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I wasn't sure i was ever going to be able to post in this section but over the last couple of days I’ve had the interesting experience of watching Openreach install a new fibre up the lane while trying to contain my excitement.
As a company they get a fair bit of stick but having seen the resource involved for the job I understand the costs and time frame a bit better now so thought I’d share.
Quick bit of background for those that don’t visit the Not Spot section - My house is on the end of a bit of copper that has been patched so many times that the best they could offer for ADSL2 was a theoretical 2Mbit/s. VDSL isn’t an option despite my neighbour that shares the same copper cable going down the lane being able to get it. (never did get an explanation for that one). The house opposite them had fibre run to it last year when they rolled out the rest of the village but that is fed from the opposite direction as we are right on the boundary between to exchange areas. My guess is someone drew up the plan based on houses connected to that exchange without looking for other houses that would be quick wins and as every project has to have a limit that is fair enough.
I installed a 4G router with a Vodafone SIM as a temporary measure while enquiring about getting something better from Openreach. I ended up going down the USO route which I thought was going to get me VDSL but for some reason they couldn't arrange that and as luckily I’m in a EE blackspot that wasn’t an option either so they kindly gave me a price for installing FTTP which started off at £80,000 and then went up to £112,500 after they had a better think about it. Needless to say that I considered that a little out of my budget so politely declined.
Around the start of the year I put in my quarterly form to Openreach saying I’d like fibre in the future and the reply came back to say the computer said I could have it. After I picked myself up off the floor I stuck and order in quick and about a week later two chaps from Kelly’s turned up to do the install. We hit a small problem at that point when they asked if I knew where the duct was I pointed them to the one about 150m up the road. They went off to raise some more jobs on the system as this didn’t match what they had been told and I assumed it would get filed in the too hard / expensive pile.
Moving forward 7 months to the good bit and this week the road has been closed for two days while they ran 650m of fibre down to the bottom of the lane. This required at least 4 vans, 2 cherry pickers, 2 traffic management vans and a tree cutting team but I now have a 8 port CBT mounted to the pole outside my house and a 38 core fibre feeding it which seems a little over engineered to me! I’m delighted that they have done the work and I’m looking forward to getting my service activated but I have a nagging feeling that it might not have been the best use of their time and resources for just one customer.
The FTTPoD quote was well over the top but I’d be interested to see the bill for the job as 12 days of labour + materials + configuring the network + contractors is almost certainly more than they will ever earn back off of the install and I’m genuinely surprised it ever got signed off.
Now I just need to find a suitable place for the ONT as the current master socket is in the middle of the house which might be pushing my luck unless I get some really nice biscuits in and get the router built ready.
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