Virgin Media XGS-PON Installation

By Aaron

Below is a list of the events and the dates as they happened, this is only to provide an estimate of how long it takes from an area going live to a completed install.

  • 30th August 2023 - Final Fibre Termination on the Street
  • 2nd September 2023 - Available for Ordering
  • 5th September 2023 - Service Ordered and Installation Date of the 19th of September given
  • 10th September 2023 - External Works done
  • 19th September 2023 - Indoor Installation and Activation Completed

  • On the 30th of August 2023, the final visit to the street appeared to be completed, the termination box in the existing BT manhole went live, and the equipment had been installed several months earlier.

  • By the 2nd of September 2023, the service was appearing as available to Order on Virgin Media’s website and also showing as live on https://bidb.uk

  • On the 5th of September 2023, I contacted Virgin Media and ordered the 1Gig Fibre Broadband Only service and was given an install date of the 19th of September 2023

  • Sunday the 10th of September 2023, the pre-pull team came to complete the external work which involved bringing the fibre from the manhole through the existing BT ducting which was laid during the house build around 17 years ago, and terminating it into a brown Virgin Media box which they also installed.

    There was no prior notice of this visit as all the work was outside and didn’t require access to the property but the engineers kindly gave us a knock to let us know they were there and also had to ask our neighbours to move their car as the manhole sits under their drive.

  • The engineer arrived well within the stated time, he used an existing hole that I had put there previously but he did check I was happy with this, he ran the fibre from the brown box through the wall to the white one he installed.

The fibre patch lead was run between the the white box and the Virgin Media supplied router (Hub 5x) which is a direct fibre connection.

The router is aesthetically pleasing, as I won’t be using the Wireless functionality so I was happy to have the router placed in a cupboard on a shelf in my rack

I have a 10Gb connection from the Desktop through to the Router, so obtaining the maximum speed that can be achieved

  • Overall I’m quite happy with everything the speed is excellent and reliable, the biggest downside for me is the lack of Modem Mode on the 5x router so it’s not a very clean setup if you want to use your equipment, also Virgin Media seem to hijack you DNS queries even with all the content filtering disabled.
  • My workaround for these issues is to do double NAT for the router and DMZ the IP of my router, and for the DNS I’m using DoH which encrypts DNS over HTTPS as this broke some of my home lab services until it did this.

If you got this far thanks for reading and if there is any interest in my home network setup let me know.

I’ve provided some affiliate links below to the equipment I’m using