Digging up the UK again - BT Openreach broadband program

jaybee

jaybee

jaybee

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Joined
10 Jul 2008
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How's all your roads looking currently? Been blocked in without warning for several days yet? Lovely patched in pavements that look like ****? It's like being back in the cable laying days of the 90s again!


My street is being dug up like many in the country currently for broadband improvements. I saw some signs up saying it's open reach broadband. But then when I went online and googled for Fibre broadband coming to my area, I found that the company that are targeting mine and other areas is a company called "toob". Apparently they went live in Southampton before and offer 900 up and down for £25. Anyway, this got me confused...

The people that just dug up my road have not gone right down the full length of the road. In fact, they only came about half way up my road then stopped the trench work and were gone a few days later. A couple of additional green cabinets have appeared on the pavements around the estate.

1: Does this mean my road is done and will never be dug up again even if this work was exclusively for toob? I'd be shocked if the road all got mashed up again in a year or two so I am assuming this must mean the work is done for the future now?

2: Why did they not trench all around the road? Is it because they were and are able to use some of the existing BT or Virgin media ducting to finally connect properties requesting in the future?

3: Will every house now be able to have FTTP in the future or would there be some houses that need drives being dug up to finish the last bit to link it into the street cabinet?

4: Is toob going to exclusively be the only one we can go with in the future? They go on about their network being a privately laid one. Or will it be unbundled to anyone in the future? Or toob and BT only? Or BT only?

Basically how does it work. Bit confusing. I have two ducts coming out the floor near my house. One virgin and one BT. Will they literally run a fibre cable along this ducting down to the new cabinets if I ever request FTTP in the future?
 
Alternative providers can use Openreach ducting through something called PIA as far as I am aware.

https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-products/physical-infrastructure-access(PIA)

However, no one can use Virgin Media's yet as they haven't been made to allow access. Although only yesterday more news came out about VM spinning their infrastructure off into a separate entity via a joint venture with another party....

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...-million-uk-premises-with-fttp-broadband.html
 
Forgot to add, I'd happily take a few more patches on the roads around me (in addition to the mess other utility companies make). For improved connectivity. :)
 
Surely a duct is only so big though? What is to stop 10 companies over the next few years all jumping on the bandwagon and opening the roads back up to install yet another line? It can't be that it's a free for all for continued disruption? On the other hand, I think select companies being allowed a monopoly hampers progress and is why we are where are today and have had to rely on virgin/ntl/telewest for bleeding edge broadband speeds up until now and they have been able to set high prices not allowing for fair competition.
I thought this was why openreach were doing the leg work and kind of laying the fibres for all other companies to leech off of?
 
PIA permits you to lay your own fibre in the ducting at a cost. So that probably prohibits over competition. If there are already 5 competitors in the area, are you going to pay to blow your own fibre? So do you just resell openreach's wholesale solutions.

Where openreach are blowing its own fibre, that will open up fibre options to its wholesale partners (talktalk, sky, BT etc).

But if toob blows it's own fibre though, it hass exclusive to that fibre, unless it decides to resell I suppose.
 
I think they only tend to dig rthe road to either lay complete new ducting, or repair existing blockages.

Where possible, they will all blow fibre through without needing a spade, from junction box to junction box. It costs a lot more to dig the road than to just blow the fibre.
 
Had that a few weeks back - 2 days before it was due to happen we found out by chance they were closing the road for Openreach work to one of our sites and a load of other businesses for 3 weeks 8pm to 6am despite most open til 11pm or 24x7... absolute mess trying to get hold of someone to sort it - only really resolved the day before when someone came to put out signs that it was closing and was like hang on a minute...
 
If the road is local authority maintained then any utility company can at any point dig it up after notifying the council. If you're unhappy with the reinstatement then you need to complain to the highways team at your local or county council, depending who is responsible for the road.

I can sympathise but rules such as making companies resurface the entire footpath if they dig into it would make rolling these networks out unworkably expensive.
 
18 months ago Gigaclear dug up the pavements and installed POTs to all the house on my estate. Very good it is too. A company called ZZOOMM are now going dig them up again to lay their own FTP.

The only reason I can think of for this happening is they are tapping into some Government funding, they will not make it pay from customers. Very few of us have taken Gigaclear's FTP.
 
jaybee said:
How's all your roads looking currently? Been blocked in without warning for several days yet? Lovely patched in pavements that look like ****? It's like being back in the cable laying days of the 90s again!


My street is being dug up like many in the country currently for broadband improvements. I saw some signs up saying it's open reach broadband. But then when I went online and googled for Fibre broadband coming to my area, I found that the company that are targeting mine and other areas is a company called "toob". Apparently they went live in Southampton before and offer 900 up and down for £25. Anyway, this got me confused...

The people that just dug up my road have not gone right down the full length of the road. In fact, they only came about half way up my road then stopped the trench work and were gone a few days later. A couple of additional green cabinets have appeared on the pavements around the estate.

1: Does this mean my road is done and will never be dug up again even if this work was exclusively for toob? I'd be shocked if the road all got mashed up again in a year or two so I am assuming this must mean the work is done for the future now?

2: Why did they not trench all around the road? Is it because they were and are able to use some of the existing BT or Virgin media ducting to finally connect properties requesting in the future?

3: Will every house now be able to have FTTP in the future or would there be some houses that need drives being dug up to finish the last bit to link it into the street cabinet?

4: Is toob going to exclusively be the only one we can go with in the future? They go on about their network being a privately laid one. Or will it be unbundled to anyone in the future? Or toob and BT only? Or BT only?

Basically how does it work. Bit confusing. I have two ducts coming out the floor near my house. One virgin and one BT. Will they literally run a fibre cable along this ducting down to the new cabinets if I ever request FTTP in the future?
Click to expand...
I have a question. Why do you even care? Surely if you get faster internet as a result it's a good thing, no matter how patchy the road or pavement is?
 
azazl187 said:
I have a question. Why do you even care? Surely if you get faster internet as a result it's a good thing, no matter how patchy the road or pavement is?
Click to expand...

The workmanship is shoddy and it's a complete eyesore in comparison to the perfect roads and pavements some areas have that have never been dug up before. But yeah it has to happen
 
jaybee said:
The workmanship is shoddy and it's a complete eyesore in comparison to the perfect roads and pavements some areas have that have never been dug up before. But yeah it has to happen
Click to expand...
There is an unfortunate plague that affects the general work force of any business. The workforce are being put under so much pressure to get as much work done as possible that there simply is zero time for anyone to put in that extra 15% of effort to do a great job. The jobs are just done to the absolute minimum that they can get away with often pushing that minimum acceptance line time and time again until standards drop again.

I see it all the time. As a subcontracted carpenter I feel this every day. I'm simply not given the time to do the perfect job that I want to do. No one wants a great job anymore, they just want you to do it as quickly as possible for as little money as possible and then still moan at the end of the job on how they lost money on this and that. No one seems to care about feedback as there is plenty of work to go around. It's a complete joke and it breeds a workforce that is underskilled and burned out after a few years. It's a very sad state.

It's all about money and very little about reputation. Look at the big building companies. They throw these houses up as quickly as possible to meet targets so everyone gets a bonus and then spend the next 2 years fobbing off as many people as possible with complaints with poor young people on minimum wage. The world has become very much more of a greedy place where the faceless are walking/jumping/standing on anyone and everyone to get a piece of it.

I worry for my children to be honest.
 
No Openreach FTTP planned here, they too busy doing rural areas subsidised by government.

Thankfully cityfibre are doing my city, although seem to be at snail pace, 5 years for the city to be done.
 
jaybee said:
The workmanship is shoddy and it's a complete eyesore in comparison to the perfect roads and pavements some areas have that have never been dug up before. But yeah it has to happen
Click to expand...

All the bits (mostly Open Reach or similar) they've done around my commute to work are a disaster - the top 2-3 inches or so is just crumbling into bits and pot holes appearing everywhere. I noticed over the last few days they've been marking them out with lines on the road so I guess going to be redone at some point.

Across from my house where both OR and Jurassic Fibre did some work recently it is already turning into a sink hole...
 
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