On 1st December 2025 MjQuinn on behalf on Openreach installed FTTP to my house.
In this blog we will show you what the install process looked like.
A huge thank you to Daniel and Mike from MJQuinn for letting me take photos during the install.
Install day
I placed my order with Structured communications on 24th November and only had to wait a week for the install which is very good going.
The comms I received from Openreach and MJQuinn were excellent and I was kept well informed of the appointment including on the day although the one text I had early morning saying the engineer was outside caught me by surprise as it was an afternoon appointment, this turned out to be a bug in the system and was actually the engineer clocking on for the day!
Daniel the MJQuinn engineer turned up just after 12PM and not long after his colleague Mike arrived who was being trained by Daniel.
Daniel then took me though the install process and asked where I would like the service to be installed and to my relief was happy to accommodate it being installed into my garage where I have my home lab setup and my other FTTP lines come in.
The first challenge was to locate the Openreach CBT (Containerised Block Terminal) these are nodes where the fibre’s from each house are plugged in.
Having seen inside my chamber before (the one on the pavement right outside my house) I knew there was not an Openreach CBT in there the two as per the above picture belong to Virgin Media (Nexfibre) which is used for my backup line and another alt net which I used to have a connection to.
The Openreach CBT is actually located in the chamber on the opposite side of the street with a duct running under the road between the two chambers with the blue drawstring left to pull the fibre though.
The Chamber as pictured above containing the Openreach CBT is located on my neighbours driveway good job they were out!
Having located the CBT the next task was to rod though the duct to start pulling the fibre though this bit took a bit of doing with a couple of failed attempts due to slight blockages but using a special attachment on the end we got it though.
Having cleared a path though the engineers then pulled though the fibre cable from the first chamber with the CBT under the road to the second chamber and then though the duct to my house.
Daniel then connected the fibre to the CBT and labelled it with my connection details.
Meanwhile Mike was inside the garage installing the ONT and drilling a small hole outside to bring the internal fibre cable though.
This fibre cable was then tacked neatly to the outside of the garage round to the front of my house to join with the fibre cable from the street.
In order to join the two fibre cables together they use this discreet slim Customer Splice Point (CSP).
You can see on the image above the fibre cable from the street is stripped back and neatly tucked in the splice tray.
Next the cable from the inside is bought round and stripped ready to be spliced together using a fusion splicing machine.
Once spliced together the cover is put on the CSP leaving a very neat job.
Finally the ONT (Optical Network Terminator) was switched on and then provisioned/activated by the engineers.
They then make sure the service is working before they leave.
Really impressed with the install from Daniel and Mike from MJQuinn they were friendly and accommodating could not fault them a huge thanks again to them both.
Also a huge thanks to Adam of Structured for getting me setup so quickly and for great service from Structured Communications.
A week after the install the PSU failed on the Openreach ONT (pictured below) and was really impressed that Openreach came out next day to fix!
Huge thanks to Adam from Structured for fast service and for Openreach for fast fix time.
Currently Openreach offer GPON based Asymmetric services over FTTP (Unless you get leased line)
I have got the 1000/115 package have had to get creative to get round the limitations of the 115mbps upload.
Openreach are planning trials starting next March of XGSPON based services including trialling 3.3,5.5 and 8.5gbps symmetrical services which is really exciting and cant wait for that to come round here!
