It’s taken a long time for the 21st Century to arrive in Bridgend. You might think that since I work as a web developer and maintain a homelab and a gaming channel on YouTube as a hobby that I’d have a fast Internet connection. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Up until the last week, I was struggling along with a VDSL connection that was, to put it bluntly, pedestrian by mid-2020s standards. You can see how pedestrian below.

Downloading games from Steam was painful. Uploading a video to my YouTube channel took over an hour. And yet that was what I was stuck with in the hinterlands between Cardiff and Swansea, in which more urban areas cable providers had been offering faster connections for years.

A link light at the end of the tunnel

Last week an engineer from Openreach came round to fit a FTTP ONT as part of their drive to completely eliminate the copper PSTN by 2027. The run from the exchange to the cabinet in the middle of the street has been fibre optic for quite some time (known as FTTC), but that last stretch of copper cable was the sticking point. With everything now connected by a surprisingly tiny fibre optic cable I took to the comparison sites to see what FTTP packages BT (my current provider) were able to offer and was distinctly underwhelmed. High prices, low upload speeds and no option for a static IP address, which is really helpful when you have a homelab that you want to be able to access from outside the local network (I’d been relying on a cobbled-together dynamic DNS solution, which is less than ideal).

Then I saw YouFibre. For the same price BT were offering a nominal 300 Mbps download (150 Mbps guaranteed) and 49 Mbps upload, I could get a nominal symmetric 1 Gbps connection, ie 1 Gbps download and upload. Not only that, they were happy to add on a static IP address for an extra fiver a month. Amusingly, I’ve just noticed today that the endpoint server for the last speedtest I did on the BT connection (pictured above) was operated by YouFibre.

I immediately signed up. I was surprised to discover that they’re not using BT’s fibre network and reselling bandwidth from BT Wholesale like most ISPs. They’re actually operating over an altnet, in this case Netomnia – so I didn’t need to wait for Openreach to hook me up at all. They don’t cover the whole country yet, but if you’re in one of the areas Netomnia do cover, you could do a lot worse than to check them out.

And what actual real world speed do I get? Feast your eyes:

A signing bonus

If you sign up for YouFibre broadband via this link you’ll get an extra bonus of up to £100 depending on which package you sign up for, and so will I.