Is there any chance of a close CBT ever making a difference

I live in a semi-rural location in Essex, in a group of six houses that have constantly degrading* FTTC (down to about 15 down and 1.5 up now, used to be 30/5) and no prospect of FTTP any time soon.

We are frustratingly close to fibre on all sides, the 10,000 person town just 500 metres across the fields from us is currently getting fibre to the whole town, via a local council owned company. The next group of houses along the road from us got FTTP last year (they had even worse ADSL/FTTC, some on exchange only lines).

That FTTP install along the road from us means that there is a completely empty CBT just 520 metres away from us.

I did a FTTPoD survey recently to see what the costs would be, it came in at £10,000 + VAT. Unfortunately even with vouchers that is not something my neighbours are likely to be interested in weighing in on.

That FTTP install was both EO lines and lines on a different cabinet than we are on. I'm 99% sure there are no OpenReach ducts between the CBT and us (and there are no poles), our lines go via poles/ducts the opposite way down the road.

So, my question is, will the fact that the FTTP install happened just down the road ever mean that the FTTPoD costs come down or is that likely no help to us at all ?

I am on Starlink at the moment, but would love to be able to switch to fibre one day...

* several of us have spent many, many engineer visits over 8 years trying to get them to improve the degraded cabling, with limited success

Are you able to supply a postcode?

I did a FTTPoD survey recently to see what the costs would be, it came in at £10,000 + VAT. Unfortunately even with vouchers that is not something my neighbours are likely to be interested in weighing in on.

Was it a desktop quote or paid an ISP like Cerberus to obtain a firm/proper quote?

Within the last 6 months by any chance - as the FTTP on Demand near network commercial trial- ran from 1 December 2021 to 31 May 2022.

May have reduced costs if you were in scope.

So, my question is, will the fact that the FTTP install happened just down the road ever mean that the FTTPoD costs come down or is that likely no help to us at all ?

You may find that once all that 'low hanging fruit' has been picked, not up the road in Tiptree, but by Openreach, that they may return to complete "in-fill" properties such as yours - which are costlier to provision for/hence lower down on their priority list.

Edited by Pheasant (Fri 22-Jul-22 21:59:39)

It was with Cerberus, within the trial period.

I talked to the surveyor about the nearby CBT, but he didn’t seem at all interested and as far as I could tell all he wanted to do was survey the route following back our phone line in the direction of the landline routing.

Although that said, the properties listed as passed on the build quote are the five between us and the unused CBT, rather than the one property between us and the cabinet.

CO7 7HA

Although that said, the properties listed as passed on the build quote are the five between us and the unused CBT, rather than the one property between us and the cabinet.

In that case the direction to the serving/planned splitter, etc would be in the direction of the last (unused) CBT - so if the CBT was 520m from you the splitter would be further away and thus you could safely say you were out of scope of the trial (500m distance to splitter / Ag Node) unfortunately. Close but no cigar.

I mean you could lobby and lean on the OR exec. complaints team via the CEO office.

They are known to make things shift even though it may take some time.

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

That FTTP install was both EO lines and lines on a different cabinet than we are on. I'm 99% sure there are no OpenReach ducts between the CBT and us (and there are no poles), our lines go via poles/ducts the opposite way down the road.

AFAIK they will follow existing infrastructure routes. From the limited plans I have access to I suspect the issue is that the two poles serving the premises in your postcode are fed with a directly buried cable going west back to crossroads by the football club, connecting to a duct along Elmstead Road. It would need a fair amount of civils works with road restrictions to run fibre.

There doesn't appear to be anything going south towards the plant hire company. There is a duct coming up Keelars Lane which then proceeds east, as this already had fibre for the mobile masts adding more for that CBT may not have been that expensive (going back to the low-hanging fruit comment).

Given your should have good coverage from all mobile operators that would have been a less expensive option than Starlink until fibre does appear.

BDUK (Superfast Essex) currently say for that postcode

Broadband available or planned by a Commercial operator

and a previous source from March 2021 says

Gigabit broadband infrastructure available or planned, although this information has been judged as potentially being at risk.

so I would contact them to find out more as the next block of houses (CO7 7EP) got upgraded to FTTP by them.

Thanks for that detail, the fact that the cable back to Elmstead Road is direct buried I guess explains OpenReach's reluctance to really fix our FTTC problems.

Over the years they've replaced all the easy bits, they ran a (6 pair ?) cable direct from the pole over the road into our kitchen for example, to avoid the dodgy large number pair drop that was there before (though four of the other houses still have to use that failing larger cable on whichever pairs are best). And they rebuilt the box at the end of the buried section which was flooding regularly.

And they've identified that there are faults along the buried section. But the buried section is 450 metres and under an extremely overgrown mature sort of a hedge (more like a series of closely packed trees). With almost no verge, on a single carriage way 60 limit road.

Doing any work along that road edge would be a nightmare and it only serves our six houses. I only got the drop wire over the road added in the end by OpenReach engineers bending the rules/calling in some favours on a quiet Sunday to get it installed without any traffic control (this was some years ago now).

And yes LTE in theory is the answer, we have a handy Three/EE tower only 1,500 metres away. And that is what we swapped to after giving up on expensive bonded FTTC. With a Mikrotik high gain antenna we were getting a very stable 80 down, 40 up. That worked well for about three years.

Unfortunately that all fell apart during COVID. Clearly a lot of people working from home started using mobile for their broadband. During the evening streaming period the downstream speeds were down low enough that 4K HDR streaming was no longer an option and even HD streaming had loads of buffering and low quality fallbacks. When we moved to Starlink last year, EE was still very poor in the evenings.

So Starlink is expensive (though not more so than bonded FTTC was) and not as reliable as FTTC/FTTP/LTE, but at the moment it is our only real option for a modern Internet connection.

I tried contacting them in March 2021. Their reply was that we didn't get FTTP from them because we had over 30 Mbps (in reality we never did have over 30 Mbps and the neighbours are struggling to hit 15 now). And that we weren't eligible for anything now, because a commercial provider (County Broadband) has said they are thinking about it...

Which sounds like a load of nonsense. County Broadband say "We are currently canvassing for support for services in this area". It seems extremely unlikely that they are suddenly going to decide to run fibre to six random house that are surrounded by other fibre that isn't theirs.

I guess I could try contacting them again.

Does having Starlink in place now weaken our case though ?

From Openreach’s data, I can see that whilst technically you should be able to achieve 32 Mbps download speeds, I agree that in practice this may unlikely be the case.

For the addresses that received an FTTP upgrade within the Superfast Essex programme, at the time the contract was agreed upon, had download speeds below 30 Mbps. Because your addresses had download speeds of 30 Mbps or above at contract signature, due to State Aid laws you could not be included within the Superfast Essex programme.

Over the last four years, we’ve carried out an open market review and public consultations to find out which areas in Essex already have access to superfast broadband or are in commercial plans to receive a service. This has helped us to identify properties that are not included in any plans and are therefore eligible for investment in future phases of the Superfast Essex programme.

If an operator tells us they already provide a property with fibre broadband, or have commercial plans to, this address cannot be included in the Superfast Essex programme. This is due to State Aid rules for broadband, which say that we’re legally unable to invest public funding where commercial broadband coverage is already available or planned to be made available.

However, we’ve had a look into your enquiry further and can see that there are additional broadband upgrade works planned at your property, which sit outside of the Superfast Essex programme.

This is because the operator County Broadband has told us that it has commercial (non-state funded) plans to provide you with access to a broadband service, or that a service is already available to you.

To find out if a service is already available to you, visit County Broadband’s website. If it is, you won’t be automatically connected so you’ll need to ask a broadband provider to upgrade your service to access faster speeds. A list of some of the broadband service providers available in Essex can be found on our website.

If County Broadband’s website says fibre is coming but is not yet available, you can register to receive updates on their website: https://countybroadband.co.uk/

If you believe the information provided on our website or by commercial operators to be inaccurate, please complete our broadband survey. We’re currently running the survey to help us shape future broadband rollouts across Essex.