BT Infinity & FTTx Discussion

Caged said:
There's no such thing as a BT exclusivity period on an Openreach FTTP deployment - Ofcom would crucify Openreach for allowing that to happen.

What *might* be happening is that only BT had a cablelink at the serving exchange because no other providers (TalkTalk, Sky, whatever) had bought one yet, but really any ISP that is half decent should be pretty eager to get their services available to people as soon as Openreach are ready to serve them.
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The primary reason for the historic lack of availability is it has taken time for big LLU providers to get the commercials and systems in place to handle FTTP provisioning. There has simply been no business case to launch these products when they were only available to a tiny fraction of premises. Even BT Wholesale took their time to get a reasonable commercial proposition for FTTP to their resellers.

I’ve found the number of premises served by each L2S for FTTP to be much lower than for FTTC. I’ve just done a proposal for to upgrade about 60 sites currently on FTTC across 3 exchanges and they terminate on 6 L2S, on FTTP that increases to 14 L2S. What I thought would be a nice cheap upgrade for the customer has turned into needing about £35k of hardware and Cablelinks.

Someone mentioned the upload over 100Mbps being expensive - the 500/65 and 1000/220 products have a £500 install change from £Openreach - all products up to 115Mbps upload the install is only £99.38. OR annual Rental on 1000/115 is £378.84 but 1000/220 is £969 - nearly £600 more. The ISP has all their backhaul and general costs plus a profit margin to go on top of those numbers, so that Cerberus pricing is pretty good.
 
Anyone know how accurate the Open Reach Fibre First checker is? My area just changed from "At the moment, we don't have any plans to upgrade your area to full fibre" to "We're starting to build our ultra-fast, ultra-reliable Full Fibre broadband in your area.". Does that mean it's actually likely to happen some time soon or do they put that even when it's going to be years later?

Honestly I'd be surprised if they upgrade to FTTP here at all, I'm in the middle of nowhere and they only installed FTTC here a few years ago.
 
The same thing happened in my area. I think in September 2019 it changed from 'no plans' to 'building'. In May 2020 I was able to order and then I had FTTP installed in June. Had it not been for Covid the install would have been done sooner I am told.

I was surprised that FTTP became available here so soon as there's good VDSL availability. They installed it in some of the farty little villages near by too. I'm told that building the infrastructure was fairly easy and expected uptake was high.
 
It would be nice if that was the case (< 1 year), although I do wonder if now Openreach got the £5 billion gov investment whether they've just basically listed every area as "we're starting to build...". If I put my postcode in their other checker it says Priority low: sometime between now and December 2026 :(

More upload speed while working from home would be really helpful, can't complain too much though, up until 2016 we still only had 0.5/0.5mbit here and now we're lucky enough to get the full 76/18 from BT FTTC despite being in the middle of nowhere.
 
The government haven't made £5bn of investment, and the vast majority of the Openreach build is happening without any public subsidy

Which checker are you using that is telling you that you're low priority?
 
PaulM said:
It would be nice if that was the case (< 1 year), although I do wonder if now Openreach got the £5 billion gov investment whether they've just basically listed every area as "we're starting to build...". If I put my postcode in their other checker it says Priority low: sometime between now and December 2026 :(

More upload speed while working from home would be really helpful, can't complain too much though, up until 2016 we still only had 0.5/0.5mbit here and now we're lucky enough to get the full 76/18 from BT FTTC despite being in the middle of nowhere.
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I mean I’m lucky that I have 80/20 FTTC at the moment and could get Virgin 500 if I wanted to, but my address isn’t even down as planned at all!
 
I've been on "we're building in your area" since June and I've not seen any activity. Will update the thread if/when it happens.
 
We're moving house in a few months, of course the first thing I checked when buying it was the internet speeds, and it already has FTTP which is amazing. I'm getting rather sick of my 30mb FTTC connection now. Even the 150mb package with 5x the speed will be amazing. Not sure if I can justify the higher costs of the faster packaged right now, they do seem very expensive.
 
MissChief said:
Although it doesn’t always show up have you’d checked the one.network site for any planned roadworks?
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I check it now and again, this is all fully ducted so it will just be people working on the pavement so I don't think it even qualifies for inclusion on that site.
 
If it’s fully ducted you’ll likely never see them doing the build unless the main manhole is right outside your house or you just happen to walk past when they do it.

We are fully ducted and the main man hole for the cal de sac is outside my neighbours house. He said they were in and out in a matter of hours laying the main cable. It did take a few months between when they were seen running the fibre and being able to order it.
 
I've had a crackly telephone line for some time now and additionally, although vastly improved, I'm still not receiving the full broadband speed that is advertised, so I called up today to try and remedy the situation.

In short, I found the information being given a little too 'rapid fire' for me to take in and in an ideal world, I would have liked it followed up clearly in an email.
I don't know what level of support the agent was that I spoke to but he was talking about a number of things such as changing plans from 'fibre 2 broadband' to Halo 3, as well as our equipment, too.

He did also rattle off something about gift cards or potentially being able to leave the contract without a charge, though in all honesty, I was struggling to understand his accent half the time, which of course, is no fault of his own.
I like to digest the information before making a decision which he didn't seem to appreciate, and near the end of the call, he enquired about what service provider I was with concerning my mobile.
The offer he made does actually seem like well-worth considering, though as I say, I'm not just going to go along with everything someone in his position says without getting an impartial opinion or doing a little homework of my own.

I guess I just found his overall address quite pushy.

Anyway, more engineer visits are booked for later this week so hopefully, something good will come of it.
 
First real test of my BT 900. A game like this around 36GB would take 2hrs to download on my old 50 service. Quite a big difference :D


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What difference would it make from 10ft from the house for fiber vs fiber straight into the house? and how else would one be able to get the last piece of copper cable removed and fiber put straight in...

Openreach started digging in front of the house 3 days ago. Ducting has been put in place and a little black box installed at the end of the foot path from the front door. The cable hasn't arrived yet.
 
I didn't have ducting ran to my house. They removed the old telephone wire from the pole and ran a new wire then clipped down the house to the gray openreach box fitted outside my wall. I really don't know how it all works, would this last bit be copper?
 
Steven Rimmington said:
First real test of my BT 900. A game like this around 36GB would take 2hrs to download on my old 50 service. Quite a big difference :D<SNIP>
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Sorry if this is a little off-topic, PSN used to have a throttle on it - took ages to download anything on the PS4 irrespective of ISP and connection however, on the PS5 even I have noted it takes next to no time. Downloaded the 10GB Siege of Paris DLC last night on my VM500 (gets 550Mb) connection and it took 4 minutes. Can only imagine what that would've been on 900Mb+ FTTP. I am guessing Sony are elevating traffic or something for PS5 users.

Makes me question whether I should've just bought the digital PS5 instead :p
 
V F said:
What difference would it make from 10ft from the house for fiber vs fiber straight into the house? and how else would one be able to get the last piece of copper cable removed and fiber put straight in...

Openreach started digging in front of the house 3 days ago. Ducting has been put in place and a little black box installed at the end of the foot path from the front door. The cable hasn't arrived yet.
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How do you mean? Openreach aren't going to be converting that fibre to copper, regardless of where the black box is installed.
 
Caged said:
How do you mean? Openreach aren't going to be converting that fibre to copper, regardless of where the black box is installed.
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This. Either Fibre runs to a green cabinet and copper from the green cabinet to your door (that's FTTC) or the fibre is coming into your house (that's FTTP)
 
At a guess they are doing something new that hasn't been widely publicised for properties that had direct buried phone lines, where they duct it to your boundary and then just run a fibre through your lawn for the last little bit. I think before they would just put poles up so this new method seems preferable.
 
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