Does living near a FTTC cabinet make it easier to get FTTP?

Does living near/next to a FTTC cabinet make it easier for you to get FTTP, or is it not that simple? Say I wanted to pay to have the Fibre to the house put in, is it as simple as having an engineer do that or is there a lot more complicated/expensive stuff Openreach need to do?

No, it's more complicated than that.

It's called FTTPoD (Fibre To The Premises on Demand).

Very few ISPs support it, and BT Wholesale stopped offering it a while ago IIRC. They may have started again.

It is horrendously expensive. Openreach charge BT Wholesale, who then add a profit margin and then charge ISPs. (LLU suppliers deal direct with Openreach but I'm not aware of any touching it).

It is supplied from aggregation points. Those are glorified underground junction boxes for the fibres. FTTC cabinets are usually near one and fed from it. Users may, strangely, be nearer to a different one and FTTPoD might be supplied from that.

The Openreach installation charge starts at £950 if you are under 200 metres from an aggregation point. Rising by £400 per 200 metres up to 1km. Then faster for longer distances. Furthermore, these are minimum prices, depending on survey. If there are difficulties requiring considerable extra work it can be more, or even rejected as being non-viable.

Annual rental on the only product available - 330/30Mbps - is £1,188.

Given that BTW and the ISP both add a profit margin and the cost of providing the backhaul and other ISP services, and you pay the ISP price plus 20% Vat, does that answer the question?

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 27-Jun-16 15:05:49)

Thanks for the reply. Yes it does pretty much answer my question. I think I am around 300-400m from my cabinet. That is way too expensive for me... I could maybe overlook the installation charge if the line rental wasn't at least £1500 a year including VAT. Probably close to £2000 a year.

BT are doing trials at the moment and it is possible they will come up with a new offer for FTTPoD at some point. It may well be more cost effective than the old FTTPoD offering but until they release us some details we don't know. They may also launch it slowly and therefore it could be a long time after launch before some areas get access to it.

Plus G.Fast comes into the equation.

Does it?. g.fast is not mainstream and is not a buyable product

Neither is FTTPoD. That aside, my point was that G.Fast is likely to be a far more "pushed" product by ISPs than FTTPoD. We are already seeing upgraded cabinets.

Fibre to the Remote Node could also make FTTPoD less popular, whatever FTTPoD v2 looks like for pricing. That's if any ISP offers v2 at consumer level.

take your point.. But g.fast is not here now for most of us and I suppose neither is the other option. it is a chance either way