The UniFi Installation Experience

In my post on HSBB last year, I wrote about the arrival of FTTH (Fiber-to-the-Home) in my area of residence.

Well, I finally made the move of switching away from Streamyx broadband for the newly-introduced UniFi high-speed broadband (HSBB) service. In particular, I signed up for the VIP5 package which is a triple-play service i.e. 5Mbps Internet, IPTV and VoIP.

In this post, I thought I share my experience on the UniFi installation process.

Installation

It was a Tuesday morning at 10am on July 6, a crew of four installers from TM came with two reels of cables (see below) and big bags containing equipment.

After the normal introductions, I lead the crew to the back of the house where the nearest pole with the fiber distribution box is located. I also took them to the rooftop.

I told them where I wanted the broadband termination unit, residential gateway, phone and IPTV set-up-box (STB) were to be placed.

After a quick survey, the crew leader briefed me on how the installation was going to take place.

In no time, they started working — first tackling the aerial fiber distribution box on the pole. At the same time, the crew made a hook on the side of a concrete structure on the rooftop (see below).

That hook was to hold the black fiber cable pulled from the pole. The black cable ran along the side of the concrete structure leading to another fiber box which was affixed to the concrete wall (see below).

From this box, a thin white fiber cable was pulled to a nearby window. The cable was so thin that only a small gap at the bottom part of the window was sufficient for the cable to gain entry into the house (see below).

Though not the most elegant way of bringing the cable in, at least there was no need to drill a hole through the wall as in some other installations.

Inside the house, this white cable ran straight down to another fiber box (see below). For this cable-run, the crew housed the cable in a conduit.

It was about 11:15am (after about an hour plus of outdoor work), all crew members gathered indoors and started hooking up and configuring the equipments (see below from left to right: DECT phone, broadband termination unit, residential gateway). They brought their own laptop for configuration and testing.

Since the household TV set is in the living room (front part of the house), I wanted the IPTV STB (see below) there. I provided them with a long CAT5 cable to connect the STB with the residential gateway for temporary testing purposes.

All these configuration and testing took about half-an-hour.

I was then given a sheet of paper containing several access passwords for different services.

Happy that everything was working, I did the sign-off and the crew left in their van at about 12pm.

So, the complete installation only took them 2 hours — a big contrast from the full day installation that I was initially told.

By the way, hats off to the TM installers. They were an efficient bunch and I appreciate their professionalism. I don’t normally give such a compliment after having had a bad experience with my Streamyx implementation in the past.

Terminating Old Phone Service and Streamyx

After doing some testing on my own and satisfied with the outcome, I went to TMPoint Bangsar to terminate the old phone service and my Streamyx broadband service just before their counter closing at about 5:30pm. I returned their old phone to them to avoid a penalty.

So, there you have it! I hope to share about my experience with the UniFi service itself in the near future.

Technorati tags: tm, unifi, hsbb, broadband, ftth