Home::1 CityFibre Services

Offering CityFibre services is new for us at A&A and we are initially taking orders on a 'soft launch' basis. To request an order, email: sales@aa.net.uk

Check that your premises is 'Ready For Service' - you may have had your road dug up already, but it may not be fully connected.

1. Email us your address and we'll check and will be in touch.
2. Place order, this will include selecting the engineer visit date and time
3. Order will be confirmed by CityFibre, we'll let you know.
4. The day before the appointment, you'll receive an SMS from CityFibre confirming the appointment
5. We have more details in the 'Installation information' section below about what happens on the install day

Engineer visit

An engineer visit is required for new installs, which will be booked during the order process. We usually only offer morning appointments (8am-1pm) as that gives a better chance of the installation being completed that day. Some installs can take longer than the allocated time and may need a second appointment. CityFibre outsource the installation to Kelly Communications.

Dig work

CityFibre would have already dug up and installed their cables and junction boxes along your street. Further work is required to connect your premises to this cable, and will involve either running cable overhead, if you have telegraph poles, or digging a trench from the pavement/road to your building, then drilling in to the building to gain access to the inside.

Digging up your drive

This would involve digging from your pavement area to your building, so may well mean digging concrete driveways or flowerbeds, or pulling up driveway brickwork. The contractors will try to do the best job possible but do be prepared for some disruption. We'd suggest you take a look at your driveway and imagine what would be needed to run a cable from the pavement to your building and whether you are prepared for the destructive work to take place.

Time

If there is easy access, such as where overhead cabling is used or where the box is next to easy to dig earth, the installation can take less than an hour. However, it can take a lot longer, 3, 5 or more hours, where digging and drilling is required.

Wiring in the home

The cable being installed it fairly thick and can't easily be bent around corners like telephone or CAT5 wiring can. The engineers are not allowed to drill door frames. The point the cable enters the building will be decided when the engineer arrives and due to the cabling constraints and building structure it may not be exactly where you'd want it to be.

They will try to make the install as neat as possible. The engineer will take photos and one of their managers will sign off on each install.

Equipment

The fibre that is installed in to your home will be connected to an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) that will be provided by the engineers. This does need to be powered so you will need to have a power socket close by. This is the box that you'd plug your router in to. You can read more about the ONT on our Support Site.

Moving from one CityFibre 'Partner' to another is possible. Until April 2023 this is 'Losing provider led' - which means a bit of manual for for the customer and for us (and the losing partner). Get in touch with us and we can explain the process as it can be a little fiddly.

Latency can vary depending on the location. Latency will increase the further from London you are. For example, we see around 3ms ping time on lines in Reading, Milton Keynes and Cambridge to the IPs: 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9, but nearer 7ms in the West Midlands, and 13ms from Glasgow.

The CityFibre installers will install an 'ONT', you can find details about this device on our Support pages: https://support.aa.net.uk/CityFibre_ONT

Yes, that's no problem! It'll need to be set up for PPPoE using VLAN 911.

CityFibre classify residential and business addresses and offer two separate products to each. We are not yet able to order a CityFibre service to a business address, though we are working on this.

CityFibre will install only one service to a property, so it's not possible to have two.

You could have multiple services as well as CityFibre - eg, you could have a CityFibre service and a FTTP from BT, or FTTC from us as a backup.

It was announced at the end of 2022 that CityFibre and Toob had agreed terms to work together and provide eachother's services. Originally the press release said that partners (like us) would be able to access Toob's network by Summer 2023 - however, this has not happened and we have no ETA from CityFibre as to when we'll be able to order Toob-based services via CityFibre.

The Committed rate is the minimum rate that CityFibre guarantee across their network, in practice we'd expect customers to be able to use their full bandwidth without any congestion. The CityFibre FTTP service is not like a leased line where you have sole-use of the bandwidth between your premises and the ISP, this is a shared service using GPON or XGS-PON technology, much like BT's FTTP service.