A fibre installation is a straightforward job for our technicians, but it involves work on your property and it helps to know what to expect.

This guide walks through the whole process, including how long it takes and the decisions you’ll be asked to make on the day.

Typical timelines

Properties that need a longer cable run, wayleave permission from a landlord or body corporate, or work across a public road may take longer. We tell you as soon as we know rather than letting a date slip quietly.

What we need from you

• Someone over 18 present for the whole visit, to agree cable routes and sign the handover.
• Permission to do the work. If you rent, or live in a complex or estate, written permission from the landlord or body corporate may be required before we can drill or run cable. Arrange this in advance — it is the most common cause of a wasted visit.
• Access to the route. The outside wall, the roof space or a distribution point may need to be reached. Clear the way and secure any pets.
• A power point near where the ONT and router will be mounted.
• A decision on placement. Have a rough idea where you want the equipment before we arrive.

The installation, step by step

1. Arrival and survey. The technician introduces themselves, confirms your details and walks the property with you to plan the cable route and equipment position. Nothing is drilled until you have agreed the plan.
2. Running the drop cable. The fibre is run from our nearest distribution point to your building — overhead or underground depending on the infrastructure in your area. This is usually the longest part of the job.
3. Entry into the building. A small hole is drilled through the wall at the agreed point and sealed afterwards. The cable is secured neatly along its route.
4. Terminating the fibre. The technician splices or terminates the fibre and connects it to the ONT. This is precision work and can’t be rushed.
5. Mounting and powering the ONT. The ONT is fixed to the wall and powered. Its lights confirm the optical connection is good.
6. Router setup. Your router is connected, configured and your Wi-Fi network name and password are set.
7. Testing. The technician tests the line speed, confirms it meets your package and checks the Wi-Fi reaches the rooms you need.
8. Handover. You’re shown the equipment, told what the lights mean and given your Wi-Fi details. Then you sign to confirm the work is complete.

After the technician leaves

• Write down your Wi-Fi name and password and keep them somewhere findable.
• Connect your main devices and check the signal in the rooms that matter.
• Run a speed test with a laptop plugged into the router, and note the result as a baseline.
• Change the default Wi-Fi password — see how to change it.
• Log in to the client portal to confirm your account details are correct.

Who owns the equipment

The fibre cable, its termination and the ONT remain the property of Flexi Networks. They stay with the property if you move and must be returned or left in place when service ends. The router may be included with your package or supplied separately — your service agreement sets out which. Please don’t attempt to remove, relocate or modify any of it yourself.

The lights on your ONT tell you almost everything about the health of a fibre connection. Learning to read them means you can often diagnose a problem in seconds — and, just as usefully, know when it’s something you cannot fix yourself.

This guide follows the same order our technicians use.

Start with the status page

Before touching anything, check our network status page. If there’s a known incident affecting your area, we already know about it and are working on it — restarting your equipment won’t help and you’ll only lose time.

Reading your ONT lights

The checks worth doing yourself

1. Photograph the lights. Before changing anything, take a clear photo of the ONT and router. Attaching this to a fault report often lets us diagnose without a site visit.
2. Check power to everything. Confirm both the ONT and the router are powered. Try a different wall socket — failed adapters and dead sockets are more common than people expect.
3. Restart in the correct order. Unplug both units. Wait 30 seconds. Power the ONT first and wait two full minutes for its lights to settle. Only then power the router. Doing both together is why many reboots appear not to work.
4. Reseat the network cable. The cable between the ONT and the router should click into both ends. Unplug and firmly reconnect it, or swap in a spare cable if you have one.
5. Confirm it’s in the right port. That cable must go into the router’s WAN or Internet port — usually a different colour from the LAN ports.
6. Test with a cable directly. Plug a laptop into the router with Ethernet. If that works but Wi-Fi doesn’t, the fault is in your wireless setup, not the fibre.
7. Look at the cable entry point. Check visually for obvious damage where the fibre enters the building — storm damage, a pulled cable, a strand caught in a gate. Report what you see; don’t attempt a repair.

Matching the symptom to the cause

When to stop and call us

Contact us straight away, without further troubleshooting, if any of the following apply:

• The LOS light is red or flashing red.
• You can see physical damage to the cable outside or where it enters the building.
• The ONT is completely dead with power confirmed at the socket.
• The problem returns repeatedly after restarting.
• You’re a business customer and are offline — phone us rather than using a form.

Fibre is the fastest and most consistent connection technology available, so when it feels slow the cause is usually somewhere between the router and the device rather than on the line itself.

This guide works through the possibilities in order of how often they turn out to be responsible.

First, test properly

Almost every speed investigation goes wrong at the first step. A test run over Wi-Fi from the far end of the house measures your Wi-Fi, not your fibre.

1. Plug a laptop into the router with an Ethernet cable. This removes Wi-Fi from the equation entirely and is the single most valuable thing you can do.
2. Pause everything else. Stop downloads, streaming, cloud backups and console updates on every device in the house.
3. Run the test three times. Once now, once during the evening peak, and once late at night. Use our speed test or any reputable tester.
4. Write down each result with the time. The pattern across the day tells us far more than a single number.

Cause 1: Wi-Fi, by a wide margin

This is the most common answer. Wi-Fi is affected by distance, walls, interference from neighbours, the age of your devices and how many things are connected.

• Move the router somewhere central, high and in the open — see improving your Wi-Fi signal.
• Use the 5 GHz band for devices in the same room; it’s considerably faster.
• If one end of the house is weak, consider mesh or an additional access point.
• Reduce the number of connected devices, particularly older ones that slow the whole network down.

Cause 2: the device you’re testing on

• An older laptop with a 100 Mbps network port physically cannot exceed about 94 Mbps regardless of your line.
• Phones and tablets more than a few years old often support only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, which caps real-world speeds well below fibre rates.
• A device low on storage or memory, or running many background applications, will test slowly for reasons unrelated to your connection.
• Test on a second device before concluding anything. If one device is slow and everything else is fine, the device is the problem.

Cause 3: everything else in the house

Home packages are shared across everyone using them. A single 4K stream can consume 25 Mbps, a console game update can saturate the line completely, and a cloud backup running quietly in the background will slow everything without any obvious cause.

• Check what’s running on other devices before assuming a fault.
• Schedule large downloads and backups for overnight.
• If your household has grown since you signed up, the package may simply be too small now.

Cause 4: peak-hour patterns

If speeds are excellent at 10:00 and poor at 20:00 every day, that’s a peak-hour pattern. It may be your own household’s usage, or it may be capacity in your area — and that’s something we want to know about.

Report it with cabled test results from several evenings and the corresponding off-peak results. That evidence lets us check capacity on your access node directly rather than guessing.

Cause 5: the package no longer fits

Sometimes nothing is wrong at all. A 10 Mbps package that was ample for two people is genuinely inadequate for a family of five with a home office and three streaming devices. The line is delivering exactly what it should — there just isn’t enough of it.

If that’s the situation, we’ll tell you honestly. Ask us about upgrading — in most cases it takes effect within 24 hours and needs no new installation.

Reporting a speed problem to us

• Three or more speed test results with the time of day noted
• Whether each test was on a cable or over Wi-Fi
• Which devices are affected and which aren’t
• Whether the problem is constant or follows a daily pattern
• What you’ve already tried

With that information, log a fault and our team can usually get to the answer quickly.