Fibre internet rollout

Thinking about fibre internet?

With Enable rolling out fibre internet cable around Christchurch, many of us here will already have fibre internet setup. But what is involved in getting fibre internet at your house?

Has Enable been down your street and you can now see a wee enable post by your driveway or somewhere along your front boundary fence? If so, you may be able to get fibre internet connected – yay! You can also confirm by checking here and searching your address.

The first step to get fibre internet is to contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP); or this may be a good time to shop around for the best price ;). From here, they will get Enable or Chorus (Mainly only for new builds) to come out and connect the fibre from the street to a junction box on the exterior of your house. This is most likely to be near a garage. The next step is “blowing” the fibre through into your property and connecting it to an Optical Network Terminal (ONT).

This is where it can get tricky.

Say for example, your junction box sits outside your garage. It would make sense then to have the ONT in your garage right? Not necessarily! You need to connect your modem to your ONT which presents two main issues. If your modem is wireless, and you mostly rely on wireless for internet in your house, you may not get great wireless coverage around your whole house. Also, your phone will need to be plugged into the modem – no one wants to have to go into the garage to answer the phone! Further, most existing homes in Christchurch will most likely not be wired for fibre internet. These homes may have several phone jacks (BT) around the house, but the wiring with these will not support data transfer so RJ45 ports are needed with at least Cat5e wiring.

There are several options to get around this. You could have Enable or Chorus setup the ONT where your existing modem is. If you decide to have the ONT in the garage, you could arrange for an electrician to run Cat5e or Cat6 cable from your garage to where your modem sits in your house and viola!

There certainly is a lot to consider, especially if your house isn’t new and built for fibre! Do you have fibre in your home? How did you get yours setup?