FTTP - so near and yet so far

My street in Sevenoaks, Kent, now has FTTP available and a number of my neighbours now have it. However, my property, which sits up a short drive behind another property, shows as unavailable. The phone line currently comes up a conduit in the drive and a helpful openreach engineer lifted the access hatch at the end of the road and said it should be able to the cable up from the pole up the conduit but i face "computer says no" from both my ISP and OpenReach. Ive done an availability check with openreach but without luck. I feel like if I could speak to someone intelligent and explain the issue it would be easily solved but I am struggling to do just that.

I have had a Fibre on demand quote and it is £4,800 + vat. I wouldnt mind paying a premium for installation but it cannot cost that to run a cable 50m up my drive.

Any suggestions would be very, very gratefully received.

thank you.

Was that a desktop quote or the result of a survey?

If a survey, then it is supposed to reflect the actual work required (broken down as "civils", "stores", etc.) so maybe the build stopped when the CBT or splitter was fully allocated.

However, no quotes seem to come in below a few thousand these days, so you do wonder why the gap for seemingly simple FoD vs the regular £500 installation fee...

Time to email me andrew@thinkbroadband with short desc and address details and will forward onto Openreach with some notes

.... the build cost is from an existing aggregation node, not just served off of an existing CBT.

I will do that - thank you. And in answer to the query above it was a desktop survey

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

.... the build cost is from an existing aggregation node, not just served off of an existing CBT.

Even if the network has been built out to 50m away and there is capacity, I guess?

I had wondered.

So that does indeed explain why folk who've been "just missed" get disappointing FTTPoD quotes!

If you are only offered FTTP then it suggests BT did not build your address in to the current design and so quite possible all the ports on the CBT are already allocated. There is the question as to why you weren't included though - perhaps it was just an oversight or perhaps there were specific issues that made it cost prohibitive.

Let's hope for the OP's sake that it's simply a database oversight.

Apologies if this is a dumb question but is there an element of first in best dressed here for those where it does show as available? There are only about 35 houses on our street - would it be normal to lay the fibre and not have the capacity to connect everyone that it passes?

I have thought about trying to persuade our neighbour to upgrade and then piggy-backing off his!

Roll-out these days is meant to have 120% port capacity so should be able to have every house covered take a service

So, somewhat to my surprise, on Thursday a couple of openreach engineers showed up and have installed the fibre cable up the conduit to our house (and that of our neighbour who is also set back from the road - we share some parts of a common drive). The did so apparently in response to the query I raised with openreach a few weeks ago which they told me had been "escalated to a specialist team".

Does anyone have any idea what happens next, please? I assume at some point OpenReach's broadband checker will update and then I will be able to order, but any ideas on timescale or if I should do anything else in the meantime?

thanks for everyone's help so far.

I'd suggest give it a week normally, but seen as its Christmas week then I'd not panic until 4th Jan 2021 if the checkers have not updated.

The work they did will need to filter through the systems, which is a few days. So if in Jan if still not showing then its time to get me to prod the right bit of Openreach for you.

Ok brilliant - thank you very much and thanks for all your help so far. Your nudging is certainly proving effective - I was astonished when they turned up!

Still not updated so if you could put in a word that would be marvellous - thank you

Andrew - now shows as available and order placed (with Zen). Thank you very much for all your help - i have no doubt your intervention was key. My neighbour (to whom they ran a fibre up the conduit at the same time) still shows as only having FTTC....

You're a legend.

Just to close out this thread, my FTTP installation was completed last week. ISP is Zen. So far I am happy although the signal seems to drop occasionally (I log into work via a multi-factor authentication system so if the connection drops i have to log in again). I think that might be my mesh wifi (BT disks) rather than the fritz box that Zen provided.

Overall it is a vast improvement on my old FTTC system - getting about 500mbs down / 75 up, which is exactly what I paid for.

Thanks to everyone for their advice but particularly Andrew for his help and support.

Good news.

Connection drops are typically down to WiFi - it really is the weakest link in the chain. Upgrading, changing or reinforcing your in-home WiFi will be needed if the service dropouts are frequent, severe or the range and throughput aren't up to the job.

Its typically when folks get FTTP installed they realise all the other bits of their network that are creaking.