Openreach FTTP - any way to beat the system?

[daern]

So, bit of a timeline:

• Dec (Xmas day!) 2020 - email from Openreach - "We are very happy to let you know that we've recently announced plans to start upgrading the network in..."
• <silence for 18 months>
• Aug 2022 - email: "Good news. Ultrafast full broadband is coming to your area..."
• During the summer some work started on the street, with ducts being cleared and a couple of new poles slung up
• Nov 2022 - email: "Good news. Ultrafast full broadband is coming to your area..."
• Dec 2022 - Openreach on site. Excitement building! Sadly, it turned out that this was for a long overdue business fibre connection to a local farm that they happened to be routing up our street. Apparently, all of the duct work was for this and the Openreach team on site said that it was "completely separate" to the domestic deployment.
• Xmas 2022 - Fibre pulled through, "flowerpot" appears on our post, but the cable routing clearly shows this is heading off to the farm.
• 6 weeks passed, and nothing has happened since. No sign of any further work anywhere in our area and get the feeling that it's rather passed us by now.

I've emailed Openreach to ask for an update and some idea of timescales, but still not had a reply two weeks later. The online checker just reports "build not announced" (whatever this means), despite the local area supposedly being in-build. It's a little frustrating as Virgin went through the town 12 months ago and literally cabled every single street apart from the estate where I live, so somewhat paranoid that Openreach are about to repeat the same thing, despite seemingly being enthusiastic to duplicate their network where Virgin have already dug to ensure they don't lose customers to cable.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions as to how to find out what is going on? Openreach seem pretty much impenetrable when it comes to getting information out of them beyond "we'll do it at some point".

[daern]

Well, another two months have passed and nothing - not a jot of activity. I think OpenReach have passed us by and are rushing around fibring-up areas that Virgin have now cabled to avoid losing customers. Those of us who have no option are very much bottom of the heap, it seems

Kinda surprised noone here had any suggestions, tips or tricks, but they would still be welcome!

[Jayach]

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@daern wrote:

Kinda surprised noone here had any suggestions, tips or tricks, but they would still be welcome!

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Some of us here are in pretty much the same position.

[daern]

@Jayach  Have you managed to get anything at all out of OR? I've had a couple of contacts with them and they've promised to escalate and find out why they only did half of the street, but stopped before they reached the end. Each time, I've been promised a call back and that the operator would "personally ensure that I got an answer" and each and every time all I've had is silence.

Given that they are sucking up government grants to do this, it feels like they should be *much* more accountable for timescales than they are today. I've no objections to the fact that these things take a while, but it's been 2 1/2 years since they contacted me to say "it's on its way" and this is the point where it feels that they should probably give some sort of update....with timescales!

[CrimsonLiar]

The only way we beat the system was to express an interest late last summer/early autumn when fibre hit the estate.  But I kinda needed to be home when the install takes place, so it's taken me until now to get FTTP via BT.  The advantage of the wait, £30 pcm/24 months for Fibre 900/100 (930/103 actual), best I was offered by VF was £43 (memory) for Fibre 500 - a figure you cant even get to from their price list!

[Jayach]

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@daern wrote:

@Jayach  Have you managed to get anything at all out of OR?

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I live in Hadleigh Essex, This is what The Openreach site currently shows:

I enquired, via their website in April '22 and they said:

"Great news. Your area is in our plans for Ultrafast Full Fibre broadband, with speeds of up to 1Gbps†. (That’s 1,000Mbps!) "

A year later, In April '23 they wrote to me again and said:

"We’re getting in touch to update you on our Ultrafast Full Fibre build. We’ve reviewed our build plans, and currently we can’t deliver Full Fibre to ***********.
There are lots of reasons for why our plans change - from engineering hazards to access permits. We review our build plans regularly as circumstances change. We hope this is just a temporary setback and that we can bring ********** back into our Full Fibre build plans in the future.
We'll keep you updated and let you know immediately if anything changes."

So, no I've not been able to get anything out of them.

[daern]

I have a horrible feeling that this is what is happening here. Openreach now shows "build not announced", but there are connected houses at the far end of the street no more than 100yds away, and we have fibre on our pole which has been run from the local exchange (no more than 200yds away!) that was put in for a local business fibre connection.

The "we can't do it" would seem to hold very little weight here, but the reality is that there is almost zero influence that we can have over what openreach say they can or cannot do, which is intensely frustrating. If they say "not doing it", there's really not much we can do.

[Cynric]

@daern  Here's the last national roll-out report.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/project-gigabit-delivery-plan-winter-update-2022-to-2023/...

[daern]

Thanks. The Openreach build plan has also just been updated for May:

https://www.openreach.com/content/dam/openreach/openreach-dam-files/new-dam-(not-in-use-yet)/documen...

My own exchange is now showing as "Mostly finished" which doesn't fill me with a whole lot of optimism that we'll ever get fibred.

[Cynric]

Ha-ha! My exchange is not started at all and is just "sometime in the future".