The day after the last failed attempt to install fibre, I got a follow-up message from Openreach, pretty much not telling me anything I didn't already know:
We came to see if we can connect your property to our Full Fibre network yesterday.
The good news is we can, but the engineer found that the existing network connection point wasn't suitable for private land's underground connection, so we need to plan a new way to bring the fibre cable to your home, which may also require a specialist engineer for a flat roof connection.
We're really sorry for the delay, but we're on it and will update you again in the next 10 days (we're usually much quicker).
We promise Full Fibre's worth the wait. It's the UK's most reliable broadband technology.
The flat roof thing was... interesting, but okay, I'm sure they know what they're doing and that it's some automated system with a restricted set of outcomes.
Skip forward one day and I get an SMS out of the blue:
Hi, it's Openreach on behalf of EE/BT.
Sorry we missed you.
Book a new date for your Full Fibre installation here: [removed]
The "Sorry we missed you" was very odd. They didn't miss me. I saw them two days earlier. But, again, okay... I followed the link and it also seemed to be written as if one of us had missed an appointment and I needed to pick another day. Anyway, I ignored what it said and just used the date picker to pick the next available day (which was today: as in the day I'm writing this).
Fast forward to today and there's a knock on the door at around 08:30. Around two hours later, and this is what I was seeing:
To be clear: this isn't the actual speed of the connection. This was a quick test from my Mac, in my office, via the Wi-Fi connection. I don't currently have a Mac or PC wired into the router so can't measure the full speed. Testing on the router itself, it's much closer to 943Mbps/100Mbps. But, yeah, I'm good. I finally have full fibre again!
There was an immediate downside though. Once it was all set up, with the new router (which I swapped to as it has Wi-Fi 6, so why not?), I noticed that the ping times between my Macs were all over the place; this was also noticeable in that the ssh connections were so jittery to the point of being almost unusable.
Bugger.
So I did a bunch of digging online and, without getting too deeply into it (because I'm not a networking guy): the problem is AirDrop/Sidecar. They don't play well with a Wi-Fi 6 connection, so do stuff in the background that causes your ping times to be all over the place.
The solution? Turn this off for the Wi-Fi connection on the affected Macs:
I can't find anything that suggests I'm going to regret doing this for the couple of Macs in my office, and for my MacBook Air, and having done it, the performance is fine again.
This is why I avoid anything to do with networking: it always seems like if you improve one thing, it degrades some other thing, and it's only ever fixed by remembering to tweak some reasonably obscure setting somewhere on some particular item of hardware.
Still... I HAVE FULL FIBRE AGAIN!
Finally, I can think about doing the odd stream again.