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!).

It doesn’t sound like you’re that far along the purchase process, but relevant property searches should reveal the nature of the arrangements of the road and whether it is a private road or otherwise unadopted. There may be wayleave issues, which could cause a carrier to put it in the too hard basket.

Yup, it is the only thing that's stopping me. If I could guarantee that it would happen in the next couple years then that would be fine, but I can't. I spoke to city fibre and the issue is having to get agreement from 20-odd householders to dig up their front gardens and driveways. I chapped on a few doors yesterday some folks up for it, some not. Those that wanted it frustrated by the unwillingness of those upstream to have their gardens dug up!

It could be decades before this got full fibre, so I would ask you if you would be happy with the 500Kdown/256K up that you had 20 years ago TODAY. I suspect most folks would not, moving forward that's a possible outcome for this estate.

Pretty hard to go from 2 years @ 900/900 back down to 30/8 (at best!)

Going forward slow internet connectivity will be affecting house prices due to folks like me ruling houses that are in the slow lane out.

Good news is that somewhere else has just come up!

Karen

Spoke to CityFibre this morning, due to lack of pavements they need to run it along the boundary of each property, some home owners have objected to having a hole dug and driveway re-laid, and CF unwilling to use a mole for the conduit. Bit of a stale-mate and CF wont do anything until all homeowners are on board.

Street has been adopted, I have the land registry print for it. I have not offered yet (Its offers over here in Scotland), and everywhere is going to a closing date. Somewhere else has come up with less connectivity hassles as well. Slow-Lane house is the better house for the same cash though!

Karen

In reply to a post by veletron:

Going forward slow internet connectivity will be affecting house prices due to folks like me ruling houses that are in the slow lane out.

I agree, there is already some rough research which I believe found the impact to be ~£1500 on the average property. I can't remember whether this was the difference between gigabit and ADSL, or gigabit and FTTC.

If you consider meaningless surveys as "research", then you're probably think of this one.

In reply to a post by veletron:

Slow-Lane house is the better house for the same cash though!

But the reason why that its more physical property for the money, is precisely the same reason why you are put off it - a significant number of people won't move to places without good internet any more.

E.g. https://www.idealhome.co.uk/news/value-broadband-add...

Potential buyers say they would only buy a property with poor broadband if it came with a 16 per cent discount. However, half of the buyers said they would avoid an area with slow speeds completely.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

If you consider meaningless surveys as "research", then you're probably think of this one.

It's not a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trial, and I wouldn't call it *good* research, but it is better than nothing.

The question asked was

How much more, if anything, are you/would you be willing to pay for a home that had full fibre broadband?

and £1514 was the mean from 2026 responses.

It's a badly written question because it doesn't state what connectivity would be there were it not for the full fibre broadband. If the other option was 'not even dial-up', then the answer should really be many hundreds of thousands of pounds. So it's likely most people were thinking of FTTC or Virgin in making their comparison.

And yes, it should try to determine whether the respondents are likely homebuyers, and express the additional value as a percentage of that respondent's likely property budget, and do all kinds of clever things.

I think most major developers have now noticed that good communications infrastructure, such as the presence of both Openreach FTTP and an altnet adds value. It is the 21st-century version of the communal Sky dish or CATV operator, probably even more.

I don't think it's meaningful at all.

Firstly, you're asking people *hypothetically* what they might do. If you actually put them in that situation, where they had a choice of house A without fibre and the identical house A with fibre for £X extra and they had to get their chequebook out, then the results could be very different.

Secondly, such a situation is unlikely to occur in practice, where you can actually pay extra for fibre (I guess FTTPoD is the closest in reality). More likely, they will be comparing house A at £X without fibre versus house B at £Y with fibre, and the presence of fibre will be one of many factors weighing in the comparison.

If nothing else, the median would have been much more interesting than the mean.

I agree that it's all hypothetical. And the mechanism for good connectivity raising prices is not so much that buyer A will offer £1500 more for it, but that buyer A will make an offer at all if he has decided fibre is essential.

Buyer B is happy with ADSL (many are) and is interested in the house. If there is no fibre, he offers £5k under the asking price, is the only qualified purchaser and his offer is accepted. If there is fibre, buyer A also makes an offer and the price could quite easily end up at £5k over without anyone really batting an eyelid - a £10k increase.

To do it properly you'd want to figure out what proportion of purchasers are As and what are Bs, and what steps there were in between. How is that even measured? And data would be needed on the average number of purchasers interested in the average property, and how much multiple interested parties affects the price - data which would likely be outdated as soon as one had collected it as market confidence bounces up and down.

In short, yes it's an imperfect way of tackling the question, and yes, I'd like to see more than just the mean. If I worked for a developer, though, I'd probably give up on quantifying it once I realised that the cost to most major developments of engaging with an altnet is minimal for the potential return.

The meaning to take from that survey, in my humble opinion, is that connectivity concerns in property purchases are mainstream now, not just the preserve of those of us that hang out here.

Edited by ft247 (Thu 29-Apr-21 23:15:57)

In reply to a post by veletron:

Spoke to CityFibre this morning, ... Bit of a stale-mate and CF wont do anything until all homeowners are on board.

...
Slow-Lane house is the better house for the same cash though!

In that situation it could months or years before everyone’s happy / unilaterally agrees. So if the fibre connection is a major box tick, simply move on.

These off topic posts are not helping the OP

Moot point now anyway as it sold at the end of the 1st day of viewings on Wednesday. I heard on the grapevine that 30 folks were shown around and that it went 25K over the HR value.

Evidently some folks are not bothered by glacial broadband - or they didn't to any pre-offer research(!)

Anyway a relief there is another house on that floats my boat without the fibre issues. Offered on this so we shall see, its very very tatty, but not enough profit in it for a developer so I hope that puts other folks off!

Karen

All the best Karen, hope things work out.