The hub in the meter cupboard

British flats hide the boring utilities behind a door that slams with a metallic authority. Fibre installers, quite reasonably, terminate in that volume. The hub then sits on top of the ONT because there was a spare millimetre, and the household spends a year buying extenders that also live near the tin. The line is fine. The radio is in prison.

Leave the ONT, evict the radio

The fibre ends where it ends. Power for the ONT can stay. From the ONT’s ethernet, run a cable to a place humans inhabit: a shelf, a desk, a hall table that is not metal.

If the provider insists the hub stays for voice or TV, see whether it has an access-point mode you can park in the open, or whether a second cheap AP is simpler.

The door-gap myth

People pinch a cable in a fire door and call it a workaround. Do not. Pinching a cable in a closing door is a damage and safety problem. Use a proper route, a brush plate if the building has one, or a route the agent accepts.

A 30-minute conversation with the agent about a 6mm hole in a non-fire partition can save a year of mesh. Try the conversation.

Test the room you live in

A speed test in the cupboard is a WAN test. A speed test on the sofa is the product. After you move the radio, repeat both. If WAN is poor, you have a line ticket. If WAN is fine and the sofa is fine, you have finished.

If the sofa is still poor, the cupboard was only one of your problems. Then walls, neighbours’ radios, and the usual domestic list.

A meter cupboard is not a comms room just because a fibre landed in it.

The cupboard can keep the meters and the ONT. It cannot keep the only radio you own. Move the air to where the people are.