I've been waiting patiently for about a year now for my cabinet to get FTTC, but when I saw somewhere that I could email into openreach to find out more specific details than the usual pushed out date, I mailed in to see if they had a more accurate estimate. Unfortunately I got some bad news:
Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband.
You are connected to cabinet EM/LONGB 129 (Nottingham).
We have experienced severe difficulties with regards to providing fibre optic cable to this particular cabinet. This is due to blocked and collapsed ductwork.
We have therefore taken the regrettable decision to defer this cabinet out of our current program. We will revisit at a later date but at this point in time, we cannot give a timescale as to when this may occur.
I appreciate it is frustrating but we are deploying Fibre Broadband on a commercial basis and we are not able to provide service to your cabinet at this time due to engineering difficulties..
Which really sucks for me but I can understand that problems will inevitably crop up - I've just gotten unlucky.
However from the phrasing of that email and the few details he gave, I'm now wondering just how long it will be before they do revisit - and if they'll change their minds at that time. I've no idea what the extent of the problem is, it could be prohibitively expensive and delay the fibre basically indefinitely.
So my question is: what are my options now, if any? I don't particularly want to remain stuck on 5-6 down/1 up, and I don't think virgin is ever going to lay cable here - although I can't find any way of determining if they have plans or not.
Am I basically stuck with ADSL2+ unless I find a place where fibre is 100% confirmed and move there, or is there some other unknown option that might appear in the future? Are there any major competitors to those big two companies?