How does FTTP connect up at the premises?

Trying to get my head around how FTTP is actually connected up at the premises.

My understanding so far is that a CSP is attached to the outside of the house?
That would suggest a terminated wire is brought into the property to which a modem is connected but the modem has to be a dedicated ONT FTTP modem?
If that is correct there would be no "one box" combined modem/router available?

Does the connection have to come in next to the present master socket where in my case no power sockets are available.

Again which ISP's actually provide connection to a FTTP service, so far I have only come across BT and their site is not very forthcoming about what is available.
Having learnt I am down to one day (hopefully) get FTTP roadworks.org has notice of duct laying a short distance from my property putting in Ductoverlays-civilsoverlay I am keen to know what is involved.

Edited by Jax2 (Wed 25-Jun-14 20:15:40)

They connect another short piece of fibre to the ONT and you connect that to an Ethernet router. No one box solution available.

ClaraNet
PlusNet but maybe not now as trial is over

I have been lucky enough to have two native FTTP installs recently, one in a house, one in a flat.

In the house, the install was done in two parts, external and internal. In the external phase, the engineer attached a small box to the outside of the house near the incoming underground feed. I think this is the splice point? I don't know how long this took and I didn't need to be home for it.

For the internal phase, he brought the fibre through the wall from the box, attached the ONT (large white box visually similar to old FTTC modems) and the BBU (tall thin battery backup box). He then modified the existing NTE5 with a Fibre <> Copper switch at the top and wired the incoming feed on the NTE5 to a socket on the ONT. The internal installation only takes about an hour when done like this. I think it does need to be done next to your existing NTE5 if your phone line is to be converted to fibre and you want your extension points to work.

For my new build flat, the whole installation was done in one go - the fibre was behind the wall in the utility cupboard, the engineer took it out and created the small grey box again, followed by the ONT, BBU and NTE5 modification, and then half an hour's work downstairs in the building's communications room. This took over three hours.

I'm not sure who trains the FTTP engineers how to install in each property when they're all so different, but both engineers were very knowledgeable and helpful.

Re ISPs. it is still only BT Retail out of the mainstream group and while they still sell Infinity 1 and 2 on FTTP, they have almost completely backed off marketing the Infinity 3 and 4 (200 and 300 Mbps) FTTP only products. They show up if you put "fttp=yes" in the URL like this: http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broad...

Also note that their availability checker is currently broken for FTTP addresses and has been for over a month - you get a small box saying "BT Services available at x" but then no options appear below it.

The other mainstream ISPs will all tell you that you are "not in a fibre area" if you check your details - in my block, one can get 300Mb FTTP from BT or <3Mb ADSL2+ from the other major ISPs and based on the list of wireless access points I can see, most people don't know that the former is available or don't care...

I've tried to find another address checker on a smaller ISP which will tell me that they will offer me FTTP, but they either don't mention it or insist on a phone number, which you usually won't have with FTTP.

Thanks very much both of you, much clearer now.
Sounds that nearer the time I had better organize a pair of power sockets near the master socket so that is very useful to know.

In my case the copper cable is armoured and there is no ducting. Therefore the fibre will be totally independent of the copper and will not be installed close to the existing master socket, that was probably installed in the 70s when the house was built.

Andrew, what makes you think that the PlusNet FTTP trial is over? They are still discussing it on their forums.

My property has no ducting, the phone line comes in via an overhead wire so it sounds like the fibre could be bought in independently?
My phone line comes out of a chamber at the foot of a pole on the other side of the road and hence up the divide (hedge) between my neighbours drive and mine via a couple more poles (long 100 metre plus drives) then overhead across my garden so I have presumed they would run the fibre cable along the same route. Makes sense to me anyway!

There are FTTP connections run from poles. A couple of people have posted photos of theirs.

Where there is FTTP to houses round here server by a pole the fibre is connected to a manifold at the top of the pole. Individual houses are then fed from the manifold. In some cases the fibre is wrapped around the copper cable and in other cases the have run the fibre separately to the copper from the top of the pole. In either case the fibre can enter the house independently to the copper.

Thanks again everybody.