Understand your fibre connection and fix common faults

How your fibre connection is put together

A fibre installation has three parts, and knowing which is which makes troubleshooting far quicker.

• The fibre cable. A hair-thin glass strand running from our network to your building. It carries light, not electricity, and is unaffected by weather or power failures — but it can be cut by digging, snapped by falling branches, or damaged where it enters the building.
• The ONT (Optical Network Terminal). A small box mounted inside, usually near where the cable enters. It converts light into a normal network signal. Its lights are the single most useful diagnostic on the whole installation.
• The router. Connected to the ONT by a short network cable. It creates your Wi-Fi and shares the connection between devices. Some installations combine the ONT and router into one unit.

Reading the lights on your ONT

Exact labelling varies between manufacturers, but the pattern is consistent. This is what our technicians look at first.

Light	What it should look like	If it’s wrong
Power / PWR	Solid green	No light means no power. Check the adapter, plug and wall socket.
PON / Optical	Solid green	Off, red or slowly flashing means the ONT is not seeing our network — usually a line fault. This one needs us.
LOS	Off entirely	Red or flashing red means Loss of Signal. The fibre is damaged, disconnected or dirty. Report it to us.
LAN / Ethernet	Green, flickering with traffic	Off means the cable to your router is unplugged, loose or faulty.
Internet / Auth	Solid or flickering green	Off with a good PON light can indicate an authentication or account issue — contact us.

Checks you can safely do yourself

1. Check for a known outage. Look at our network status page first. If your area is listed, we already know and are working on it.
2. Restart in the right order. Unplug both the ONT and the router from power. Wait 30 seconds. Plug the ONT back in first and wait two full minutes for its lights to settle. Only then plug the router back in. Restarting them together is the most common reason a reboot “doesn’t work”.
3. Check the network cable. The cable between the ONT and the router should click firmly into both ends. Try reseating it, or swap it for another one if you have a spare.
4. Test with a cable. Plug a laptop directly into the router with Ethernet. If that works but Wi-Fi doesn’t, the fault is in your wireless setup, not the fibre.
5. Look at the cable entry point. Check visually for obvious damage where the fibre enters the building — a pulled cable, storm damage or a strand snagged by a gate. Report what you see; don’t try to repair it.

What never to do with fibre

• Never bend it sharply. Fibre carries light in a straight line. A tight bend — anything smaller than a coffee cup — causes light to escape and speeds to collapse. Don’t run it around a sharp corner or trap it behind furniture.
• Never unplug the fibre from the ONT. The connector face must stay perfectly clean. A fingerprint or speck of dust is enough to break the connection, and re-terminating it requires our splicing equipment.
• Never look into the end of a fibre cable. It carries invisible infrared laser light that can permanently damage your eyes.
• Never staple, nail or pinch the cable. If you need it rerouted or extended, ask us — a technician can do it safely.
• Never move the ONT yourself. The fibre run is measured and terminated to that position. If you want it relocated, we can quote for it.

Fibre connected but running slowly

If the lights are healthy and you’re online but speeds are disappointing, work through these in order:

1. Test on a cable, not Wi-Fi. This single step resolves the majority of speed complaints. Run a test with a laptop plugged into the router.
2. Check what else is running. A console downloading an update, a cloud backup or someone streaming in 4K will consume a large share of a home package.
3. Test at different times. If speeds are good at midday and poor at 20:00, that’s a peak-hour pattern worth reporting to us with timestamps.
4. Consider your device. An older laptop with a 100 Mbps network port or a phone with 2.4 GHz-only Wi-Fi cannot reach higher speeds regardless of the line.
5. Check whether the package still fits. Households grow. If you’ve added people, devices or a home office since you signed up, the line may be doing exactly what it should — there simply isn’t enough of it. Ask us about upgrading.