BT say we cannot connect despite a line and cabinets

Quick resume: We are surrounded by homes getting 70Mb/s on FTTC system. The fibre cable is strung between poles and passes our home, I can see it from our living room window. There are two cabinets within 150m one in each direction along the road. We understand that there is spare capacity in the cabinets yet BT say that they lease the line from Openreach and there isn't an option for fibre to our home. We currently get around 6Mb/s via an Exchange Only line over 2miles away. Have taken it up to BT Resolution Centre Management but get the stonewall response "we can't do it". I believe there's an error on the records somewhere and it needs an Openreach Engineer with a bit of gumption to actually have a look at the options. Is that too difficult a problem.
I've contacted Openreach no one has responded just an acknowledgement. Actually three acknowledgements as you don't seem to be able to actually speak or write to anyone so need to complte an online form every time.
Have contacted my MP & MSP yesterday
Have contacted HIE (Highland & Island Enterprise) who are looking into it.
Have contacted Digital Scotland (R100 Team) have an acknowledgement.

Sadly, if your line is showing as Exchange Only (EO) then FTTC will not be available as your line does not go through any Openreach cabinets.

Edit: if you check your nearest neighbours and they all go through a cabinet then you may have been missed from a migration off of EO to a cabinet.

Edit: Don't focus on the fibre cable hanging between poles, you need to focus on what your neighbours are getting on either side of you and then try to escalate through your ISP to Openreach as you may have been missed

Edit: Have a read of this post if you can prove you have been missed, although a different starting point from yours he did push his ISP and Openreach to get a network rearrangement done when it was proven he had been missed, it wasn't easy and he did very well to get it done.

Edited by deleted (Wed 14-Oct-20 09:48:49)

The fibre passing your home is useless to you.
You can't just break in to a fibre cable and tap in to it.

You're on an exchange only line. It "might" run right past the front of the fibre cabinet which could in theory make it relatively easy to connect in to the cabinet, maybe an hour's work.
The thing is... There are hundreds of thousands of exchange only lines.
If they made a habit of connecting individual lines to cabinets then every person in the country with an EO line would be on the phone demanding the same. Those hours here and there would cost OpenReach millions of man hours.

Your line might not even run past the front of the cabinet. It might go in the other direction or it might be on the other side of the street.
They would need to break in to your copper bundle (which can involve digging the road/pavement) and then installing ducting between that point and your local Street cabinet.

Usually with exchange only lines there's lots of properties served by a bundle of cables.
During previous state aid funded projects OpenReach have charged an arm and a leg to connect convert these bundles of cables to local cabinets so they can get FTTC.
It is a VERY time consuming and very expensive process.

You will need to wait for R100 which will be more focused on FTTP than FTTC.
If there is spare fibre in the fibre line passing you and running to the cabinet then they could build the FTTP from the cabinet towards you.
They might just pull in some new fibre though.

Edit: what dect says above is true in some cases but your neighbors having FTTC is nowhere near enough.
It could have always been that way, particularly with properties built during different time periods.
It's only if there was a publicly funded project to convert your neighbours lines from exchange only lines to cabinets that you "might" be able to claim you were missed.
The fact every neighbour in the street has FTTC won't help if it was always that way.

Edited by j0hn83 (Wed 14-Oct-20 09:56:08)

Try contacting the openreach CEO and see if he can get someone to look into the feasibility of re-routing your line to a cabinet. You have nothing to loose.

In reply to a post by witchunt:

Try contacting the openreach CEO and see if he can get someone to look into the feasibility of re-routing your line to a cabinet. You have nothing to loose.

Not a chance! It's will cost them lots of money!

In reply to a post by adslmax:

In reply to a post by witchunt:

Try contacting the openreach CEO and see if he can get someone to look into the feasibility of re-routing your line to a cabinet. You have nothing to loose.

Not a chance! It's will cost them lots of money!

What are you on about? There are circumstances under which they will re-route a line, for example if it was missed off when during a larger scale re-route/re-organisation was taking place. In fact, there's a thread on here from a few weeks ago where that very scenario happened and the line was correctly re-routed after it was missed.

Are your neighbours close to you (i.e. not hundreds of metres away like my neighbours)? If so are you friendly with them? Could one of them get an additional line installed at your expense so you could run an ethernet cable to your house?

Not a chance! It's will cost them lots of money

You don't know that and Openreach wont know unless they look at it.

What happens if you go through the motions of ordering but specifying a new line is required (rather than using your existing telephone number)?
Not guaranteed to work, but I remember instances of people ordering a new line for the purpose of getting connected via a different DP and/or cabinet in order to get a faster connection back in the ADSL days.

Edited by Rastus (Wed 14-Oct-20 20:38:55)

I’d have to say that is an enormous gamble, and one that is extremely likely not to achieve what you suggest.

You order, the line is routed by automated systems, and that’s pretty much that.