Getting fiber to the garage

A free install that quietly cancelled itself, then a polite installer, a shared pole, and a same-day surprise that turned "next week" into that same afternoon.

Getting fiber should be boring. You order it, someone shows up, a light turns green. Mine took a cancelled contract, a couple of no-shows, an online form that finally worked — and then, out of nowhere, a Proximus tech who phoned on the afternoon of the install offering to light the line that same day. Here is how the cable actually got from the pole across the street into my garage.

The order that cancelled itself

I went with Proximus on a business plan. The good part of ordering on Proximus’s own fiber network is that the physical install is free — no construction fee for running the drop and mounting the box. The less good part was everything that happened before anyone showed up.

It began as a phone contract — business, so they call you — and on that call we agreed the install dates. Then I started getting emails inviting me to pick dates online. I ignored them; the dates were already set on the call, or so I assumed. The installers didn’t appear on the agreed dates, and a little later I got a cheerful notice that my contract had been cancelled.

So I called support. It half-resolved — enough that the cancellation notices stopped, not enough that anyone was actually coming. What finally worked was the thing I’d been ignoring: I filled in the dates through the online form from one of those emails. Those dates stuck. People came. Lesson learned — when Proximus offers you a form, fill in the form.

Install day: a pole, some coax, and a very neat run

CCTV still: a Unifiber bucket truck with hazard stripes parked on the driveway, boom lining up on the pole across the street. — 11:26 — the Unifiber crew lining up on the pole across the street. My own CCTV caught the whole morning.

The Unifiber technician was genuinely great — polite, and happy to talk through how I wanted the cable run before drilling anything. The fiber comes from a pole across the street, and that same pole already carries our coax. I asked whether he could reuse it rather than string a second line; no problem at all. He ran it across, down the façade, and neatly into the garage, then mounted the wall box — the OTP, the legal demarcation point where Proximus’s responsibility ends and mine begins.

The white Unifiber wall box (OTP) mounted on a garage wall, a green SC/APC fiber pigtail emerging from the bottom, a hand pointing at it. — The Unifiber OTP in the garage. The green SC/APC pigtail is the handover point — everything upstream is theirs, everything downstream is mine.

No mess, no drama, no “we’ll have to come back.” If you’ve ever had a utility install go sideways, you know how rare that sentence is.

The same-day surprise

Here is the part that actually made me write this down. The Unifiber install wrapped up in the late morning. Around 15:00 — a couple of hours later — my phone rang. A Proximus technician: the centrale flagged that your fiber’s in, I’m finishing a job nearby, I could swing past and activate you now instead of next week.

CCTV still timestamped 13:20: a Renault van on the driveway, a technician in hi-vis working out of an open toolbox in the foreground. — 13:20, same afternoon — the Proximus activation that was supposed to be “next week.”

My provisioning appointment was, in fact, scheduled for the following week. So this was a pure, unprompted we’re ahead of schedule, want it early? And yes. Obviously yes. He activated the line, and I had working fiber the same day the cable went up. After the ordering saga, it felt like the universe squaring the account.

…and then the real project started

A working line is one thing. What I actually wanted was to throw out the operator’s boxes and run the whole connection through my own router on a single SFP+ stick. A couple of days later the FS.com ONT module arrived, and that turned into its own afternoon of optical levels, VLAN 20, and PON state machines — the full bring-your-own-ONT writeup lives here.

The two things still open

I won’t pretend it’s all perfect. Two tickets are with Proximus as I write this:

VoIP credentials won’t generate. My plan includes voice, but the “create VoIP credentials” button in MyProximus throws an error every time. No SIP username, no password, no dial tone — yet. (There’s a whole separate post coming on the voice side once it’s sorted: UniFi Talk vs. Telnyx vs. Proximus’s own SIP.)
The upload is half what it should be. I’m on Business Ultra — nominally 8.5 Gbps down / 8 Gbps up. In practice I see roughly 5.5 down and only ~2.5 up. A symmetric shortfall would point at my own kit; this lopsided one, with upload hit hardest, smells like something upstream. That one’s with their technical team.

Neither dampens the headline, though. The cable got from the pole to the garage cleanly, and the line lit up the same afternoon. For a fiber install, that’s a good day.