Cost of FTTP rural instalation

Can anyone give some input/examples of likely cost of FTTP in a semi-rural location? Just outside a town (2km to a new BT manhole & 3lm to an existing fttc green cabinet) with a FTTC exchange, but the new BT USO scheme apparently is fulfilled by installing fttp rather than fttc!
I appreciate that every location will be different, but some baldpark examples of eg what it costs to run fibre along a grass verge, strung on existing overhead poles, what does the final x metres down a house drive cost etc, to get a general idea?
Thanks

Edited by deleted (Mon 24-Jan-22 13:50:48)

That's not really possible, so I'm afraid you'll have to wait until your USO quote comes back.

Firstly, the distance to cabinet is not useful; distance to fibre aggregation node is what you need. However the locations of fibre aggregation nodes are not published!

Secondly, there are no standard price-per-metre rates for these things in Openreach. What comes back is what comes back. The costing model is completely opaque, with aggregate line items for "civils" and "stores".

The biggest factor, which is in your favour, is the demand aggregation - this assumes that 70% of the properties to be covered by the install will take it up. For example, if your FTTP CBT will serve a cluster of 10 USO-eligible properties, then it's assumed that 7 of them will take service, so BT's contribution will be 7 x £3,400. That may make it completely free, or it may still leave a huge excess. See BT's report here.

Therefore I could guess "free to £30K", but that doesn't help you much. And even the upper limit of that is not guaranteed. It depends hugely on what the surveyor says needs to be done.

there are a number of misconception in your ask

USO is determined either as 4G or FTTP - your premise will have been mapped and a technology type allocated if a USO is requested so dont ever assume its always FTTP

the FTTC cabinet is an irrelevance in any FTTP deployment as you need to come back the nearest aggregation node and find a path back to the headend (ps aggregation node might be a number of KM back in to the network or it might ber round the corner -- FTTP is also about how you get to your actual premise ie is is ducted / is it overhead are there extensive no duct issues -- there is no simple answer to your question as any number of the above factors could impact the cost of providing an FTTP service . there is no one who can give you an estimate of this - the only estimate you will get is if you ask for a USO quote (assuming you are getting less than 10 meg now)

Edited by Fastman3 (Mon 24-Jan-22 15:31:55)

Using those hypothetical figures I unfortunately can't see ~24k of demand-based contribution making a huge dent in the final price. 3km is a pretty significant distance.

Given that we have no idea how many properties are in the cluster (10 was just an example I gave), nor how far they are from an aggregation node, then we don't really have a clue.

My FTTPoD (ordered in 2018) was about 600m line-of-sight, 1.3km cable route from the aggregation node, and included 34m of new dig but was otherwise all existing ducts. The cost was £6600+VAT, although the prices for FTTPoD appear to have gone up considerably since then - and it's in BT's interest to over-quote rather than under-quote for USO.

An important point was raised that the solution offered is likely to be 4G (unless in a 4G not-spot).

Out of interest what does the BT USO checker below say for your property?

BT USO Checker

Checker says eligible for upgrade, BT has confirmed that & there is no 4g signal available in the area, so will have to await costings - the various comments & input have been useful thanks.

As others have mentioned the costs between different jobs can vary massively.

The best example I can think of is:
Pulling fibre through an unblocked duct is relatively cheap with the main cost being the labour involved.
If the ducts are full/damaged or there's no ducting at all (some cable are direct buried) then digging on a carriageway costs £112 per metre last time I checked. Then there's labour, traffic management and additional civilis charges on top.
So 100m would add over £11,200 to the quote.

That's why an install that's 2km from an aggregation node can be cheaper than an install that's only a few hundred meters from the agg node. Pricing varies considerably and costs will only be known after a full survey has been carried out.

ConsumersFriend

If you can give us a postcode, you MAY get a better view. If as you say there is no 4G coverage that only leaves FTTP as a USO method. This will then depend on how many properties there are. A single property could be very expensive ( anything over £3400 you will be expected to pay). A small estate of 10-20 houses may cost in.

Your location makes a difference in that Small and semi rural differ depending on where you are. A small English town is around 20k pop upwards with scattered surrounding pockets, a small Welsh or Scottish town can be only 1000 pop with individual houses scattered around.

Will update once we see the USO costs - what hasn't been mentioned in any of the responses is the advances BTOR have made in cable installation that greatly reduces costs in semi-rural/rural locations (ie those not needing substantial road closures & hefty civils costs) including the use of the likes of ditch-witches & armoured fibre cabling to allow rapid deployment along verges without needing ducting.

Not mentioned because there's no guarantee that they'll use it. If they decide that traditional ducting is the best long-term solution in your particular area, then that's what they'll specify. Equally, if there are existing poles then they might just string along those.

Be aware that fibre does not necessarily follow the path of copper. Copper goes to the local exchange; fibre goes to a fibre aggregation node and from there to the nearest large "head end" exchange, which may well be in the opposite direction.

In any case, good luck with the quote, and let us know how it comes back!

Will do, thanks. Clearly not a simple "menu price" issue!!!!

In reply to a post by ConsumersFriend:

Will update once we see the USO costs - what hasn't been mentioned in any of the responses is the advances BTOR have made in cable installation that greatly reduces costs in semi-rural/rural locations (ie those not needing substantial road closures & hefty civils costs) including the use of the likes of ditch-witches & armoured fibre cabling to allow rapid deployment along verges without needing ducting.

If anyone is going to use a Ditch Witch (something like a C24X) then they would be putting in ducting as direct in ground cabling really is not the way to go these days.

john

really unhelpful as indicating cost figures bear no resemble to the actual figures that might be presented - unless you think openreach / BT work for free

these figures are unhelpful , ,misleading , not context and dont bear any resemblence -- all they do is provide a mis conception to the asker which he than has to try and work out once the real figure has landed

Cool beans

In reply to a post by Fastman3:

john

really unhelpful as indicating cost figures bear no resemble to the actual figures that might be presented - unless you think openreach / BT work for free

these figures are unhelpful , ,misleading , not context and dont bear any resemblence -- all they do is provide a mis conception to the asker which he than has to try and work out once the real figure has landed

I personally found John's post informative as usual and as he said "costs will only be known after a full survey has been carried out"

For what seems like a similar installation ( if there ever is such a thing) in a rural area I had a desk top quote described as well north of £100K all down to me as we are quite remote and there are no other properties "passed"

In reply to a post by crule:

For what seems like a similar installation ( if there ever is such a thing) in a rural area I had a desk top quote described as well north of £100K all down to me as we are quite remote and there are no other properties "passed"

Sorry to hear that.

In reply to a post by crule:

For what seems like a similar installation ( if there ever is such a thing) in a rural area I had a desk top quote described as well north of £100K all down to me as we are quite remote and there are no other properties "passed"

Mine didn't even have one as, it needed a field survey. Which now going down the cfp route ....

Yes, I likewise found John's post to be informative - frankly we need more transparency as to the costs of broadband especially as there are now so many taxpayer funded schemes making contributions towards the push to expand fibre, so my thanks to John for his useful input.