Rural Office - What are our options?

Openreach (Via Cerebus) have come back to us today with an estimated build charge of £14k for FTTPoD.

I can shave off £3k thanks to rural vouchers but it's still very high when COVID-19 is still causing a nightmare with uncertainty.

We've currently got a 80/20 connection which does well but just simply can't withhold the bandwith of file sharing and a team of staff.

A leased line is looking like the next possible options but i'm worried about excess construction charges plus what happens if we need to swap providers in 3-4 years time.

Does anyone have any advice?

Two VDSL2 lines and a load balancing router
Two VDSL2 lines and a bonded service.

Bonded is more expensive as needs kit at ISP end, but means you get speed of both lines for a single download/upload

Load balancing is cheaper and just splits different downloads or uploads on different connections

You may as well get a leased line quote - if the ECCs are above the level that Openreach absorb then you can stop the order.

I could understand viewing the £11k as an investment if you owned the premises you were in, but that's more or less the entire 36 month cost for a decent leased line. We gave up waiting for fast broadband about 7 years ago and got a 20Mbps leased line, we're now paying around the same each month for a 500Mbps service and could easily make use of a gigabit. We do a lot of video work and the upload is life changing for us, there's very few 'broadband' services that can come close to meeting those requirements.

Edited by jpm (Fri 20-Nov-20 01:12:25)

In reply to a post by Whitehall11:

A leased line is looking like the next possible options but i'm worried about excess construction charges plus what happens if we need to swap providers in 3-4 years time.

Try linebroker.co.uk for a quick quote.

The build cost is usually absorbed by the provider across a 36-month contract. If there are unexpected ECCs you should be able to cancel the order without penalty.

EDIT: worth also mentioning that the install time for a leased line is likely to be much quicker than FTTPoD.

Edited by candlerb (Fri 20-Nov-20 08:50:00)