Full Fibre Bypassed House

Hi

I have been enjoying Full Fibre from Vodafone CityFibre for the past couple of years @900Mbits synchronus. I have just sold my house, and in looking for a new home, one of my requirements is access today to full fibre. I really cant go back to BT's snail-like FTTC 'broadband'.

The house that I am looking at is on a street where some properties are shown on Vodafones checker as having full fibre 'available' and others have it as 'not available'. The house thats on the market there is in the 'not available' camp.

So, I am trying to find out why, the street is Monoblock paving and there are no pavements - I am thinking that this is why? Does anyone know if its city fibre policy not to bother with Monoblocked streets or perhaps streets with no pavements? The driveway is also monoblock, but I would gladly lift that to get fibre from the street.

So, anyone any experience with full-fibre not-spots, or whether its simply policy to bypass hard to lay streets? Seems to me that if it does not have it now, but all the surrounding properties do then its likely to be in the slow lane for decades to come.

Karen

In reply to a post by veletron:

So, I am trying to find out why, the street is Monoblock paving and there are no pavements - I am thinking that this is why? Does anyone know if its city fibre policy not to bother with Monoblocked streets or perhaps streets with no pavements? The driveway is also monoblock, but I would gladly lift that to get fibre from the street.

CityFibre like most network operators don't have a blanket ban/policy on monoblocking but instead cost each area on a per premises past cost.

Monoblock definitely has an impact on operators rollouts as it's very costly to lift and relay block by block.

Monoblock and private/unadopted roads are a couple of the biggest reasons that streets are missed from rollouts.

It might be worth asking CityFibre but your hunch could well be correct.

To be honest with you Karen, if your requirement for a new home is that it needs to have full fibre then you need to chalk that property off your shortlist. Even if a company promises to install full fibre sadly there are no guarantees it will happen as plans do change.

Bit of desperation TBH in all other respects its ideal, currently my shortlist has just one property on it - that one! So little on the market!

Karen

There must be more to it than it being Monoblock paving in the street as you said some properties have full fibre and others don't. Have you spoken to the owners and see if they can throw any light on why their property didn't get done when the others did.

Not sure what monoblock is, but if it’s similar to block paving then CF are still installing in areas with it as they have just completed a couple of estates in Doncaster that have it.

Edited by gary333 (Tue 27-Apr-21 17:54:31)

Yes, I will go knock on some doors! I think however that the ones that have gotten done had alternative access via a footpath that passes into the opposite end of the estate.

Sounds like I am best avoiding though.

I'd do without mains electricity before going without full-fibre now TBH! I could prob do a deal with a 'HAVE' house to pay for their connection and throw a cable in between the houses (!)

So, I asked a knowledgeable homeowner on this street (first 2 gave me a 'you what?' look!). City Fibre were supposed to have returned at a later date, but didn't.

The reason seems to be the lack of pavements. Comment is that fibre hence has to go along the edge of the boundary of each property, and under folks driveways etc. Too much hassle for City Fibre to organise this by the sounds of it as it needs the OK from every resident.

I am still considering the house as its ideal in all other respects, If I get it I'll end up running a local broadband scheme to self-install ducting.

Years ago in the days of Dialup, I did similar in Dunblane but obviously that was just a website and door2door getting folks to register interest.

If all else fails then I'll cough up for someone else to get 900Mbits for free 50M away where there is pavement and Tee off of it with a 60GHz ubiquity GigaBridge!

Anyone care to state real world sync throughput of ubiquities 5GHz kit?

Karen

I used a couple of Ubiquiti Loco M5s for a link to my garden office (~50m) for a year or so. Worked fine, but I only had ADSL Max, so not really a good test of bandwidth. It wasn't really any different to the ethernet I now use other than an extra ms or so on the latency.

TBH honest, if that's the ONLY thing that's stopping you then that's mental I'm sure FTTP will be there soon and whilst I totally get the fact that your so used to the speed (like driving a car with no RTTI), unless your downloading and uploading huge files each day, you're day to day household streaming will be fine until you get FTTP (which will happen at some point!).