And so, at 12:55 p.m. today, Openreach’s man turned up to write the last chapter of the saga.

I must commend the poor sod for working outside on one of the hottest days of the year - it took him nearly two hours to fish through the freshly laid duct from the street and clip the fibre round the outside of my house in such a way that it isn’t visible unless you get down on your hands and knees to look for it.

Here’s the ONT sitting neatly out of the way in the garage near my networking cabinet:

Openreach ONT mounted near my networking cabinet in the garage

Unfortunately the nasty little PoE splitter I purchased months ago turned out to limit the speed to 100mbps - a problem when you’ve paid for an internet connection that runs at 500 - so I’ve got a better one arriving tomorrow.

Much to the confusion of myself and the Openreach guy, this particular ONT seems to take over an hour to mate with the exchange after being powered on. It does get there in the end though, and the whole point of feeding it over PoE is that it will benefit from my UPS, so I’m not too fussed.

I’ll end with the obligatory speed testing screenshot, although this is just hanging out in the garden using the outdoor WiFi access point - all that work last year getting ethernet up to my desk means I can enjoy the full 500 (or sometimes more) from there reliably.

Fast.com speed test showing around 500Mbps over outdoor WiFi