Surprise hole in the road - Netomnia?

Long story short: I live in a town with more or less full fibre coverage from both Openreach and Virgin...apart from the one estate where I live, which has been largely bypassed by both. In recent months, Openreach have been progressing very very slowly around the place, but it's really just doing the odd pole here and there with no seeming plan for doing the many streets that have still not been covered. Last month, however, fibre connection units appeared on the top of a couple of random poles near my house (not mine, sadly), so I was rather hoping that the ETA would now be measured in months rather than years...

And then, yesterday, out of the blue a couple of holes appeared more or less directly outside of my house which have barriers labelled up as "Netomnia", which a quick search showed is the wholesale bit of YouFibre. This is very surprising as, to the best of my knowledge, they don't have any deployments within 20 miles of here.

Any other possible explanations here? Could Openreach have outsourced to Netomnia for the install on our street? This seems unlikely as Netomnia / YouFibre appear to be pretty independent, albeit sometimes using Openreach ducts to simplify their deployments. It would be excellent if we did have Youfibre as I think their service is probably superior to OR's offerings (e.g. symmetric connections and cheaper too!) and I suspect we'll also get OR eventually, so it's always good to have options.

Interested in other people's thoughts and experience...and also if they have any idea how long it normally takes from holes in the road to being able to order?

Netomnia only install their own network. They don't do work for others.

Enter your address on the Netomnia availability checker

They made a lot of fuss about coming to my town, then very quietly dropped their plans.
When I posted a comment about this 1 of their senior staff members (guy called Jeremy) jumped in to defend them (twice) with excuses about the exchange being full, rolling out from a neighbouring exchange and that they were still coming.
Over a year later I emailed them and got a response...

"We are having to replan this area due to unforeseen issues to connect the surrounding properties.

This will need to be reviewed and replanned by our build team, unfortunately the area is on hold until we can do this.

Due to the scale of our build, we cannot place a timeline on when we will be able to review your area. Unfortunately, I do have to advise that it could be months or years."

Load of nonsense. Surrounding properties? They dropped plans for about 20,000 homes by the looks of it. No transparency at all.

Yes I'm bitter 😂

Haha, yes after years of dealing with OR, I can quite understand this!

The availability checker does report "coming soon", but for pretty much the whole town, so taking it with a pinch of salt. That said, they're outside fighting to clear Openreach conduits as we speak, so I think we've passed the point of being cancelled (I hope!)

Oddly, as far as fanfare it's the exact opposite here - the hole in the ground was the first time I'd heard of them or their plans!

In reply to a post by daern:

Haha, yes after years of dealing with OR, I can quite understand this!

The availability checker does report "coming soon", but for pretty much the whole town, so taking it with a pinch of salt. That said, they're outside fighting to clear Openreach conduits as we speak, so I think we've passed the point of being cancelled (I hope!)

Oddly, as far as fanfare it's the exact opposite here - the hole in the ground was the first time I'd heard of them or their plans!

If they have got as far as work on the ground and the site says coming soon, then it's coming soon.
They usually plan to do whole towns.

The thing with Netomnia is if there's an issue and it costs money to overcome it then they tend to skip the properties with an issue. They are being very sensible and keeping their cost per property passed low.
They will happily skip an entire street over spending thousands unlocking blockages in ducts etc.

...and sadly that may well prove to be the case here. I have my fingers crossed.

Popping your postcode into something like https://mastdatabase.co.uk/maps/streetworks should reveal more on what's happening

Thanks - very useful! There are a few other bits of work on adjacent streets for the same company, so it looks like they're pretty serious about it. I've just got to hope that our bit doesn't defeat them!

Ours took 12 months from initial letter/works to be live for ordering.

A few teething problems along the way but now on 2gb/2gb with static ip for £49 pcm

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

Netomnia only install their own network. They don't do work for others.

Enter your address on the Netomnia availability checker

They made a lot of fuss about coming to my town, then very quietly dropped their plans.
When I posted a comment about this 1 of their senior staff members (guy called Jeremy) jumped in to defend them (twice) with excuses about the exchange being full, rolling out from a neighbouring exchange and that they were still coming.
Over a year later I emailed them and got a response...

"We are having to replan this area due to unforeseen issues to connect the surrounding properties.

This will need to be reviewed and replanned by our build team, unfortunately the area is on hold until we can do this.

Due to the scale of our build, we cannot place a timeline on when we will be able to review your area. Unfortunately, I do have to advise that it could be months or years."

Load of nonsense. Surrounding properties? They dropped plans for about 20,000 homes by the looks of it. No transparency at all.

Yes I'm bitter 😂

Their CEO Jeremy is extremely helpful at getting you installed in complex cases like mine where my address was added to the database but wasn't quite scoped for service shall we say (with unusual undocumented ducting on the OR maps) and we discussed the options and pulled 300M of of fibre to cover me from the closest CBT from another street.

He will get you covered, its just a matter of when.


EDIT:

On the plus side my uptime has been 100% from a Netomnia / YouFibre point with no documented outages, the only reason it is less than that on the tools is because of my configuration changes and rebooting of hardware on my end. Even then my total monthly outage is 0.02% (7 mins) (the occasional 8 mins and 56 seconds if I have a firmware upgrade bring down the average to 99.97 availability)



If I look at the last 3 months I have had 99.97% availability with 31 mins downtime which is excellent for residential and all self inflicted outages.

With Virgin Media I had the same volume of downtime (30 mins a month) caused by me with a total of 18 hours downtime over a 3 month period giving me 99.22% availability which is a lot worse, with multiple 8 hour outages since the start of that service.

So when comparing the two YouFibre is excellent and cannot be faulted Virgin Media is a load of expensive rubbish that just doesn't work, has loads of jitter, over 4 times the latency and more downtime to the point I would set two alarms for the morning because I didn't trust the service to keep the alexas on when i needed them to work most.

Edited by RR_The_IT_Guy (Sun 21-Jan-24 16:04:17)

Thanks! I guess it's "how long is a piece of string" really - I don't know how mature their network is round here, so there might be some long sections that need to be completed as prerequisites first.

If they're going back to the local telephone exchange though, that's only a couple of hundred yards from me.