Safaricom FTTH Optical Network Terminal

Dying FTTH Terminal

Safaricom is still my home internet service provider, with good speeds - about 80 Mbps according to Open Speed Test. Quite the increase from the 10 Mbps that I was thrilled about 8 years ago. The service is reliable with very good up-time, albeit the occasional degrading during peak internet traffic in the evenings when all the neighbors are home. 

I noticed a few months ago that the terminal (modem and router) was taking longer to power up and some of the lights were not working. Interestingly Safaricom retains the ownership of the device after it is installed irrespective of the duration of the FTTH internet service subscription. They had previously replaced a terminal once, at no cost, due to a major drop in the speed of the internet which I had not associated with a problem with the terminal. 

Excellent Service by Safaricom

My request to Safaricom for help using Twitter DM (or is it X) early on a Saturday morning, led to a call from someone at customer service who said a technician would come to check out the terminal. That afternoon the technician came and after a simple assessment replaced it with a Huawei EchoLife EG8145V5 Optical Network Terminal (ONT). He asked me to select the name for the WiFi network name aka SSID (Service Set Identifier) and a password. He then asked me to wait for about 30 minutes and try to log on and start using the internet. During this downtime Safaricom sent me a 5GB data bundle on my phone to use, as well as offering their apologies. Truly excellent service by Safaricom. 

WiFi Device Connection Mystery

Once the service started working I decided to reset the password using the Safaricom *400# USSD service. Oddly when I got to the place to select the WiFi whose password I wanted to change there were two options with the same name. I selected option one and completed the process.

I was able to log onto the WiFi with my laptop right away and my youngest daughter did so too on her phone. However when my wife tried to do so on her phone she got an error message and so did I when I tried to connect my phone. Very strange as I was certain the password was correct. Later, her attempt to connect an older phone to the WiFi was successful. The rest of the evening I pondered on this and thought to try again the following morning. 

The next morning, I checked the bottom of the Huawei EchoLife EG8145V5 ONT, which has lots of information including an IP to use to connect to the device, the password and WLAN key. Interestingly there are two SSID listed, one at 2.4G and the other 5G frequency. As the morning wore on I thought to try reset the password on the second WiFi name option using the USSD *400#. As soon as I did that my phone and my wife’s were able to connect to the WiFi.

That solved the problem but leaves me wondering whether there are two WiFi networks from the ONT at the 2.4G and 5G frequencies. If so, is this by design or accidental.