Last year I needed to install a new drain down the side of my house, and that required digging up the fibre in the garden. This would have been a simple thing to do, but I had bigger plans; when originally moving into my house, I had all my homelab gear under the stairs, so when CityFibre installed FTTP in 2019 I had the installers run it to there.

Now jump forward 5 years and all my homelab and network gear is based in the garage; the opposite side of the house to the ONT!! I do have a single CAT6 cable running through the house linking it all, but I don’t like this bottleneck.

Needing to dig up the fibre anyway for the drain installation meant only one thing: I had to move the ONT to the other side of the house.

All of what I went through to move it is not something I would recommend for the faint of heart, or those with shaky hands. The fibre is incredibly fragile and breaking it would require a call out to my supplier, Vodafone, who would have to book it in with the owner of the network, CityFibre, who would no doubt take a week or two to sort, plus expense.

I tried calling a local fibre installation company in advance to find out a cost to quickly patch a broken fibre cable, and their reply was “it’s CityFibre’s, so we can’t touch it.”

This did not deter me, so off I went…

First job, dig up the existing fibre run and expose it back to the street. This was harder than I thought it would be due to roots growing around it. I couldn’t just pull it up, It needed to be carefully dug up. The brown conduit is pretty tough however.

Next, on to the wall point and releasing the fibre from that.

In the above shot, the fibre from the street is about 25m long, spooled up and tucked behind a plastic cover, which then runs into a connector (the green square) that then feeds another 2m fibre cable through the wall to the ONT inside the house.

First realisation was that the connector was not put on properly by the installers, so it took me a while to figure out that the release toggle on the LC/APC connector was sitting above the lug in the wrong place. Here is an ‘after’ photo after fixing it.

As soon as the fibre was disconnected, I wrapped the ends in plastic and taped them up so to not get dust in them.

Here is the spooled fibre, taped up and ready to move about. The new 10m fibre cable I bought to run from the new wall point to the ONT inside the garage had some fibre-tip plugs, so I used those to protect the connector from dust.

Now comes the main problem I had: the new location of the wall-point was further than the existing external brown conduit was!!

The only solution was to cut the brown conduit in the middle (very carefully with a razor blade), and extend it with something that would slide over the APC connector, and be tough enough to live buried in the garden soil. I had some 15mm polypipe (water pipe) spare, and that seemed to be the perfect size to get the APC plug through.

So herein lies another issue; I was so focussed on unravelling and sorting out the fibre, that I didn’t take any photos of it, but in essence…

I unspooled the excess fibre across my back garden to make it straight (which in itself is troublesome as the fibre snags even on grass), pulled it carefully through the 3m length of 15mm water pipe, spooled the excess fibre back up, taped it all securely to the pipe etc so to relieve movement stresses on it, and then moved it all to the front lawn to bury it.

How I sealed the where the existing brown conduit went into the polypipe extension was creating a bung with wrapped electrical tape, pushed very snuggly into the pipe, then sealed off with copious amounts of tape wound round the outside of the joint.

Here is where the new run came across my lawn. I was amazed at how bad of a straight line my dig was. This channel was where the polypipe was laid.

The fibre needed to first cut across my main path, and here’s my doorbell cam capturing me cutting a groove in the path.

Finally, after running the conduit through my front lawn, across two paths, I had it where I wanted on the front garage wall.

And here’s the ONT in its new location in the garage. Those 4 green LEDs coming on where an awesome feeling.

So would I recommend someone else doing this to their own fibre? Maybe. It’s not a technically difficult thing to do, its just unravelling some fibre and moving it about carefully. Worse case for me if I had broken the fibre was I would have needed Vodafone (CityFibre) out to repair it. My plan as well if it did go wrong was to have first investigated what the connection was at street level, just the other side of my curb, to see if that was something I could have remedied, but as I didn’t want to interfere with any joint that wasn’t on my land, I left that alone unless I absolutely needed to investigate it. Thankfully it all worked and it was lovely to have my ONT right next to my modem/router.

Due to my testing of the ONT throughout the process of moving the fibre (powering it on/off several times in one day), this appeared to have affected my internet latency up to about 20ms, which was slightly concerning as I thought something I had done had affected it, but after a few days it came back down to its usual 4ms.

I’m posting this here mainly because before I attempted to move my ONT and fibre, I had searched online and someone else’s successful attempt at it had spurred me on. So here it is to encourage someone else out there to risk it all and move theirs!

If that is you reading this now: Good Luck!