Cabinet enabled: only first 5 houses in street can get fibre

My village has recently had all its Exchange-Only lines moved to a newly commissioned fibre cabinet. Mine included.

When you look at the availability checker for my tiny little cul-de-sac, houses 1 through 5 are able to get fibre (house # 5 is showing as able to get 79.43 mbit) and then houses 6 onwards are showing as not able to get anything at all.

For info, house 6 is right next to house 5 (the street is numbered sequentially, not odd-even) and mine (house 13) is about 60 meters away as the crow flies.

I've submitted a request via then Openreach website to the fibre enquiry team, which got a token answer from their triage team saying they needed to pass my query to another department, and then I've not heard anything else since.

I've also contacted my ISP (Plusnet) twice and spoke to four successive departments, all of whom weren't interested in investigating any further on my behalf; their advice was to contact BT.

Does anyone have any ideas on what to try next?

EO lines are usually in clusters, i.e. cable bundles, so there are real scenarios where some get enabled via a cabinet and others are left waiting for another cabinet.

Sometimes the checkers are just slow to be updated correctly too.

Which exchange is this?

My line was showing as an EO line until very recently. It's now showing as connected to cabinet 4 on the Paxton Exchange (Scottish Borders). Based on the size of the village, I'd be surprised if we needed a second cabinet

Coincidentally the street was built in two phases, houses 6 onwards are "only" ten years old. One through five have been here longer.

In reply to a post by Birksy:

My line was showing as an EO line until very recently. It's now showing as connected to cabinet 4 on the Paxton Exchange (Scottish Borders).

You don't say that all the other houses are also showing as connected to cabinet 4. And if so, whether they converted from EO lines at the same time.

If they are now all saying cab 4, what does the BTW checker say for your address? In particular, does it have an entry for "fibre multicast"?

In reply to a post by Birksy:

Coincidentally the street was built in two phases, houses 6 onwards are "only" ten years old. One through five have been here longer.

There's a good chance that your property, like the other 10-year olds, needed some extra cable segments pulling to get coverage - so some of the records will be different to the first 5 properties. You likely aren't even connected to the same DP, which is one of the core elements in getting speed estimates.

As MrS says, that leaves you at risk that some of the database updates happen over a different timescale, or just plain didn't happen.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

You don't say that all the other houses are also showing as connected to cabinet 4. And if so, whether they converted from EO lines at the same time.

If they are now all saying cab 4, what does the BTW checker say for your address? In particular, does it have an entry for "fibre multicast"?

Thanks for the reply. The village is pretty small so previously all the houses were EO, they're now all showing as connected to cab 4. The BTW checker for my number has ADSL Max, Fixed Rate and Fibre Multicast showing as available and nothing else.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

There's a good chance that your property, like the other 10-year olds, needed some extra cable segments pulling to get coverage - so some of the records will be different to the first 5 properties. You likely aren't even connected to the same DP, which is one of the core elements in getting speed estimates.

As MrS says, that leaves you at risk that some of the database updates happen over a different timescale, or just plain didn't happen.

I'm beginning to think they didn't happen. I've checked for houses at the outskirts of the village, or as far away as you can possibly get from Cab 4, and they're showing as capable of 66 MBit connections. The village is pretty tiny, barely half a kilometer across the longest diagonal, so I'm at a loss as to why our little stretch is showing up with nothing.

This is looking like a possible mistake, so you need to email me [email protected] with the full address details and will then pester Openreach for a fix to the checker.

A small chance given the phasing that you may be waiting on a little bit more work to be done, but the pester should find that out.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the offer. That's really kind of you

I'll drop you the details in an email.

Cheers,

Richard.