FTTPoD quotes, prices and general chat thread Part 7

Starting a Part 7

Got back my Cerberus FTTPoD quote. Sadly, much higher than my budged allows. The location is a terraced house in North London, about 600-800m of walking distance from the cabinet.

Initial estimate was Unknown Subject To Survey.

The confirmed build charge is £11,742.00 + VAT.

Labour £6,002.00
Contract Labour £0.00
Civils £2,949.00
Stores £3,361.00
BT Connection Charge £495.00
Deduction £-815.00
Field Survey charge paid £-250.00

Total £11,742.00 + VAT

Had it been around 8-9k, I might have gone for it. But 12k is a bit too high. Never say never, though, I could always win the lottery

about 600-800m of walking distance from the cabinet.

.......... it is distance from the aggregation node that matters, not the cabinet.

But that’s all by the by now .... unless your numbers come up. 🤞

My cabinet is almost 4Km away.

My Agg Node is less than 2Km away.

Either way building a full fibre network to the premises is a very expensive complex business as I have learned over the last 4 years.

Pleased to say that after initially raising an order with Amvia back in August 2019, our property went live with FTTP on the 27th of October 2020.

Timescale from order being first raised to quote being accepted by carrier was around 11 months (August 2019 to start of July 2020).
Approximate build time was 4 months from quote being paid by us to connection going live (July 2020 - 27th of October 2020).

Total build costs (ex VAT): £10,629.94.
Minus two rural gigabit vouchers: £10,629.94 - £7,000 = £3,629.94(ex VAT).

Download speeds originally 4-5mb/s are now constant at >300mb/s.

A long winded (at some points frustrating) journey, more than happy that it's finally now in place.

Not sure if we are still posting FTTPoD quotes/stories.

Out of pure curiosity I put in a desktop quote with Cerberus recently. According to the TB broadband map, the surrounding area has absolutely zero Openreach FTTP anywhere. The exchange the cabinets around the area are going to is enabled for FTTP but I didn't have high hopes and....

Estimated Build Cost: Unable to offer an estimate using desk survey tools. Onsite survey required to confirm charges

Not a clue where the NGA node is. Maybe closer to Narnia.

My street is a newer build completed 2006 all ducting, there is however a pole serving the first few houses. Fortunately when I moved a few years ago I got Virgin Media to extend their existing infrastructure down to me as it stopped half way down a cul-de-sac for reasons VM don't even know, so that was lucky given they paid the construction costs. Otherwise I'd be stuck on FTTC options only.

I can imagine FTTPoD is going to be very costly but I wasn't really going to go beyond a general desktop quote anyway. Virgin Media will likely have a monopoly on my area for fibre options for many years yet!

Edited by jamesmacwhite (Mon 10-May-21 21:09:07)

In reply to a post by jamesmacwhite:

I can imagine FTTPoD is going to be very costly but I wasn't really going to go beyond a general desktop quote anyway. Virgin Media will likely have a monopoly on my area for fibre options for many years yet!

Desktop quotes are pretty random anyway, but you can be pretty sure that the final quote would be at least £8K+VAT. This is what even the "simple" ones have been coming out as, for the past couple of years anyway.

These days, a CFP may be a better bet - but you may not find many people willing to share the cost if you have VM already.

We requested a desktop quote for FTTPoD just before buying a new house in August last year - it came back at £15k. This was quite a bit higher than we were willing to go, so forgot about it for a while.

Fast forward to September, and we realised the Rural Gigabit Voucher scheme would work very well if we could convince a few neighbours to join us on an order, so prepared a PDF to distribute on the road WhatsApp group. We ended up with 13 other neighbours (out of approximately 30) wanting to do it. The fully linked order was submitted to Cerberus at the end of September 2020, with an initial survey visit something like a week later. It took until December for the survey to complete, which came back as just over £40k (under 3k per household, which is within the value of the vouchers). It took a week or so to get everyone to do the "paperwork" for DCMS applications, and then the order went to Openreach middle of December 2020.

We started seeing Openreach contractors out inspecting the state of the ducts around mid-January 2021, followed in mid-March by two days digging 300 meters of surface ducting from an underground chamber, where I understand the planner decided to locate a fibre splitter, to a point about half way along the road (the remaining half was already served with useable ducting, presumably due to the presence of a cell tower). They left ropes protruding from the bases of the eight poles from which the 14 houses are served.

A fleet of Openreach vans descended in early April with a hoist, mounting CBTs, pulling fibre, and then jointing. They told me that fibre had been blown from 5 km away, where the local aggregation node lives. One of the poles was deemed unsafe though; it gained a 'D' notice, and is awaiting replacement.

Since the 'D' pole serves two of the houses on the order, I don't know whether Openreach will commission the rest of the network first, or wait till after the replacement happens. With any luck we'll be getting connected soon, though.

I've been quite impressed with the speed at which this has progressed, and how happy the engineers been to explain the process.

That's very cool - that's the largest linked FTTPoD order I've heard of, and great that you could get vouchers to cover it all. I have a few questions if you don't mind:

Did you get hit with a Cerberus commissioning charge for each property?

Are all 13 users paying the higher FTTPoD monthly rental for the first year? (Generally £35+VAT per month above Cerberus' standard business FTTP rates)

Did you give any consideration to going the CFP route instead of FTTPoD?

Thanks - it's certainly been an interesting experience, and also brought us together with our new neighbours very quickly. Poor connectivity was a common complaint, only exacerbated by the need to fully work from home now.

Cerberus basically told us this is at the very top end of what FTTPoD can scale to - is that effectively because the fibre from the aggregation node can only be split up to 32 ways, or due to the logistics of coordinating between so many parties for the voucher application process?

EDIT: I was told they had opted to feed fibre from either end of the road to serve each half, so perhaps there's actually more than one fibre coming to us from the aggregation node? We're pretty much in the very middle, and they made a comment about the plan having been to feed us from one end, but they did it differently on the day, as there was a discrepancy with the plan to feed our pole from an underground chamber, which turned out not to exist. The pulled fibre from the pole on the other side of the road instead, where there is a chamber, but still located our CBT on the closer pole. Apparently this will simplify matters when it comes to the "cut and draw" operation to replace our drop wire with a hybrid cable.

Yes, there's a line item for their commissioning charge, on top of the Openreach connection charge, however there's also a significant deduction for each house on the order, and a smaller one for each additional house that's passed. Since the vouchers completely cover these costs, it didn't seem an issue.

I did look at CFP, but the impression I got was that we didn't meet the required scale on that, and that it's effectively just a registration of interest, as opposed to an actual order for services.

We've all opted for the lowest tier package (FoD Plus?), as it'll be a dramatic change from the 20-25Mb/s currently achievable via FTTC (our street cab is almost a kilometre away). I did notice Cerberus introduced an even lower tier at some point after our order went in, but that carries a two year contract, and I don't think it meets the requirements of the Gigabit Voucher scheme, because it's not a "step change" from the currently available speeds.

Edited by adoran47 (Wed 12-May-21 10:18:46)

I don't think linked FoD orders are limited to a single splitter. The cable pulled to the aggregation node will have multiple fibres (maybe 48 or 96) to future-proof it.

I suspect the scaling limit is, like you say, the coordination between parties, and the joint liability. With a CFP, the order is contracted with a single entity, such as a community interest corporation. With linked FoD, if any one person decides to cancel their order, the whole thing collapses.

My road is currently applying for a small CFP to piggy-back on top of the FoD that I had installed in 2019. It's a similar scale to yours - about a dozen people interested - and I know there's already a splitter at the end of the road, because I talked to the guy while he was splicing it.

The CFP request was submitted at beginning of February, but the survey still hasn't taken place. I suppose small orders will tend to go to the bottom of the pile. We're in an area 2, so although I got a gigabit voucher for my FoD, they are no longer available.