For the last 12 months or so CityFibre have been digging up most of Wakefield, which happens to be roughly where I live. Supposedly, in return for this, the good people of this-end-of-West-Yorkshire would have the ability to banish OpenReach from their lives, and get a Proper Fibre Internet Connection, with actual Fibre Fibryness delivered to thier house.
I was somewhat nervous that this meant that anyone who wanted to use the network would be tied to a single provider, but no! A bunch of ISPs announced at some point mid-2022 that they would be able to provide their service through a CityFibre connection. Usefully, my ISP (who I like) jumped on this too.
Once the incessant roadworks and temporary traffic lights went away, I noticed a fibre loop coming out of the ground and LX-taped to my local pole. A few days after that, there was a box at the top of the pole with the fibre un-looped and plugged into it.
After a few weeks of hitting the “CAN I ORDER YOU YET??” button on the CityFibre website, it eventually screamed back “YESS!”, so I pinged AAISP and asked them to sort it out.
A surprisingly short amount of time later, some vans and cranes showed up, then did some drilling and other complicated things involving the statutory highway clearance (5.2m) before leaving me with a small black box, some blinky lights and a hole in the wall. After a little bit of cabling and provisioning (somehow involving VLAN 911), I had a connection!
Is that… a power cable?
The only snag was that the ONT (that’s Optical Network Teminator) is a powered, active device. A bit like… a modem?
Anyhow, there was an ugly power cable getting in the way. I like powering things over ethernet, the way the original founders intended, so after pulling the box off the wall and searching for “anatel gigapoint poe”, I came across this handy blog post which explained that with a handy little injector device, you could power the ONT over PoE.
By sheer coincidence, I owned this exact little injector device because I’d used it to power my Draytek Vigor 120 that I was using for my ADSL line. I’d just stopped using this, so re-purposed it, and it worked!
