complain about fibre upgrade!

Is there anywhere I can complain about the fibre roll out?

Essentially we live in a small village pretty close to a large town. The fastest connection we can currently get is 8mb on fibre! The exchange is fibre enabled however our exchange lives in the town about 3 miles away.

I've contacted a few people and they just tell me the house is already fibre enabled, then they look at the distance between the exchange and my house and the just say "oh! theirs no plans there"

I'm a computer technician and do on call work which means I have to VPN into work, its painful having an 8mb connection at home and a 500mb connection at work

Is there anything I can do?

Thanks

Not much ...And 8Mbps on an FTTC connection is a lot better than some I know of who have FTTC down at 1.5 to 2.5 Mbps.

And it is not distance to exchange but distance to cabinet that matters and I would suggest you are a lot closer than 3 miles.

It should eventually be covered in the USO but that is only 10Mb so if they did it just to the USO you wouldn't see much improvement. There is no requirement at the moment for 100% superfast coverage so there will always be some people, like yourself, who are on "slower" speeds. Complaining to Openreach on this is unlikely to get you far as they won't change their plans based on a complaint as the project to do the rollout is huge.

You might be able to get faster speeds on 4G or pay for FTTPoD - but you might want to wait until February when the new FTTPoD product is launched as the pricing and contracts on that currently look to be more favourable.

Which area and what were their targets?

Harsh, but if an area was targeting 95% superfast coverage some people will obviously be in the 5%, individual assessments of what people do are with their connections are not part of the criteria for getting an upgrade.

If the 8 Mbps is via FTTC consider bonding in the short term, or one solution once the VPN is up access a remote desktop so the files you are moving around and editing are on the 500 Mbps LAN and you just see the 'video' from the remote desktop rather than pulling the large files down the slower link.

Distance to the exchange is irrelevant. It's distance to the cabinet which is important.

Complain about what though? It has never been suggested that every property in the country will get superfast broadband. That is, sadly, not economically possible. It might not even be technically possible.

All the CPs are spending as much money as they can in order to bring superfast to as many people as possible. Unfortunately if you happen to live in area where the costs of upgrading the local loop are very high and/or only a few people will benefit then you're going to be left waiting.

It often comes down to a calculation like this:
We have £100k to spend.
At location A that will cover 5000 properties.
At location B that will cover 1000 properties.
At location C that will cover 100 properties.
At location D that will cover 10 properties.

Which location would you choose? At end of the day no-one has infinite money or infinite resources. The best you can hope for is that eventually locations A, B, C have all been done and yours is the only one left. Unfortunately even then it's questionable whether anyone would want to spend £100k (£10k per property) when the annual return after costs is £50. Would you be prepared to invest £100k on the understanding that you would start to see a profit after 2,000 years?

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Complain about what though?

If it were me, I'd be complaining about only having 8Mbps available - if that is in fact the case.

Local BDUK authority if you have one, CEO of Openreach Clive Selley, local councillors, your MP, DCMS, BBC, Daily Mail, local rag , etc, etc

And all that complaining will likely get nowhere. As I suggested before looking at 4G or FTTPoD options may provide a potential route to getting something done rather than complaining to people that they don't like the current BT rollout plan.

Move ?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

Complain about what though?

If it were me, I'd be complaining about only having 8Mbps available - if that is in fact the case.

Well yes..but I'm suggesting that's pointless. Or at least the wrong attitude to take.

The only thing the CPs (and the government through BDUK) are 'guilty' of is practical financial planning. The OP can talk to people to discuss the situation and should indeed do so. Should have been doing so for a long time now. But complaining is unlikely to be the right approach as that implies taking someone to task for making a mistake.

I know your numbers are arbitrary and selected only to illustrate the point, but I do think they're exaggerated.

Pick the most rural location you can think of, and assume you can get past any wayleave and other legal issues. What is the actual cost per mile of running fibre? What is the maximum amount of money that it could cost to get a property connected? I bet it's well under £10k.

In reply to a post by ian72:

And all that complaining will likely get nowhere. As I suggested before looking at 4G or FTTPoD options may provide a potential route to getting something done rather than complaining to people that they don't like the current BT rollout plan.

Exactly. It's so common in these discussions that the have-nots fall into the trap of thinking the lack of faster broadband is personal or some kind of snub against them by the CPs (though of course they only ever mention BT). That kind of attitude is unhelpful. The have-nots are in their current situation despite the best efforts and intentions of CPs. CPs would love to have every last house, out house and hen house fibered up. Unfortunately none of them (even with government help) have the resources to do that.

I'm sure it sucks to be a have-not but when dealing with CPs the issue should be approached like a common problem. One where both sides are unhappy with the current situation but neither has yet found a solution.

First of all, I would like to establish whether the issue is correctly representing the facts.

Some line stats would be nice and also the dslchecker estimates.

When you say get past any wayleave, are you aware that getting past them can often involve an upfront and then annual payment to the person/body whose land it is?

The cost is largely dictated by the time involved, i.e. cost of labour rather than the price of fibre per metre

We had a quote for a school some years back to get fibre delivered to them - the quote was over £300K.

In reply to a post by j314:

I know your numbers are arbitrary and selected only to illustrate the point, but I do think they're exaggerated.

You should try Googling it. I didn't for my first post so now I must apologise for understating the cost. I haven't found anything current and definitely UK oriented but a rough consensus appears to be 'several tens of thousands of dollars per mile'. How that translates into UK money and UK costings I'm not sure but I vaguely recall that the cabinet itself costs about £20k so my £100k sounds like it might be enough (just) to install one cabinet in a village that's a couple of miles outside a town.

That is on the basis of digging the ground up so presumably is cheaper if there's ducting all the way to the village but I don't know how common that is. It would be interesting to see what the more knowledgeable people on this forum say but my I don't think my figures (for all that they were plucked out of thin air) are exaggerated or even particularly pessimistic.

There's an interesting costing table here if you scroll down a bit.

Rather shockingly it seems to be saying (for five miles) 7.8m for digging or 2.5m for blowing down existing ducts. I'm not sure what currency that is though. I think it's probably Dollars but sounds ridiculous. Possibly I'm just misunderstanding the table.

:0

Okay another article from the World Bank (2016) suggests that in developed countries it's about $100k per mile in rural areas:

"But the high costs of installing cable without �piggy-backing� on other infrastructure construction (in the advanced economies, as much as $100,000 per mile) limits profitable broadband investment primarily to densely populated areas."

Edited by Andrue (Wed 01-Nov-17 16:24:22)

I can remember the costs of putting power cables in - which is not much different. The cost for those was between £20 and £50 per metre depending on the ground with a field being the cheapest and tarmac road the most expensive as it needs to be fully reinstated afterwards.

It may be cheaper for longer runs but there are many extras including things such as permits to close roads or put traffic lights in place or arrange diversions.

Have a read of: http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/forums/showthread.php...

In reply to a post by MHC:

I can remember the costs of putting power cables in - which is not much different. The cost for those was between £20 and £50 per metre depending on the ground with a field being the cheapest and tarmac road the most expensive as it needs to be fully reinstated afterwards.

Power is somewhat different. It has to be considerably deeper in the ground than telco so is naturally more expensive per metre. The cost difference isn't trivial, especially through carriageways.

There is no difference for LV supplies under a carriageway. UKPN require 600mm below the surface which is the same at BT OR. When its move up to the 11kV and 20/22kV distribution the requirement is increased to 750mm.

Given that a large proportion of the cost for tarmac surfaces is for breaking through and re-instating, there is minimal, if any difference between telecoms and power.

If you want, I can find te appropriate reference documents that cover it.

Follow the money - e.g. look at the £200m contract Gigaclear recently declared with a firm that will do their digging for them

Do some basic calcs on that at say £40/metre and you get 5000km ! That is a lot of trenching ... Go to my lowest suggestion of £20 and it becomes 10,000 km !

The OR Quick Guide to Duct Laying refers to 600mm when crossing a carriageway and teh UKPN document is ECS 02-0019.

In reply to a post by j314:

Pick the most rural location you can think of, and assume you can get past any wayleave and other legal issues. What is the actual cost per mile of running fibre? What is the maximum amount of money that it could cost to get a property connected? I bet it's well under £10k.

Unfortunately not.

The 2008 study by Analysys Mason (for BSG) divided the country into a number of geotypes, based on the then-current exchange size & line length of phone lines.

Pulling example figures out of that report, the cost per property connected (assuming 31% takeup) for GPON was around:
- £1,500 for London, at 3,600 premises per sq.km
- £2,000 for large urban areas, at 1,300 premises per sq. km
- £4,000 for the rural areas around larger cities/towns, at 100-200 per sq. km
- £7,500 for the more rural areas, at 23 premises per sq. km
- £10,000 for the most rural, at 6 premises per sq. km

The numbers would be different now, because half of the investment in FTTC has gone into the fibre spine, and can be reused in GPON. That probably has a large effect on the first couple of categories.

Well @Andrue
I'm sure you can explain the following then
1 My village area was deemed non commercially viable by BT for upgrade
2. My village was then deemed not suitable or some mealy mouthed words by BDUK for an upgrade.

So
Along come Gigaclear and rapidly find the village is commercially viable and we all now have an excellent full fibre FTTP service from them of which I pay for the 50up/50down option.

We in the village have a pretty good idea what was likely to have been happening. This is a seriously up market area and we think BT/BDUK/local council reckoned that they need not upgrade us as we would be so desperate that we would PAY them to upgrade it at our cost as an area which would have the money to do this.
Yes - we think it was indeed a deliberate snub and yes BT made no effort whatsoever to improve their service in this area - best efforts my arrrrse!

Unfortunately BT made a big mis-calculation and have now lost a huge amount of business. At one point BT had taken to ringing up asking people why they were ceasing their BT broadband supply......

In reply to a post by zom22:

We in the village have a pretty good idea what was likely to have been happening. This is a seriously up market area and we think BT/BDUK/local council reckoned that they need not upgrade us as we would be so desperate that we would PAY them to upgrade it at our cost as an area which would have the money to do this.

So you're saying that BT, while getting SFBB service to 94.4% of the country, have decided to leave *your* up-market, affluent area out of the build, in spite of it being cost-effective for them to do so?

A deliberate snub that, if BT aren't doing it to you personally, or to your village personally, they must be replicating that decision throughout the country.

By extension, the remaining 5% is well-chosen as the richest part?

To quote the Gigaclear website:

25 October 2017: Over 10,000 homes and businesses in West Oxfordshire will be connected to ultrafast broadband by the end of 2019, accessing speeds of up to 1Gbps (1,000Mbps), following the announcement of two major infrastructure projects for the area.

The first project is an £8m plan to bring full fibre to 4,600 properties, jointly funded by West Oxfordshire District Council (WODC) and Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) to the tune of £3.1m, and rural broadband specialist Gigaclear for £5m. In addition, Gigaclear has announced that it is investing a further £8m to connect another 5,700 homes in the area, linking existing networks together and extending the provider�s already significant footprint in the district.

The latter project works out at £1,403 per property.

I wish we had 8meg. We live on the outskirts of a large town in Shropshire, and I've just this minute done a test, ours is 4.01 Mb. Great eh?! Not great to share between 2 adults and 2 kids using phones, tablets, smart tv and gaming etc. Awful.