Community Fibre Underground

I noticed Community Fibre have been installing fibre down a street that my house is just off of. According to planning documents they installed a "CFL 110 chamber" undergorund near the BT cabinets that serve my house.

Since my street is private land I was wondering how Community Fibre layout their infrastructure i.e. would they need to build anything on my private street which, could pose a problem.

I was looking around with the thinkbroadband map and noticed that community fibre only seems to be available to blocks of flats or streets served by telegraph poles which my area isn't. Community Fibre do seem to talk about installing via underground ducts but I can't seem to find any evidence of this actually happening.

If your street is truly private / unadopted then yes CF will need permission from the landowner(s) to install their cabling and any necessary chambers etc.

This permission will typically be a way-leave agreement between CF and the landowner.

Do you know who the “owner*” of the street is and if they have been approached? This is typically what delays or stops dead any network build. Getting this in place is imperative before they’ll consider building to your property.

Edited by Pheasant (Sat 13-May-23 07:28:06)

In reply to a post by AJHB:

I was looking around with the thinkbroadband map and noticed that community fibre only seems to be available to blocks of flats or streets served by telegraph poles which my area isn't.

That's not the case. Community Fibre definitely have underground deployments.

Community Fibre makes extensive use of Openreach PIA product (physical infrastructure access) meaning they pay for access to Openreach's ducts and poles.

They have lots of deployments that are fully underground using Openreach ducts with the only visible indication of their network is where they have installed their own chambers that feed off the existing Openreach ducts.

If Openreach already have a wayleave for your private road this would also cover CF to feed their fibre in the ducts but I would expect any new/additional chambers to take a wayleave.

Edited by j0hn83 (Sat 13-May-23 12:10:31)

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If Openreach already have a wayleave for your private road this would also cover CF to feed their fibre in the ducts

It doesn't.

Has that been tested by anybody? The wayleave agreements I've seen are not precisely worded and I argued that Openreach replacing a copper cable with FTTP in an office building was network maintenance covered by the permissions that were already in place. If wayleaves for ducts just refer to "the network" and there's language about Openreach being able to appoint third parties to maintain and improve it then you could argue PIA is covered by that.

I would guess it's different if you're talking about a route across a field on poles but I can't think anybody living on a private road is going come running out to stop Community Fibre installing fibre into ducts. I certainly never had Lit Fibre ask about wayleaves on my road to do PIA, and if they had asked I would have lied to them anyway rather than having the entire thing tangled up in lawyers and potentially getting the build cancelled.

In reply to a post by jpm:

Has that been tested by anybody?

Netomnia and CityFibre right here.

What I really would like to know is how Community Fibre does ducted installs. How localised does the build have to be beyond just laying fibres through existing openreach ducts? They may not need a wayleave at all or they may just skip my street.

Unfortunately I still can't find a single example of Community fibre doing ducted installs; everyware I've seen community fibre seem to have telegraph poles or be a block of flats. Though there does seem to be evidence of infrastucture being built that could only be for ducted installs.