Once you get to someone's property boundary your job is done. Well that's the principle, but you need to check that the householder has the necessary information to finish the installation. You have to issue guidelines and keep a watchful eye over the proceedings – try at least to get the owner to explain his plan before he does it and inspect the finished result. This saves a lot of disappointment on fibre blowing day when you find he has put the back-plate on upside-down or has his orange duct sticking out of it.

Before you got duct to his boundary you probably met the owner. You know if he's interested. You can probably only easily reach part of his boundary with the spur duct, and you will have to discuss the point where he would ideally like you to get to. There will often be a wall or a fence at the boundary, sometimes you will help getting through this obstacle.

You will end up getting very involved in some peoples installation, just because some people haven’t got a clue and they need help. If you had a volunteer who could be responsible for this job it would be very useful.

There are 3 parts to the owner's job

1. Deciding the route across the garden and burying the duct
2. Deciding the gas block cover position and installing it
3. Deciding the router position and installing it

(and then the difficult part might be getting through the wall)

---------------You should start by considering those in reverse order

Locating the FTU

Although it's the householders job to decide, you have to give him all the information you can to help him decide. It is difficult to say or even list the things he needs to know, someone really needs to look at any proposed location to advise.

As soon as you start stressing "must be near a socket" (because the last ones you came across needed extension leads), you will see ones where the socket is so close the router won't go on.

Deciding the location, has 2 parts - deciding which wall of the house to fit it to and then exactly where on that wall.

• You really have to leave the final decision to the owner, but point out any difficulties you see.
• There's no use explaining a complicated wifi system that will mean additional cost to someone who can't afford it

If the house-owner is intending to put in his own network with wi-fi extenders, ethernet cables, etc then it is less important to decide on the house entry point. The focus will be to advise on the particular position on the wall, especially in regard to the location of its power supply.

But if the owner wants a set-up with a single wi-fi source then the location is important. Start by considering a place near his existing router. If that is near an outside wall then look to see how easy it would be to get duct to there.

And if they also wish to use the router to set up a phone system then it gets complicated again. Some of the decision to get a B4RN connection may have been the possibility of a cheaper phone system or just 'to get rid of BT".

Some of your advertising of the benefits of B4RN will probably have mentioned that it can give you lower phone bills. This obviously leads you into the customer wanting to know "well how do I do that?".

Getting through the wall can be the difficult part, and if it is really difficult then it may change the router position.

The backplate is designed with 3 entry points. The majority of people will use these, especially the hole at the top, but you will come across non-standard places. Some of these are okay, some can be made okay and some have to be re-fitted.

Fibre to the FTU

Getting the fibre through to the backplate from the gas block should be simple. But it may be at that stage that you find there is a problem with the white duct. (2 cases recently where the fitter had damaged the white duct as they screwed up the gas block cover). Again the volunteer will have to see if they can sort it out there and then, come back and sort it, or pass the problem back to the householder.

The fibre is likely to go through easily. Before it comes through the white duct has to be cut to exactly the right length. It needs to be just long enough to be held in place, but if it is any longer it gets in the way.

If the house fibre has been blown to the outside of the house and only one person is doing the job then they

1. Inspect the inside to see if the backplate is in a suitable place
2. Cut the white duct to the right length and angle the duct out into the room so that the fibre can drape around as you push it through without snagging
3. Tell the owner that you are about to push it through and that he (and his cat) should leave it alone
4. Go outside (the gas block will already have been prepared with its ducts the right length and the gas block attached to the white duct) and start to feed the fibre through slowly. take care as you get to the very last bit that the fibre doesn't kink as you make the black-to-gasblock connection
5. Tighten the gasblock - this is easy to forget, because your focus has been on getting the fibre into the house
6. Fit gas-block cover
7. Come back inside and carefully put the white duct into it's final resting place and wind the spare fibre round and round the inside of the backplate. If the fibre is far too long then some can be cut off.

If two people are doing the job then the same things happen but it's quicker. You can help as the fibre comes through by very gently pulling it. You might need a tap on the window, or a shout, to be certain the person on the outside has finished feeding the fibre in before you start winding it up inside.

If the fibre has been blown to the inside then you will be there as it came in and you can wind it round the inside of the backplate, prop the cover back on it loosely and it is ready for a splicer. You go outside and tighten the gas-block and put the cover back on. Again this works well with 2 volunteers - one outside one inside.

Splicing

Splicing is the only occasion where you need access to the house. Organising a splice day has its own page it's an important stage. It is a stage that has to be organised and has to involve volunteers.

Splicing is the act of joining on a connector to the end of the house fibre. A splicing machine melts a short tail of fibre already attached to a connector, on to the end of the house fibre that has been blown to your backplate. There are 3 delicate stages

1. Cut the ends of the fibres to be joined perfectly square
2. Weld the two ends together
3. Melt a plastic sleeve round the joint (that's the really delicate part)

That gives you a blue connector which is the terminus of your own complete fibre all the way to the village cabinet.

The 'yellow bits' that come with your backplate fittings are just spacers round the blue connector that hold it in place as the front panel is finally snapped on.

Procedure

1. Strip the house fibre right down to the glass fibre core
2. Clean the fibre with alcohol
3. Chop the end square using a tiny cutter machine
4. Load the fibre into the splicer machine
5. Do the same with the fibre it is to be joined to, (having put a sleeve over it, pulled back to one side for now)
6. Close the lid of the splicer.
7. It now automatically aligns the two fibres using a pair of micro-cameras and arc-welds them together. A picture screen shows the alignment as it happens.
8. The screen then displays a measurement of the accuracy of the splice (e.g. Estimated Loss 0.01dB)
9. Lift out the fused fibre and slide the plastic collar over the joint (that's the really delicate part of the operation)
10. Transfer the fibre to the upper part of the machine which then melts the sleeve over the join.
11. Done. Wind all the fibre back into the backplate with the blue connector held in place by the yellow bits.