Installing Fibre to Coffee Shop

We've asked BT to install fibre to our small coffee shop.(Rural Cheshire) (2018) We have a BT line and broadband through an underground duct from a new pole 50m away. We have fibre to our main house which is just by the Coffee shop . (Openreach ran a fibre cable from outside primary school 50m away )We've had 3 engineer visits and each time they spent about an hour here before deciding "we can't do it" They mentioned something about fitting a CBT box to the pole?? The duct is exposed at both ends and has a blue rope to pull new cable through and existing cable in it. We've had to remove flooring to expose the duct.
Is there a reason that fibre can't be installed as we can't get an answer from BT the last email says "order cancelled, charges refunded" Does anyone know why it can't be done and how do we ask Openreach?BT for an explanation. Many Thanks

If there are no spare connectors on the existing CBT then will need an additional one installing, i.e. not what the final install engineers will do

Does your coffee shop have its own address, or is it considered part of your house?

I think installing a length of CAT-5 cable from your router through to the Coffee Shop to a WiFi extender would be my thoughts.

Why pay for an extra service when you already have one.?

Edited by busterboy (Sun 20-Dec-20 09:21:25)

In reply to a post by busterboy:

I think installing a length of CAT-5 cable from your router through to the Coffee Shop to a WiFi extender would be my thoughts.

Why pay for an extra service when you already have one.?

One very good reason is to keep coffee shop customers off the home network so they can't see things like streaming devices and connected computers. I wouldn't want strangers connecting to my home network.

They also shouldn't be on the same network as any IP enabled infrastructure used in the coffee shop - things like tills, card payment machines, computers and printers.

There are also things to consider such as whether the ISP of the home connection permits it to be shared in this way. It's probably against their terms and conditions. What happens if a coffee shop customer downloads pirated material or other illegal content? The coffee shop needs its own internet connection with a business contract that allows its use for customer wi-fi.

It's also good practice to put in filtering, a portal that requires acceptance of terms and conditions, a regularly changing password and wi-fi disabled automatically outside trading hours.

Edited by caffn8me (Sun 20-Dec-20 16:53:03)

How far away is the coffee shop? If it's physically connected then just run a cable. If there is a gap but there is still line of sight, look into the UniFi building to building bridge and use Unifi AP's in the coffee shop so you can have proper high quality AP's and a real guest portal with barely any effort.

Edit after your post: Unifi kit sounds ideal then. You can create separate vlans for the Home/Coffee Shop and keep those separate, and any customers using the guest portal are entirely isolated on their own.

Edited by Skie (Sun 20-Dec-20 16:43:59)

And on top of this, were someone to view anything illegal you could be held liable.

Surely a router like I have ASUS RT-AX88U or similar and setup the "Guest Network" with it's own password is that not secure enough.

Not here to argue but thought it was a simple solution.

In reply to a post by busterboy:

Not here to argue but thought it was a simple solution.

It would technically work, but for a business to provide internet to its customers in the UK there are complex legals around liability unfortunately.

There are routers that provide "captive portal" pages that ask you to acknowledge terms and provide contact details. This is the sort of thing a business needs to use.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 20-Dec-20 18:53:34)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by busterboy:

Not here to argue but thought it was a simple solution.

It would technically work, but for a business to provide internet to its customers in the UK there are complex legals around liability unfortunately.

There are routers that provide "captive portal" pages that ask you to acknowledge terms and provide contact details. This is the sort of thing a business needs to use.

Gotcha.

You could even use a router that is compatible with one of the many VPN providers, so that guest traffic is tunnelled across your home network and breaks out to the Internet at the VPN provider - no chance of accessing your network and separate liability from rogue guest users.

In reply to a post by busterboy:

Surely a router like I have ASUS RT-AX88U or similar and setup the "Guest Network" with it's own password is that not secure enough.

Not here to argue but thought it was a simple solution.

There are some Asus models where the guest network is not isolated from the the LAN which I believe Asus are working on in beta firmware. Not sure if the AX88U is one of those but worth bearing in mind this bug.

Many Thanks for replies

The Coffee Shop is a stand alone business with its own utilities for the reasons described in posts

It has its own pole and underground line up drive and trying to work out why Openreach can't fit fibre
Not enough connectors on the main village pole makes sense. Do we have to wait until Openreach make more connectors available ? and how do we find out how long that will take?
TQ

Convert your BT residential services to business and the hub will have a Guest Portal ... That will get over a lot of issues and with the added benefit that it becomes a business expense.

To my knowledge.

There’s not a guarantee they would do it anytime soon, what are the speeds quoted for FTTC services? If they’re acceptable eg shows speeds of 35Mbps then there’s technically no need to fibre you up in their view... They could come back with the idea of just run a copper line and run fibre to the cabinet services. If speeds are very poor without the fibre to the home, you have more of a push for them to do something about it.

Others know more of the internal workings of openreach and should be able to confirm if I’ve got anything wrong. To my knowledge there’s no mandate that they must update things to give one premises fibre.