FTTPoD Desk vs Field Pricing

Hi all,

Not too sure if this is the correct place to ask this but was just wondering if anyone has had a Desktop survey and then went ahead with a Field survey with a company.

Currently live on 5mbps download and an upload speed of <1 on FTTC.

My desk survey came back at £5,200.00 ex VAT and passes 7 premises.

I am not too sure if it's going to be accurate so I was wanting to see if anyone has had experience with it being similar, much more or possibly even less.

Hope you're well,

Martyn

Edited by deleted (Wed 10-Feb-21 22:44:23)

Take a look at this spreadsheet maintained by candlerb

FTTPoD Desktop Quotes and Final Prices

Perfect!

Thanks

Please do let us know if you get a final quote and what it is.

There have been hardly any reports here for a long while. I don't know if this reflects a relatively static forum membership, i.e. anyone who would have considered FTTPoD has already done so; or a general fall in interest in FTTPoD because of the ramping up of Fibre First.

Either way, your desktop quote does seem to be one of the lowest seen, so hopefully means a straightforward install. Good luck!

In reply to a post by candlerb:

There have been hardly any reports here for a long while.

I had noticed this also, in recent months there has been more talk of going down the Community Fibre Partnership path, especially where Openreach agree to a demand led scheme using voucher pledges and no need for any physical cash to be raised.

Going to go a head and buy the Field Survey now,

Originally I was told they couldn't give me a desktop quote, this was 3-4 years ago but since then apparently they have been able to come up with a figure.

Fingers crossed. (Hopefully the price goes down and not up!)

If you read that spreadsheet in detail you will see something seemed to change with the full quotes in early 2019.
In 2018 there was lots of £2k, £3k, £4k build costs.

Since 2019 there have only been 2 final quotes (inc survey) under £7k.
They were £6,875 in Feb 2019 and £4,050 in June 2019.
Since then every single desktop quote below £7k has gone up after the survey.

Every quote now seems to have £4-5k in Labour or £4-5k in civils/civils labour, or both.

Going by the above pattern your final price was very likely be £7-8k or above.

Edited by j0hn83 (Thu 11-Feb-21 17:19:53)

Good spot.

I'll update on here when the final price does come!

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If you read that spreadsheet in detail you will see something seemed to change with the full quotes in early 2019.
In 2018 there was lots of £2k, £3k, £4k build costs.

Wasn't that when Openreach changed the pricing structure and the minimum contract term changed from 36 months to 12 months?

No. I was one of the early ones on the list above and we were 12 month term.

In reply to a post by simon194:

Wasn't that when Openreach changed the pricing structure and the minimum contract term changed from 36 months to 12 months?

No - the spreadsheet only shows costs under the new pricing scheme, introduced in March 2018.

Prior to that, FTTPoD prices were fixed in "bands" depending on how far you were from the fibre aggregation node, plus a fixed hefty premium on the first 36 months rental. It was possible for ECCs to be raised (and for the customer to drop out of the order without penalty if they were), but in practice this almost never happened.

The free "desktop estimates" followed by post-survey confirmed pricing (for which you had to pay £250+VAT if you dropped out) are part of the new model only.

Also under the new model, if the CBT/Manifold is placed to serve multiple properties, then they all get FTTP available to order. Under the old model, only the specific property which ordered FTTPoD got it.

In reply to a post by simon194:

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If you read that spreadsheet in detail you will see something seemed to change with the full quotes in early 2019.
In 2018 there was lots of £2k, £3k, £4k build costs.

Wasn't that when Openreach changed the pricing structure and the minimum contract term changed from 36 months to 12 months?

As pointed out above all the quotes in the spreadsheet are under the current pricing model.

There was a very noticeable increase in the quotes at the beginning of 2019 with the £4k quote in Northern Ireland being the only exception to this

Every quote now seems to have £4-5k in either Labour costs, or Civil stores/civil labour costs, or both.
If that trend in quotes continues as it has for the last 2 years then it's sensible to warn potential buyers that their final quote is likely to be at least £7-8k.

Just had a thought, as the properties passed is 7, I was going to see if my neighbours were interested and if so potentially they could help fund it.

But how do I know which premises it passes, due to my location I have houses spread around me on all but one side so I wouldn't even know who to ask.

In reply to a post by martynp1:

Just had a thought, as the properties passed is 7, I was going to see if my neighbours were interested and if so potentially they could help fund it.

But how do I know which premises it passes, due to my location I have houses spread around me on all but one side so I wouldn't even know who to ask.

You ought to get the list of properties as part of the survey - and from the survey result you will have 30 days to accept the survey and pay, or to drop out and lose the £250+VAT.

If there are 7 properties served by the same pole or by the same footway box, it will most likely be those.

Note that the "properties passed" in the desktop survey may be wrong anyway; I was told 12 in my desktop survey, but it ended up being 3.

Cheers for the clarity.

Just got to wait it out now, I think they said anywhere from 4+ weeks for the survey to be complete.

I just revisited my surveyed quote and I had a discount of £850 for premises passed. Which I understood at the time was £700 for my property and £150 for other premises passed @ £50 per property.

All my final quote correspondence was headed up from Cerberus and/or email from Bob Hendy with cost breakdown. I couldn’t see the actual addresses of the properties passed listed on any of that correspondence, but it was fairly easy to work out whom they were given what was served from the pole mounted CBT serving us.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

All my final quote correspondence was headed up from Cerberus and/or email from Bob Hendy with cost breakdown. I couldn’t see the actual addresses of the properties passed listed on any of that correspondence

Ah yes, I remember now - I had to ask which ones they were.

My Desktop survey also came in at £5200 but with 5 premises past. I had the actual survey carried out last week so it will be interesting to see how our final prices differ as the desktop survey prices were the same. I will post the final price here when I get it.

Exciting times!

How long did it take from when you ordered the field survey to it being carried out?

The field survey was ordered on 9th November and carried on 10th February. This long delay was neither the fault of Cerberus or Openreach; we were waiting for a neighbour who had expressed an interest in joining a linked order to register, eventually I told Cerberus to proceed as a single order. Once they had given the order to Openreach it took less than a week to carry out the survey.

That's pretty quick. Hopefully mine will also be somewhat fast, looking forward to see how our prices differ.

So, here is the final quote:

Desktop survey price: £5200
Confirmed Price: £8833
Broken down as follows:

Labour £5,001.00
Contract Labour £0.00
Civils £750.00
Stores £3,502.00
BT Connection Charge £495.00
Deduction £-665.00
Field Survey charge paid £-250.00
Total £8,833.00

If this is typical of recent quotes I think they might as well 'call it a day' with FFTPod.

Distance to Aggregation node is about 750m (the Openreach surveyor told me where it is), there are no roads to dig up, existing ducts can be used, and the final delivery would be via existing polls.
I am glad I proceeded with the survey but it isn't going to be worth getting this installed at this price.

In reply to a post by Cabinet13:

If this is typical of recent quotes I think they might as well 'call it a day' with FFTPod.

Sorry you got such a bad quote. I suspect you're right - Openreach probably doesn't want to deal with the pain of FTTPoD any more, and it diverts resources away from Fibre First.

However, badly underestimating on the desktop surveys is not a customer-friendly thing to do.

Similar to my quote (similar distance from agg node, existing ducts then two new poles, which from memory are about £500 each):

Labour £4,830.00
Contract Labour £649.00
Civils £924.00
Stores £3,584.00
BT Connection Charge £495.00
Deduction £-1,200.00
Field Survey charge paid £-250.00
Total £9,032.00

I had understood that FTTPoD quotes were more or less at cost. Though the benefit to OR of having someone else pay for their network expansion may well be more than is reflected in the deduction.

Watching the work happen, I think I probably got my money's worth - there were lane closures on a trunk road 5 miles away, contractors with specialist equipment to jet blocked ducts, a number of OR vans doing work over several days.

Edited by shortshrift27 (Wed 17-Feb-21 19:12:58)

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If you read that spreadsheet in detail you will see something seemed to change with the full quotes in early 2019.
In 2018 there was lots of £2k, £3k, £4k build costs.

Since 2019 there have only been 2 final quotes (inc survey) under £7k.
They were £6,875 in Feb 2019 and £4,050 in June 2019.
Since then every single desktop quote below £7k has gone up after the survey.

Every quote now seems to have £4-5k in Labour or £4-5k in civils/civils labour, or both.

Going by the above pattern your final price was very likely be £7-8k or above.

The cynic in me thinks that could have been Openreach reacting to the fact that a large percentage of FTTPoD connections after the pricing structure changed in early 2018 were leveraging the Giagbit voucher scheme funds to offset their build costs...and this was simply a natural reaction to that. Perhaps at the same time curtailing oD demand for them to divert scarce resources to the wider general rollouts.

Edited by Pheasant (Wed 17-Feb-21 21:50:49)

In reply to a post by shortshrift27:

Similar to my quote

Thanks. For completeness, could I ask what your initial desktop estimate was?

I think it's in your marvellous table. "Estimated Build Cost: £33,000.00 ex VAT"

In reply to a post by shortshrift27:

I think it's in your marvellous table. "Estimated Build Cost: £33,000.00 ex VAT"

Oops, I didn't realise it was an older one.

I've sorted the table by date now. It's certainly looking like £8-9K is the general going rate these days.

I just got an email today saying Cerberus had sent my order through to BT.

I can imagine that I will probably get a very similar result as you. In my email it said the Survey would only look at external work, did they come to your property and talk to you or did you catch them surveying?

The Openreach surveyor phoned the previous evening to agree a suitable time, I did not get an email. We met outside the property in the morning, he did not come in but I told where the equipment would go (or in this case would have gone!). Very helpful chap, he told me the route the fibre would take and where the node is, just a shame it was so much more than the Desktop survey.

Edited by Cabinet13 (Thu 18-Feb-21 11:45:21)

In reply to a post by martynp1:

I just got an email today saying Cerberus had sent my order through to BT.

I can imagine that I will probably get a very similar result as you. In my email it said the Survey would only look at external work, did they come to your property and talk to you or did you catch them surveying?

With an extra £3K of "float" in recent oD charges do they even bother coming coming through the door any more?

FTTPoD puts a CBT in the standard place outside the property, and the internal installation is a normal FTTP install. So there's no *need* to come inside until installation time, but typically they will if you ask them to, and will check your proposed ONT location and cable routing makes sense.

It's a nice courtesy, given that you're paying at least £250+VAT, and quite possibly a lot more

I know my survey took place more than 2.5 years ago now, so probably scarcely relevant, especially with current events, but they did a very thorough internal building (cable route) survey. I had the ONT placed in what on reflection is a non-standard location and they were more than happy to oblige...I guess because I was paying.

Maybe that's why my surveyed cost was something like 136% of mu desktop cost at the time 😂

He sounded helpful, it's a shame that the quote came back more than expected but as other says it's probably the norm from now on.

Shame that I live right in-between two residential areas and there is only a small cluster of us (7-8) so there are no current plans for native FTTP and I can't imagine there will be in the future.

I'll post here when I get my survey results, wish me luck!

Good luck!

I had my desk to survey result come back as "in excess of £100K with no other premises passed". I guess i won't be taking it any further

Oooh. That's cruel.

More data for the spreadsheet and fttpod chat...

I live in a 'rural' area so vouchers are available. Copper line broadband ~1.25mbps. 4G ~18Mbps (dedicated 4G router with external high-gain antenna) but can be quite flaky. Certainly won't allow a teams call with any video on at either end.

I had a paid fttpod survey in 2018 which came back as ~14K (already on the spreadsheet here). 7 properties passed + mine. Could claim 2K voucher. Didn't proceed.

In the interim have tried a CFP (~30 properties, unfortunately most (20) of the ones defined by OR are farm storage units which would never have taken a line so no chance to use vouchers for these. They wouldn't remove these from the quote. £130K. Obviously didn't proceed!

Since Covid, working from home, now have a company through which I work, thought I'd give FTTPod another go. Vouchers require minimum 2 properties so applied for a linked order with direct neighbour (mine a business order, his residential). Unable to quote for desktop survey. Bizarre given they've done at least 2 full surveys so should have plenty of data!
Paid for survey, was done the following week.
Cost £18000 for the 2 properties, 7K claimable in rural vouchers & council top up. Paid up this week, fibre here I come.

Cerberus and in particular Bob Hendy have been really helpful.

Ben

In reply to a post by bcsalt:

Cost £18000 for the 2 properties, 7K claimable in rural vouchers & council top up. Paid up this week, fibre here I come.

Yay

Is that quoted price plus VAT or including VAT? I have your previous quote in the spreadsheet as £11,945+VAT (which is just over £14K inc VAT)

Edited by candlerb (Fri 19-Feb-21 10:36:53)

18K Including vat

Difficult to say how much of the jump is from adding a second property and how much is price increase over 2 years (Bob did say that prices had drifted upwards, of course!). The vouchers level it all out though!

Ben

Your spreadsheet is a great piece of data gathering that I'm sure has helped lots of folks!

It did however occur to me that it doesn't take into account any GBVS or other council or vouchers /grants etc that offset the final cost paid. This of course is somewhat confidential, but has a bearing I guess.

I know this might be an obvious answer. But I'm not 100% sure so I'll ask it.

I had requested a FTTPod quote in March 2019. If I was to ask for a quote this March would it come out as the same price?

My final price was £8,935 + VAT.

It was out of my price range. But it's a shame that OR don't produce a distant roadmap that said when areas were going to be done, at least in the next 12 months. Then if a persons area isn't on the list then that £8,935 for me would become more attractive to pay.

As it stands today I've no idea when OR (or anyone else) will get around to bringing FTTP here. If I knew they wouldn't be bringing it here for 2 or 3 years then I'd be willing to pay the £8,935.

Edited by bowdon (Fri 19-Feb-21 13:40:47)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

It did however occur to me that it doesn't take into account any GBVS or other council or vouchers /grants etc that offset the final cost paid.

This is true, but I didn't think it was really relevant to capture whether the user decided to proceed with the installation or not, and if they did, how they paid the bill. That's down to their personal circumstances.

Eligibility for vouchers depends on several things: not just the location, but also whether the end user is residential or business, and what schemes were available at the time.

Little bit of an update, OR Engineer called me today because he was in the area on his way home and thought he'd come take a quick look before he does the Survey on Monday. He was really helpful and he told me from the back of my property it's was just armoured copper cable underground for around 250m across a field to the nearest pole. From there he had no idea and needed to go take a look.

Was a really nice guy, very surprised how fast it was from when I ordered to when the survey is going to be done.

No idea about the Aggregation node yet as he said he wasn't from the area so he would take a proper look on Monday.

In reply to a post by martynp1:

it's was just armoured copper cable underground for around 250m across a field to the nearest pole.

So just that is going to be 250m of new ducting or about 5 new poles

Edited by deleted (Fri 19-Feb-21 14:47:31)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Your spreadsheet is a great piece of data gathering that I'm sure has helped lots of folks!

It did however occur to me that it doesn't take into account any GBVS or other council or vouchers /grants etc that offset the final cost paid. This of course is somewhat confidential, but has a bearing I guess.

How does this have a bearing though?
The surveyor doesn't up the cost to offset the vouchers.
At that point surely OpenReach have no idea a voucher is even being claimed?

If it's across a field, the owner (unless it is the poster) may not be very keen on 5 poles spanning it!

But getting a quote to self-dig the section across the field is likely to bring down the cost substantially.

In reply to a post by shortshrift27:

If it's across a field, the owner (unless it is the poster) may not be very keen on 5 poles spanning it!

But getting a quote to self-dig the section across the field is likely to bring down the cost substantially.

Totally agree but thats a conversation for him with the land owner, a Ditch Witch C24X would easily trench that in a morning and weekend hire would be around £300 + petrol

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Your spreadsheet is a great piece of data gathering that I'm sure has helped lots of folks!

It did however occur to me that it doesn't take into account any GBVS or other council or vouchers /grants etc that offset the final cost paid. This of course is somewhat confidential, but has a bearing I guess.

How does this have a bearing though?
The surveyor doesn't up the cost to offset the vouchers.
At that point surely OpenReach have no idea a voucher is even being claimed?

The bearing it has the is the customers financial decision to proceed or otherwise is based on the total (net) cost, which would include knowledge of the any voucher or grant deductions.

I would argue this drives or has a material impact on the aggregate level of acceptance. So if say net costs increase on average by say 30% would you expect demand to stay the same, increase or decrease?

I think see what you mean.

You want to include if a voucher was claimed or not to see if it had any bearing on those that proceeded with their order vs those that didn't, rather than if it had a direct impact on the actual quotes.

It would definitely be good additional info but it would need the spreadsheet to show which users actually went ahead with their order and which users cancelled after receiving the full survey quote.
Unless I'm reading it wrong that info isn't currently shown on the spreadsheet.

I know, I was just smiling when he was saying it (crying on the inside). Oh well, he's back on Monday and is most likely going to be able to provide more information. I was going to consider it if the price is sub 10k but by the looks of it, I'm going to be in for a rough ride.

In reply to a post by bowdon:

I know this might be an obvious answer. But I'm not 100% sure so I'll ask it.

I had requested a FTTPod quote in March 2019. If I was to ask for a quote this March would it come out as the same price?

Likely not: quotes are only valid for 30 days. This thread has shown a repeat quote going from £12K to £15K in 2 years. So it's a gamble of £250+VAT.

He said it most likely wouldn't be 5 poles and he said poles would be cheaper. Depending on the cost, if I can bring it to a reasonable level by doing the ducting myself I will. I have a couple friends who have the machinery but will have to see!

In reply to a post by martynp1:

He said it most likely wouldn't be 5 poles and he said poles would be cheaper. Depending on the cost, if I can bring it to a reasonable level by doing the ducting myself I will. I have a couple friends who have the machinery but will have to see!

Poles will definitely be cheaper by a fair whack, I think people say about £600 a pop but some will argue its less than that and some will say its more. I personally think you're talking more than £5K for Openreach to do the ducting but thats me doing a quick calculation on the back of a fag packet and I'm being conservative on that estimate. Hopefully someone with more experience will jump in and advise.

Normally its a max fibre span of around 67m on poles, I was told not that long ago that it had increased to 75m (by a contractor who does surveys for Openreach) but would still work on 67m as a worse case scenario.

If you are seriously thinking of doing some of it yourself make sure you discuss that with the surveyor.

Hope all goes well on Monday

Edited by deleted (Fri 19-Feb-21 22:29:05)

Just wondering if you got your final quote from OR?

I saw on Cerberus's customer page that OpenReach had updated it and to "check notes" on Thursday last week, but I am unable to access them and still waiting for an email from the Lady who is handling my case. Hopefully I'll find out this week!

I am very envious
My desk top survey came back as "in excess of £100K with no other premises passed"

More of an update, an escalation case has been raised as they have not received the costs.

The system probably couldn't handle the amount of 0's on the end of the price .

Anyway, I'll hopefully be able to update you all soon!

After a long wait the pricing is in...

The confirmed build charge is £22,634.00 + VAT.

This includes the reduction for the survey and a deduction of £715.00 for premises passed. A breakdown of the charges is below:

Labour
£8,271.00
Contract Labour
£5,553.00
Civils
£4,377.00
Stores
£4,903.00
BT Connection Charge
£495.00
Deduction
£-715.00
Field Survey charge paid
£-250.00
Total
£22,634.00

A bit far from the £5000 odd I was quoted before, will not be proceeding.

Cheers for all the help and input you guys gave!

Really sorry to hear the price for your quote, I do hope that other fibre options will become available to you.

All the best

Really looks like this is the end of FTTPoD - We made the choice to move to a leased line for our business with SSE in the end, i'm glad i didn't waste £250 on a survey seeing some of these results!

In reply to a post by martynp1:

He sounded helpful, it's a shame that the quote came back more than expected but as other says it's probably the norm from now on.

Shame that I live right in-between two residential areas and there is only a small cluster of us (7-8) so there are no current plans for native FTTP and I can't imagine there will be in the future.

I'll post here when I get my survey results, wish me luck!

Any chance of gigabit voucher(s) to lessen the pain or are you considered ‘urban’?

👍 how’s progress on your circuit build?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

👍 how’s progress on your circuit build?

You'll be seeing a thread soon - But Spolier: All very good news indeed

😎 Excellent! Looking forward to the thread 👍

Bad luck Your quote came back in on the same day as eded2020. That was also a higher price than desktop, although nowhere near as high as yours.

We've seen a few desktop quotes of £5,100 or £5,200 recently. Even when the surveyor said it's a straightforward installation, the final price came out at £9K - or in your case much worse.

I think Openreach should stop giving out £5K desktop quotes when there's little chance of the final price matching that.

Unfortunately I was told the voucher scheme is only applicable for group orders. The properties that would gain FTTP from me ordering it, is my only neighbour and no one else, and he isn't interested in it.

I can't say I'm unhappy that I ordered the survey, I was dying to see if it was a possibility but at that price it's not! I am more upset at the original quote vs final price!

I couldn't agree more.

Ahh yes I see that they’ve tweaked the scheme rules, since I did it. Now it’s only group orders that qualify.

FWIW, you *can* have linked orders which aren't direct neighbours. It would require a resurvey though, and the total cost would be slightly higher for installing two CBTs instead of one - assuming the two CBTs are in the footprint of the same splitter.

In your case, you said it was a cluster of 7 or 8 properties, so there still aren't many neighbours available to chip in.

I guess 4G is the next thing to look into.