OpenReach - Bad Management or Profiteering?

I am genuinely not sure if it deliberate or simple incompetence from OR - Your voews appreciated!

In my cul-de-sac, OR have run fibre past my house to the end of the cul-de-sac (150m) and provided full FTTP to 11 out of 33 properties allegedly because they were "A Lot further from the Cab and unable to get 30Mbps" - OR have also claimed this was "Funded by council" - which it categorically was not.

Now, I am told by OR that "Fibre is not in my area" and/or "There are no plans to upgrade your address"

When I enquired via Zen, they were told:

"I can see that your customer was in a plan to bring fibre broadband to your area but the plan has now been cancelled. Due to the complex nature of the network, our plans occasionally change. For a variety of reasons, this can cause some areas to be removed from their expected fibre rollout.

If you want to bring fibre to your property sooner there are a few options you could look into.

Community Fibre Partnership, Community Fibre Partnerships are for areas which can’t get fibre broadband, aren’t included in our plans to expand the fibre network or are too far away from a fibre cabinet to get faster speeds. We split the costs of an upgrade between us and your local community, so we cover some of the costs and the community clubs together to fund the rest. The CFP team will also explore any voucher schemes which could help with the cost."

So, My question...

Do OpenReach actually think the best way to roll out country wide FTTP is to do it piecemeal, revisiting each street multiple times at obviously increased cost and time and effort?

Or is there something more underhand going on? - I have repeatedly been told to "Go find funding" if I want FTTP - either individually or as a group effort here. The Fibre is already going past my drive, but do we think that will be taken into account if we get funding, or will OR quote for the whole fibre installation process back to the cab?

There is no way that visiting a street with only 33 properties multiple times to provide FTTP is the most cost effective way to provide the service, unless OR are somehow profiting from doing it this way. and that is taking money from us individuals and the government to pay for far more work that is actually required, over a longer time frame and serving no ones interest apart from OpenReach and their shareholders.

Feel free to check addresses in CV12 0GR and look at the speeds and FTTP availability, Properties 21 and 23-43 (11 properties with gaps in numbering) have FTTP options, while the rest of us are left out in the cold.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour from OR?

My opinion is that they should be held accountable for their actions and mismanagement of the network, which is to the disadvantage of the country as a whole.

In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

OR have also claimed this was "Funded by council" - which it categorically was not.

How do you know that? Have you spoken to your local BDUK representative?

In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

There is no way that visiting a street with only 33 properties multiple times to provide FTTP is the most cost effective way to provide the service, unless OR are somehow profiting from doing it this way.

Maybe not, but it would make sense if BDUK had paid them to provide a faster service to those specific properties only, e.g. to meet a 24Mbps or 30Mbps "superfast" definition. It would also be the case if one of those properties ordered FTTP on Demand, and the other properties were covered by the same CBT.

I looked at broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com and CV12 0GR; number 33 has a predicted FTTC speed range 28.5-45.7. At first glance it seems unlikely that would trigger a BDUK upgrade, but FTTPoD remains a possibility.

FTTPoD is when an individual or business pays a *large* amount of money - typically £8K+VAT or more - to get FTTP installed to their property when it's not in current OR rollout plans.

In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

and that is taking money from us individuals and the government to pay for far more work that is actually required, over a longer time frame and serving no ones interest apart from OpenReach and their shareholders.

If you agree that it serves the interest of "OpenReach and their shareholders" to work this way, then by definition that's the most commercially-viable solution.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour from OR?

My opinion is that they should be held accountable for their actions and mismanagement of the network, which is to the disadvantage of the country as a whole.

Every single day.
All rollouts need to end somewhere.

If they completed your whole street and stopped there then the next street would make the same complaint.

It isn't mismanagement. They will have installed enough capacity to return at a later date and do the other properties.

They have a cost per premises passed target they want to meet. It could be that the other properties were over that figure.

It could well have been a BDUK funded project to increase the speeds of only some homes. That's very common.

It could also have been an FTTPoD order, paid for by a single resident on the street. If that were the case then the normal practice is for only a single Distribution Point (pole or underground chamber) to be enabled. Never the whole street.

Either way what you have described is normal. It seems incompetent to the average Joe but when you know the technology, industry, costs, regulation etc then the reasons for suddenly stopping at a point make sense.
As above they need to stop somewhere.

Edited by j0hn83 (Fri 12-Nov-21 13:58:39)

How do you know that there was no funding made available to the properties that couldn't get superfast speeds before? The most likely explanation is that it was installed as part of a public sector contract that only listed certain premises on it.

I have multiple emails from the local council department who have provided funding to other areas confirming:

My colleagues who work on the data side of things both went through the data that we have at our disposal yesterday and agreed that we have done nothing in that area. The Exhall 5 cabinet appears to have been upgraded by Openreach as part of their own commercial deployment programme. It was not upgraded by the CSW Broadband Project. 11 properties have since been upgraded to FTTP. We have checked / gone back through the data that we have and we are confident that it wasn't done by the CSW Broadband Project.

We have been in touch with a couple of colleagues from Openreach who have also stated that it wasn't through the CSW Broadband Project.

I should probably add that OR have been pretty much all over the whole estate around here putting FTTP to the majority of roads. This was not a quick visit just to the end of the cul-de-sac.

If a whole area is part of a roll-out then it makes sense to flood that area as a whole - not to come back again and again.

Two weeks ago, OR were back at the end of the road and according to the OR engineer, they were "Doing FTTP for another 2 properties".. This required three OR vans with 2 engineers in each for the whole day - the same as managed 11 properties in a day last time.

If you would like to again justify how that is a cost effective way to upgrade the whole country, I am keen to hear your argument!

It's possible that somebody did a community funded build and only put in the slow properties. Have you asked around?

OR say the properties were upgraded to FTTP "Because they could not get 30Mbps"

This is right at the bottom of the impacted speed range for the properties that have been upgraded.

Speaking to some of the residents, they say they had issues with their FTTC dropping out and being unreliable, and the problem remains now they are on FTTP.

OR have been running fibre all around this estate during the last year - my point is, that to part flood an estate and then tell the rest to pay up or wait years and see if we get FTTP eventually is simply very inefficient, and I am left wondering if OR are counting 22 properties that cannot order FTTP in their "Properties passed by FTTP" statistics, because they have gone right past here?

In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

OR say the properties were upgraded to FTTP "Because they could not get 30Mbps"

This has all the hallmarks of a BDUK rollout including the OR comment above, you won't be the first person to find out BDUK don't know their [censored] from their elbow.

Edited by deleted (Fri 12-Nov-21 14:50:27)

Following the information here:

https://www.telcotitans.com/btwatch/openreach-off-th...

Where BT are aiming to achieve a cost of £250 per property passed for FTTP, I don't see how what I am seeing around here makes sense unless they are working on huge contributions from those left out of the FTTP rollout..

Oh wait - that does seem to be what they are doing...