One does not simply upgrade a Lit Fibre line to 2.3 Gbps - Part 1
I wanted to shed some light on what the CityFibre ISP experience is like from a business tier side. Not intended to flame, I have kept my communications civilized, but I'm not impressed either.
I was originally a Lit Fibre customer, their infrastructure rollout predated CityFibre coming into my area. This was before Lit Fibre was bought by CityFibre, then buying back the ISP component, and letting CF keep their infrastructure. This means I still had the old Lit Fibre ONT.
I would have moved away from Lit Fibre regardless because of the 1 hour, with 30 minute renewals, DHCP leases used for static IP address. AKA the roll dice every 48 hours per day and try to break your Internet game.
I have since started my own company and upgraded that line to a business fibre package that uses Giganet (now Cuckoo). It's the same 900/900 Mbps package I had previously. I also run a secondary failover line using Virgin Media.
This is where it gets fun and things start falling through the cracks and going off the rails. I recently placed an order for the 2.3/2.3 Gbps package. I told my account manager that the ONT will need to be replaced. They came back and said the ONT needs to be replaced, a CF engineer is booked.
Fast forward, the engineer has come by, swapped the ONT, and tested that their end of the job is done and that there is good light signal. Internet optional. That was 21st May. It took a whole day of emails for my account manager to understand that I have no service on the CF line and that I'm running on my failover line.
I have tried troubleshooting what I can, no authentication errors on my gateway logs, PPPoE gets noisy when it fails. Interface is active with no IP assigned, there isn’t much else to go off. i tested DHCP just in case.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's something simple like the new ONT serial needing to be registered. Bad communication makes simple things dificult. This is the same provider that supplied the wrong PPPoE credentials when the account was first opened, business lines also don't use VLAN 911.
The case has been escalated with another update scheduled for 26th May.
Things to note, my business and background are in DevOps, infrastructure, and cloud. CityFibre is a black box that makes OpenReach feel like an open book.
Lots of uncommunicated expectations, it was assumed that my 900/900 line speed would resume after the ONT upgrade, it didn't. Then I'm told that CityFibre needs to migrate me to their new Aquila platform, but can only do it after 8th June. No explicit mention of any of this before starting on this adventure.
Stay tuned for Part 2!