Cabinet live, 300m away but told "too far for fibre"

Hi there, I hope some wise person will have seen this situation before.

I have been waiting for our village to be fibre enabled for a couple of years, and recently new cabs were installed and the old EO lines connected through it, including mine.
The cabinet has just gone live and everyone in the village can now order fibre, except for our house and a couple of my immediate neighbours. (They share a telegraph pole with our house, which seems relevant)

In all directions from my house, houses 50 -100 yards away from me are able to order (with 80Mb speeds estimated), as well as the farms a mile or more away.

I am about 300m from the cabinet down a straight road, although the overhead wiring comes around my house and probably adds another 50-100m.

If I enter my details on BT infinity checker (or the local Fastershire (BDUK) website) I am told that although I am connected to the live cabinet, I am too far away to order fibre. Emailing Fastershire a few weeks back, they suggested that my address would be upgraded, but Openreach subsequently have emailed to say "sorry you can't order fibre, bad luck, you are too far away".

This seems crazy to me given how close I am. Does this crop up from time to time or is this very unusual? And can anything be done or I just have to suck it up and wait and see? (I suspect I know the answer).

Thanks for any insights.

What results do you get when you put your number into here http://www.dslchecker.bt.com ?

Same as it has been for some time...

Telephone no is served by cabinet 7

WBC ADSL 2+ Up to 4 -- 2.5 to 6.5 Available
ADSL Max Up to 3 -- 2 to 6 Available
Fixed Rate 1 -- -- Available
Other Offerings
Fibre Multicast -- -- -- Available
Copper Multicast -- -- -- Available

I should probably add that cabinet 7 is the only one in the village - noone is connected via any other cabinet.

Edited by deleted (Tue 19-Apr-16 13:14:32)

You need to speak to your ISP and have them take up the issue with Openreach. It's possibly just a records issue that needs sorting out.

Of course it could be that the way your cable is routed means you ARE too far from the cabinet, in which case little can be done.

I'll try to run the gauntlet of speaking to BT then!

I would have thought that even if there was somehow an extra 2 miles of copper coiled up under our telegraph pole, this would have meant we would have slower ADSL than other locals (especially as we would have then had a 4+ mile EO line originally) - we usually manage 4-5 MB which is the same speed as our neighbours who are now fibre enabled. (and is still their estimated ADSL speed through dslchecker)

I am clearly missing something...

Thanks for the reply.

You might find it better to go through a non standard route. Posting on the BT forums may be one way, other email addresses and routes are available should you take the time to look for them

I had similar issue also Fastershire but im about 1600m from cabinet, anyway once my cabinet was enabled only about 3/4 of my street could order. I also got the too far away message but after a month or so it updated and I was able to order FTTC faster broadband product. You could try the BT customer retentions line as well as I found them more helpful.

After giving the more normal avenues a go, then can try emailing me, and will pester the right people in Openreach.

Its relatively rare for this problem to extend beyond a week or so, but it can usually be fixed if it does and providers stick to the 'computer says no'

Andrew

Thanks for the advice Moonpie, and an encouraging story as it's been about 4 weeks since our cab went live.

MrSaffron - thanks for the offer, hoping I won't need to take you up on it, we will see!

In reply to a post by Sanguine:

Hi there, I hope some wise person will have seen this situation before.

I have been waiting for our village to be fibre enabled for a couple of years, and recently new cabs were installed and the old EO lines connected through it, including mine.
The cabinet has just gone live and everyone in the village can now order fibre, except for our house and a couple of my immediate neighbours. (They share a telegraph pole with our house, which seems relevant)

In all directions from my house, houses 50 -100 yards away from me are able to order (with 80Mb speeds estimated), as well as the farms a mile or more away.

I am about 300m from the cabinet down a straight road, although the overhead wiring comes around my house and probably adds another 50-100m.

If I enter my details on BT infinity checker (or the local Fastershire (BDUK) website) I am told that although I am connected to the live cabinet, I am too far away to order fibre. Emailing Fastershire a few weeks back, they suggested that my address would be upgraded, but Openreach subsequently have emailed to say "sorry you can't order fibre, bad luck, you are too far away".

This seems crazy to me given how close I am. Does this crop up from time to time or is this very unusual? And can anything be done or I just have to suck it up and wait and see? (I suspect I know the answer).

Thanks for any insights.

I found this forum whilst trying to gain some info before getting into another frustrating contact with BT. My new BT Infinity 2 also comes from Fastershire, Cabinet 7 and I guess Sanguine and I could be close neighbours. In any case this demonstrates BT's poor service.

I learnt, via Fastershire's website that superfast broadband was available to my phone line. I was assured by BT sales that minimum of 63 Mbs would be guaranteed and so my order was placed for 14 March. Up to this point we were getting about 9 Mbs on a good day. Following the appointed day we were getting 11Mbs and after a number of frustrating calls to various tiers of technical help an Engineer called on 24 March.

He informed us that as we were more than a mile from the Cabinet we would never get more than 15 or so. I then went through another round of calls to BT and the only way to proceed appeared to be another Engineer call out. That happened last week and he showed me the various performance data for our site and the one which showed noise on the line in decibels and distance from the cabinet made it very clear that anything near a mile form the cabinet would produce about 15Mbs max.

So in theory Sanguine should be OK at 300m and BT should supply him and we, at 1.2 miles should not.

I am now gathering strength to contact BT again. How is it that a leading Communications company is almost impossible to communicate with?

Can you access your line stats? Attenuation and SNR? What does te BT checker at http://dslchecker.bt.com/ say for your number? That plus an estimate of the road distance to the cabinet. Start a new thread and you may get some advice on how to tweak or improve.


AND if it really is as low as you are getting then BT should allow you to downgrade from Infinity 2 to the "Faster Broadband" product which still uses FTTC but is aimed at sub-15Mbps lines.

Edited by MHC (Thu 21-Apr-16 09:43:20)

the bt forums are also an excellent place as mentioned to get help

In reply to a post by Sanguine:

Hi there, I hope some wise person will have seen this situation before.

I have been waiting for our village to be fibre enabled for a couple of years, and recently new cabs were installed and the old EO lines connected through it, including mine.
The cabinet has just gone live and everyone in the village can now order fibre, except for our house and a couple of my immediate neighbours. (They share a telegraph pole with our house, which seems relevant)

In all directions from my house, houses 50 -100 yards away from me are able to order (with 80Mb speeds estimated), as well as the farms a mile or more away.

I am about 300m from the cabinet down a straight road, although the overhead wiring comes around my house and probably adds another 50-100m.

If I enter my details on BT infinity checker (or the local Fastershire (BDUK) website) I am told that although I am connected to the live cabinet, I am too far away to order fibre. Emailing Fastershire a few weeks back, they suggested that my address would be upgraded, but Openreach subsequently have emailed to say "sorry you can't order fibre, bad luck, you are too far away".

This seems crazy to me given how close I am. Does this crop up from time to time or is this very unusual? And can anything be done or I just have to suck it up and wait and see? (I suspect I know the answer).

Thanks for any insights.

My friend lives smack in the middle of 2 cabs with about 200m either way to them. Both his neighbours have FTTC and yet when he tries to get it he gets told it isnt available to him. Only thing we can come up with is that he only had his phone line fitted around 10 years ago in a house that was built in the mid 50s so presumably his line is routed via the top end of the village where there are no fibre cabs at all.

In reply to a post by Alnath:

My friend lives smack in the middle of 2 cabs with about 200m either way to them. Both his neighbours have FTTC and yet when he tries to get it he gets told it isnt available to him. Only thing we can come up with is that he only had his phone line fitted around 10 years ago in a house that was built in the mid 50s so presumably his line is routed via the top end of the village where there are no fibre cabs at all.

Would you believe that this query gets the same response as the originator of the thread?

As below:

In reply to a post by lee111s:

What results do you get when you put your number into here http://www.dslchecker.bt.com ?

Compare the results you get for your friencd and the two neighbours. In particular, the information about what exchange and cabinet number they are all connected to.

Use phone numbers on that site if possible. If not, use the address checker, not the postcode checker. It is quite valid to only enter your friend's postcode into the address checker, then submit, and then select from the drop-down list of all addresses - that way you can compare results for all the neighbours, one at a time.

Thought I'd just post some feedback in case anyone else found themselves in the same situation; I haven't seen it on the forums elsewhere.

After some nudging in the right direction by MrSaffron, FTTC magically became available for me and my immediate neighbours who'd been left out when the cabinet went live. Hopefully install this week will be ok...

I can only presume it was some sort of records issue as the local BDUK people announced they had finished all work in the area. Whatever it was, it wasn't sorting itself out for 2 months of waiting.
Oddly, I found out that 5-10 properties closest to the cab were also in the same situation as me; their situation changed on the same day mine did. So for 90 properties passed by the cabinet (according to Codelook) 10+ had been left out!

Many thanks to MrSaffron for the intervention.

He's remarkably good at this, and sorting other problems with Openreach or BT Wholesale that the normal channels aren't able to handle.

I'm told he spent two years at Hogwarts.

Clearly a Gryffendor man

Ah no, there will be shouts all over the net - it's Gryffindor ... Be careful or the wizards will be after such an obvious Muggle mistake.