fastershire (Gloucestershire’s BDUK arm) to finally roll out super-fast broadband to my area, it was finally confirmed that we would not be receiving mere FTTC from BT, but in fact full FTTH from Gigaclear!
The Gigaclear order was placed all the way back in December 2015, before any of the work had even started. Then in June of this year, Gigaclear’s contractors began to dig up the side of the road to lay the fibre cabling. Finally, at the end of August, we received this package through the post:
Gigaclear’s self installation kit
The self install kit can be ordered with different cable lengths, ranging from 10 to 50 metres. You can also request even longer lengths up to 100m, but they will charge you for this. Since Gigaclear only bring the fibre cable up to the boundary of your property, they supply the remaining cable for you to bring it into your house.
The pricing options for Gigaclear are not cheap. You have to consider that you are receiving a premium internet connection, and I feel the price reflects this. On top of the monthly price plan, they charge a flat £100 ‘connection fee’ that is mandatory, and then if you don’t choose self install, the installation fee ‘starts from’ £95. So potentially before you’ve even got your internet connection, you’ve spent £200. Most practical people should be able to easily install the service without paying for the installation fee, however, as we did.
The monthly price plans are as follows (all speeds are symmetric):
50 Mbps – £39.90
100 Mbps – £45.25
200 Mbps – £52.45
1 Gbps – £74.00
I opted for the 100 Mbps plan, since it’s fast enough for pretty much everything. A 50 Mbps connection could become limited in the future with 4K video streaming, for example.
Anyway, back to the installation. Within the installation box you receive quite a lot:
Power supply, ethernet cable, 2 wall entry points, an external cable duct, cable ‘pusher’, silicon sealant, and 100 cable clips.
Router and internal wall box
50m of pre-ended Fibre cable
There are fairly comprehensive instructions that come with the box, and at no point during the installation was anything unclear.
To begin with, we started at the Gigaclear junction ‘pot’ that had been placed on our boundary verge by the road:
Inside, you will find a smaller black box that contains the actual connection point:
Inside the small black box, you will find this:
Unfortunately when I opened up the black box, it hadn’t been closed properly, and a slug family had decided to move in. I washed both the box and the lid as best as I could, but you can still see some of the remains in the picture! The lid of the box has a rubber seal that fits tightly against the junction box, and the cable entry points have rubber grommets to prevent water (and slug) ingress. Finally a screw is provided to tighten it together.
Inside the junction box, it looks like there may actually be 2 ‘fibres’ in the orange cable. If you look closely there appears to be both a red and green cable coming out of it. It just shows how thin these fibre cables really are once you strip away all of the insulation (and even these cables have a very thin layer of insulation on). Underneath the screw in the picture, there is a long tube – this is where the fibre cable from the ground is spliced to the cable that goes to the blue connector. You then get the thicker red fibre going into the connector, ready for a customer to plug into.
The connector appears to be the ‘SC’ standard. It clipped pretty easily into the one in the junction box.
Connector on end of supplied fibre cable
We started by digging a trench from the box to our boundary wall. The Gigaclear ground ‘pot’ has a hole around 2 inches deep behind the hinge, that allows you to feed the cable through. To protect the cable, we placed it inside some hosepipe tubing for the short distance that it was underground. Once at our wall, we drilled a hole through it, and then the rest of the journey we actually just clipped the cable to the back of the wall with the provided cable clips. Digging through hard earth and gravel is extremely difficult without power tools. Plus, the cable is probably safer above ground level in the event of any digging work being done in the future.
Interestingly, I ordered 50M expecting to only use around 30M of it. However, I ended up using almost the entire length of the cable! So I would definitely advise going longer than necessary – fibre isn’t like copper wire so the difference in length of say 25 vs 50 metres of cable doesn’t matter.
Getting the cable inside was easy, so was installing the ‘base plate’ that the router clips onto. The end of the fibre cable fits snugly inside the base unit, and the router literally slides up and makes contact with it. It was all pretty easy for anyone with basic DIY ability.
The finished router mounted on the wall:
With the installation finished, all that remained was logging on to the internet – you have to enter your address details and Gigaclear customer number first, and then it just worked.
Obligatory speed test result:
Pretty impressive! The low latency is probably the most impressive thing, since I’ve had experience of GPON installations elsewhere that had much higher latency. Gigaclear uses point-to-point fibre, not GPON, so you’re not sharing the fibre cable with anyone else (at least up until the cabinet, anyway).
It’s also worth noting that like many smaller FTTH providers, Gigaclear offers symmetric connection speeds on all of their plans. Even though BT offer FTTH plans in some places of the country, the upload speeds are not symmetric (I believe they offer a 330/30 service).
The supplied router is reasonable, certainly much better than Telefonica Movistar’s one provided in Spain for my FTTH there (it had extremely slow wifi). The Gigaclear router comes with 2×2 MIMO 802.11ac, obviously dual band 2.4/5Ghz. This is certainly reasonable, though really a 3×3 MIMO product would’ve been better, considering they do offer up to 1Gbps connections. It comes with 4 gigabit ethernet ports, as well as 2 telephone jacks (not used – unless the Vonage service uses them – I’m not actually sure).
The router interface is somewhat locked down: it lacks a few key features such as Dynamic DNS, bridging, and the ability for it to respond to ICMP packets externally. It’s adequate, but the power user in me would prefer something a bit more advanced. Sadly you have to use the provided router, and unlike Virgin Media, who allow you to bridge the connection to your own router, Gigaclear don’t offer this without having to pay for it (which is ridiculous – £4.17 per month).
If we consider the price of the connection, I would expect a few more options to be available without charging extra:
Aside from these minor gripes, the connection is otherwise excellent. It does annoy me that I am downgrading my internet connection in some areas, whilst improving it in others. The lack of a dynamic DNS client built into the router is probably the most annoying of the problems. It just means I have to run a client on a computer all the time.
So would I recommend Gigaclear? The answer is absolutely yes. Despite some flaws that won’t effect 99% of people, it delivers a vastly superior connection compared to pretty much anything else out there at the moment.