FTTP roll out entire village except 3 poles (including mine)

There has been a lot of Openreach activity in my village and have been seeing CBTs going up on most of the poles. The Fibre Checker showed I was in build so thought it was only a matter of time before they got to me and I could upgrade my FTTC connection.

However, in last few days the people on the poles with CBTs can now order. A few poles don’t have them and are still shown as being built but addresses on 3 poles including mine are now showing as not planned.

I filled out the ‘neighbour can get but I can’t’ form and was essentially told that although there was infrastructure nearby they have no plans to build to me and suggested FTTP on demand as an option. Is there anything further I can do (other than the expensive FTTPoD)? It seems very strange they would do a whole village apart from 1 1/2 streets. It’s very disappointing and most annoyingly it goes to the houses opposite mine and I can see the pole they are served by from my garden and it’s actually closer to my house than the pole which serves me

I do worry if they are ever going to bother coming back for just 20 or so houses.

It's unfortunate for you, but every build has to stop somewhere.

It may be there was some special difficulty that stopped them doing the last 1 1/2 streets (e.g. lack of ducting across a road).

They will *eventually* come back to fill in the last section, when they want to turn off the copper network in your area. It might be a long time.

Or you might be surprised and they just pop up one week to finish the job.

Sorry can't give you anything more concrete than that. There are people on this forum with access to systems, but they'd need to know the exact area/postcode that you're talking about.

I do suspect it is to do with the road. The last pole in the build is the opposite side of the road to the 3 that have been pushed out from the build plan. It’s a bit frustrating when I am in line of sight of a different pole with FTTP on but what can you do. If anybody can shed some light on what caused the decision to take out of build then please PM me. It won’t change anything but at least I will know the likelihood of it being added back in quickly. The exchange has a Feb 23 stop sell so don’t know if that makes the build being finished sooner more likely?

I've experienced something similar.

My neighbours opposite me and other houses on my side of the road can get FTTP, but 37 houses on my side can't.

I filled in the form on the website and Openreach came to my door and we had a good chat. Basically the other side of the street and most of my side are served by overhead poles. For the 37 houses on my side that can't get FTTP, some bright spark in the 1960s decided it was a good idea to bury the copper phone line under the golf course that we border, witth no ducts invovled. The original plan was to excavate the street to lay new duct and fibre, but that came to £250k and was not surprisingly deemed non-viable.

To their credit, Openreach did look for a solution. They came back to me a few months later with a build plan and told me that they had agreed with the golf course that they could excavate and lay new duct and fibre on the course at a much more reasonable cost. Happy days. Unfortunately over a year on and there has still been no build activity, which is incredibly frustrating as I regularly see my neighbours get their ultrafast installations.

Recently CityFibre have laid duct on the street and it's just awaiting cabling, so with 90 days of my BT contract to go, it does look like I'll be able to get FTTP. However the Openreach thing has been really frustrating. I expect they'll fill in at some point but it doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

Edited by Silvio_Dante (Fri 10-Jun-22 18:08:04)

Stop sell makes no difference: if your property doesn't have FTTP available, then the stop sell doesn't apply to you.

Just by way of an update there were roadworks a bit further up the road earlier this week to clear blocked ducts. I received an email from Openreach today to say we are now back in plan so at the moment it’s looking quite promising.

The main part of our village was done two years ago but Openreach still keep coming back and finishing off other parts that the contractors left.

Its a mystery, there has to be some kind of reason why it makes business sense to almost rollout to a whole street but then suddenly stop a few metres away from completing it, what that is no idea, and I expect you will never be able to find out sadly.

So as a bit of an update my status reverted back to ‘not available’ so I contacted openreach and had a call from someone who, while helpful and nice enough, couldn’t tell me anything beyond we weren’t in plan anymore. However, yesterday out of the blue I am suddenly showing as having FTTP available to order despite no OR activity and no CBT on my pole. Could it be that there is spare capacity on another pole with a CBT (right next to my house) and we have been transferred to that for FTTP planning? Looking at the checker mine and 2 other houses in line of sight of that pole seem to have been added that were showing as not in plan before. Is that something OR do in these situations? I mentioned this in my form but honestly thought that was a non starter.

Edited by PeterhADSL (Sat 01-Oct-22 18:50:57)

If its available to order and you still want to order, then do so. Worst case it will get knocked back, but you may as well try.

OR do serve FTTP to premises from alternate poles, it doesn't have to be the closest pole necessarily that has the serving CBT fitted. Following your chaser, this may have resulted in a correction on their database, to reflect that fact.