FTTP available but no toby boxes or poles

Hey all,

I've been a long time lurker on these forums reading about peoples wait for FTTP and the trials and tribulations that many have gone through however this week has got the better of me so it's my first post.

We've been waiting since 2021 for OR to expand their FTTP network to our house, originally we were on a build plan scheduled for completion in 2022 however out street and part of the joining street was out of scoped.

I contacted OR in 2023 and was told it was just a case of playing the waiting game which I did and then in April I noticed that two Altnets and OR had started works again around our area but no changes happened on bidb.uk or the BT Wholesale checker so I contacted Clive Selley who put me in touch with the team at OR who advised that our estate was now in a sweeper project.

Overall the team have been great and have kept us updated with bits and bobs going on, we were advised they were laying new fibre cables and were installing the CBTs. We were also told that there are plans to roll out toby boxes around our street so in preperation I added some draw wire to our duct which we had previously installed for Virgin to pull in from their toby box.

Fast forward to last Friday and low and behold the BT Wholesale checker had the following statement:

Our records show the following FTTP network service information for these premises:-Single Dwelling Unit Residential UG partial Direct In Ground.

FTTP is available and a new ONT may be ordered.

On the WBC FTTP row it shows was 1000/220 - Available - KCI2 Assure

I was skeptical however we then got an email from Zen advising FTTP was enabled so I wasted no time and put in an order via Freeola.

However I was slightly perplexed as we still haven't had any toby boxes installed and there are no signs of poles. We are located a stones throw away from our nearest OR floorbox however it would likely involve coming down by 5 houses to get to ours since we are at the end of the street (70s/80s houses)

OR phoned me after I sent an email enquiring about this as I'm absolutely terrified that we:

A - will end up having our order cancelled because there is no ducted route to our house
B - will be hit with an absolutely extortionate excess construction charge to proceed with the work

The representative was great as they advised it is highly unusual for an install to be cancelled at this stage and apparently there are still plans for work to be completed on our street however I'm hugely nervous as it feels like we are on the last hurdle and we might falter before we get to the finish line.

Currently our install date is set as the 20/08 (We placed our order on the 10/08) and Freeola have also advised that it's a two stage installed and that the survey will be conducted without needing us to be in however I've not seen any OR vans or workers in the area since receiving that.

I imagine I'm looking for a crystal ball to tell me want I want to know however has anyone else been in this position before and if so what were your experiences as I am "bricking it" to say the least as (Whist we are very lucky to have RFoG via VM) I am desperate to move away from VM after several CS issues this year and last year.

Any help, advice or comments would be hugely appreciated

In reply to a post by TechMinerUK:

However I was slightly perplexed as we still haven't had any toby boxes installed and there are no signs of poles. We are located a stones throw away from our nearest OR floorbox however it would likely involve coming down by 5 houses to get to ours since we are at the end of the street (70s/80s houses)

Do Openreach actually use tobies? And if they do, would they speculatively dot them down the street, one for each house? To me, it makes some sense for Openreach to go as far as installing the CBTs and go no further until someone orders, at which point do the works for the premises requiring service and put in tobies or whatever for houses on the same run at that time.

Try not to worry as its out of your control and wont do your health any good.

I have an estate not that far away where every time someone orders FTTP Openreach send round a team of civils who dig and do whats necessary to be able to get a fibre cable from the nearest joint box to the property without any excess charges.

They do, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Your existing copper feed is via a direct in ground cable.

It says you can order, so order if you wish service.

Openreach will come and organise, and explain, and seek your permission where necessary.

The DIG process changed over a year ago , and as far as I know hasn’t changed again , Toby boxes are no longer a part of the build , the chances are in the footway chamber that exists OR will have provided the CBT that is designed to service your address and neighbouring addresses.

If you have ordered FTTP , a duct will be provided from this joint-box directly to your house ( no unnecessary Toby box at the boundary of the footpath and your garden ) , if the duct passes by 4 or 5 houses , so be it , some situations the duct may pass many more than that , or fewer , it depends on how the existing infrastructure is located.

If a neighbour between you and the joint-box also orders FTTP for themselves OR can intercept the duct laid to your address and ‘tee’ into it and provide more duct from that point to their address .
The advantage of doing this , you don’t spend huge amounts in advance by providing toby boxes to housing that may never order Openreach service , and should an Alt Net service the area , Openreach will not have made their lives easier, to the point that OR spend money and the Alt Net gets the benefits and OR never actually get any revenue ( apart from the peppercorn rent the Alt Net pays ) .

With the old system ( pre-build to the curtilage every address ) you could well have brand new ducts and Toby boxes with only Alt Net cables in them ( no Openreach cables ) because OR don’t have exclusive rights on new infrastructure , it’s exactly the same as infrastructure that’s decades old (, as far as PIA is concerned) , so OR do the build at great expense, and potentially an Alt Net gets the benefit, in my opinion it ridiculous that PIA allows this on new construction , but it does.

The disadvantage is potentially multiple construction visits to the same area , if neighbours order FTTP at different times , rather than a single long term build incorporating every address leaving only the short ‘step’ across front gardens when orders are received.

Unless someone lives hundreds of metres away from their CBT joint box, excess construction will not be an issue .

Edited by Iniltous (Sat 17-Aug-24 09:05:30)

@DFScale On the other streets near ours that had the roll out completed before the roll out was put on hold they rolled out Tobys to every house however now that I am thinking about it, it may be becaused they were putting in new ducts anyway so it made sense to cover the routes to the houses as they were building

@PCJM40 I try not to but it's been so long waiting for this however thank you for the input

@Zarjaz Thank you for the input, we've already ordered so we are hoping there are no issues when they come to install it, even spoke with the neighbors to make sure they are happy for any digging work to happen on the street.

@Iniltous Thank you for the info, that does help put me at ease as the houses which got the toby boxes were completed in 2022 so it was a few years ago now. Theres not a massive distance between us and the nearest joint-box. There is a number 32 joint box very close to our house however I imagine due to the age of it that it isn't ducted from the nearest "proper" joint box

Edited by TechMinerUK (Sat 17-Aug-24 11:12:44)

TBH , never heard of a ‘32’ jointbox , I suspect you have looked at backside first and it’s a jointbox 23 , and as you suspect these are not ‘proper’ jointboxes in that they were never intended to be part of a ducted system , and when it comes to the FTTP rollout are generally ignored .
JB23 are pretty common, especially in 1960’s to mid 1970’s housing .

In theory PIA shouldn't disfranchise the builder from creating newinfrastructure, but as you say it does and its not fair. If it was done fairy and no network builder looses out we may see more ducting rather than going overhead!

I can't even use looking at the back of it as an excuse as I've just flat out got my 2s and 3s mixed up

That is the one I am thinking of though so it looks like they will be going passed that one to get to our house

I can sort of see why it might in our area as we are lucky/unlucky enough that all the houses around us now have two altnets they can connect to who are using OR ducting, OR boxes and just connecting their own cabinets and boxes where required.

Unfortunately streets like ours which haven't been enabled (till now) have been completely bypassed or postponed by the altnets until OR come and lay the ducts first which does seem a little unfair

Probably one for the politicians but the only way I could see it being equalised is if everyone can use everyones ducts but their would have to be a standard for laying, connecting etc which would likely lead to an XKCD 927 scenario or roll outs being slow due to everyone waiting for someone to make the first move.

What I would say is hopefully your ISP is informed and honest enough to advise what the dates supplied actually represent, your date of 20/08 isn’t a contractual installation date , but is a date by which OR should survey and then organise whatever works are needed , this in effect represents the first part of the first stage of the KCI2 ( two stage ) installation process .
Once the work to get a duct to your home is compete, the second stage ( with a new contract date ) should be advised, the first stage completion date needs to be flexible, as there can be varying considerations, noticing the local authority ( in some cases a long lead time if a road crossing were involved for example) as well as organising and then completing the civils work

Edited by Iniltous (Sat 17-Aug-24 10:37:54)

They've been pretty good on that so far to be fair, a few days after ordering we got an email saying they were hoping to have the external survey completed and that by the 20th they would look to confirm what works were needed or if another survey is required.

I'm hoping that it should be a fairly straight forward install after the ducting is outside our house as I've pulled in a duct to the end of the garden already with a draw rope and I've had power installed where the ducting meets the property so once they install the fibre termination outside they can pull it in on the wall opposite and it will be all there ready for them to connect up

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

They do, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Openreach equipped all the homes in a road in our village (that are underground fed for copper) with Toby Boxes outside each one, (in the pavement). This was 12-18 months ago.

Other homes in the same road, are OH fed for copper, and have no Tobies

Well Openreach came out to visit the house today and overall it wasn't superb news but it wasn't awful either.

The technician was very understanding and it explained that they were expecting to see additional floor boxes fitted on ourside of the street so they could feed through the cables from the CBT on the opposite side of the road.

Unfortunately because they aren't there they will have to scope out some remedial civil works and get them installed.

The escalation contact we have at Openreach spoke to us after the enginner had left as they too were surprised at the lack of floor boxes as whilst they were aware toby boxes may not be fitted the floor box was expected to be there.

Because of this we've now got to wait for a build plan to see what works the engineer has recommended, how much they will cost and if Openreach or our provider will cover them which is concerning since I imagine digging up the road and path to get to our house will take a fair bit of effort time and materials.

Fingers crossed some good news will come however I imagine it's going to breach the excess charge threshold

Presumably when you say floor boxes you mean joint boxes( rectangular concrete lidded buried structures in the footpath ) .
In areas where ‘direct in ground, buried armoured cables were used , it’s often the case that although all the properties are DIG , one side of the street can have some joint boxes ( and usually they can be of use to the FTTP rollout ) and the other side of the street may not have any jointboxes ( apart from JB23 which don’t really count ) , however the new DIG process doesn’t view this as an issue , simply that some jointboxes may also need to be constructed , especially if road crossings are involved.

You said there was a ‘proper’ jointbox outside a neighbour 4 or 5 houses away , presumably that’s on the same side of the street as you , I would have thought was useable for your provision.

, OR cannot really come back and ask for ECC as the construction would extended the OR network and potentially benefit your neighbours, ECC is normally if only you would benefit from any construction , so think very long private driveways etc , not normally duct and boxes in public streets , and it was OR showing availability, not you enquiring using something like FTTPod

It coukd be the ‘proper’ jointbox you spotted 5 doors away was a JB21 , and surprisingly it’s an updated version of a JB23 ( often replaces JB23’s ) but looks like a ‘proper’ jointbox as it has a concrete lid , but they are very shallow and not designed for use with ducts , they are more ‘square’ than rectangular.

Edited by Iniltous (Tue 20-Aug-24 21:17:48)

Yes, joint boxes (I didn't realise the large grey ones had the the name as the smaller ones)

I think half the battle for us is that whilst their is a joint box up the road from us, it is a fair distance away because how our street is setup (We are a cul-de-sac that branches off of a side street) meaning to get from the joint box closes by line of sight to the house would be digging up quite a bit of road or going across the street and then around the footpath.

For the joint box up the road I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case as the engineer came and and wrote it off pretty quickly advising the best route would be for them to cross the road at the bottom of the street and then duct round to us with a joint box near us and our neighbors so they can duct from their into our houses.

Thank you for the info on the roll outs, it is appreciated as I was loosing hope at the idea we were going to be hit with a massive surcharge. As you put I wouldn't mind if it was something that would benefit just me but I know their are neighbors around me interested in buying the service as the current VDSL2 and Virgin Media options are very slow or just unreliable.

The CBT that your address is allocated to will already have been provided, tested and made ready to provide service , it will reside inside a jointbox that already exists, was the correct size and had ‘space’ for the CBT( or CBT’s ) to be installed , that point is fixed , obviously without knowing the lay of the land , there may be more than one possible route from it to your house , but whoever designs that final ‘route’ should take things like making neighbours provisions ( should they order ) an easier proposition.

This change in process ( from building to the curtilage, paid for by FND , fibre network delivery, to this current system, where the last part of construction in the public footpath/ carriageway as well as the ‘route’ across the customers garden is now the responsibility of SD ‘service delivery’ , although different organisations within Openreach , the planning ‘rules’ are the same for both groups .

TBH , my knowledge is primarily on the previous system, building to the curtilage, the change happening around the time I stopped being involved with these process , so I’ve no personal knowledge of how fast ( or slow ) SD deal with these installations

Edited by Iniltous (Wed 21-Aug-24 10:01:53)

Thank you for the info

Yeah, I think you are 100% correct in that they are trying to figure our the most economic route to get the fibre across the street.

I've spoken with the ISP we are going with for now to give them the updated whilst we wait for Openreach to figure out the ECC and they have told me with no uncertanty they don't support ECCs so if it is passed on to them they will just cancel the order which is something, not ideal but it is what it is.

Meanwhile Openreach have advised it will be around 7 to 10 days before they get the costs figured out from the survey which was done yesterday.

From my side it just seems mad that they can classify houses as ready for fibre but upon placing an order a fairly substantial amount of work needs to be done to get the fibre there, that might be because what I classify as a large amount of work is small to Openreach but I guess I will find that out by late next week

If there is ECC, find out how much, and then go to EE/BT. I currently don't know the upper limit that EE/BT will support on ECC. Also if you can ask if you can do the ducting from the road to your house if you competent enough to do so.

In theory we should know the ECC in 7-10 days, will likely drop OR an email today explaining the situation with our ISP about the ECC to see if we can move to a different provider as I would quite happily commit to a longer contract if it meant they covered a larger portion of the construction.

As for ducting I've already pulled it through to the edge of our drive with two draw ropes in case anything goes wrong, when the engineer came out they didn't seem too keen on using it however I can't see why it wouldn't be usable as it's burried at an adequate depth and can be drilled draight into from the kerb if needed

In reply to a post by TechMinerUK:

From my side it just seems mad that they can classify houses as ready for fibre but upon placing an order a fairly substantial amount of work needs to be done to get the fibre there, that might be because what I classify as a large amount of work is small to Openreach but I guess I will find that out by late next week

The reason for this ( in the main ) and it really only applies to DIG estates , is financial,

A 100 home DIG development could typically need a ‘spend’ of £100,000 to build to the curtilage, with no guarantee of take up , £1000 per dwelling is way more than the acceptable budget per dwelling, so under the old policy , OR would survey , but the build likely is not undertaken, using the ‘new’ method of using ( to a large extent) only existing infrastructure with minimal new build by FND , ( even if certain properties will need significant expenditure after declaring them as having FTTP available) typically the new method may only need an initial £10,000 spending for those 100 properties , so a much more ( from the accounting perspective ) reasonable rate of £100 per property, or put another way , 1000 dwellings can be made THP ( total homes passed ) for the same cost as 100 under the previous policy .

This makes the ‘City’ happy , and has the added benefit of denying the competition a ‘leg up ‘ , the Alt Nets are still at liberty to spend the £100,000 themselves if they see fit ( but they probably won’t ) .

This new method helps drive the impressive monthly ‘new’ THP figure , helps in delivering industry leading build costs and from a customer point of view , the service is still available to customers , it matters not to them that some expense is moved from one budget ( FND ) to another (SD) , this is why I think it highly unlikely that any ECC will be raised, you would not have paid under the old process, absolutely no reason why that changes under this ( relatively ) new process.

Edited by Iniltous (Wed 21-Aug-24 16:44:10)

Your posts are excellent and explaining the situation to the uninformed such as myself as you are right in that it makes much more sense for their stats and overall profit to essentially "prepare" properties for fibre at a lower cost with the understanding that there will be a higher "connection fee" per property once it is live however because they aren't spending that on each property that may even subscribe it still works out as cheaper.

Basically they are just doing "last leg on demand" as it sounds to avoid disruption to streets and giving a leg up to the competitors whilst also reserving more money for other FTTP enabled deployments?

That does make much more sense, I can't quite gather why the escalations team at OR seem to be unsure of if their will be an ECC for our deployment as I would have hoped they would be aware of this process but I guess they don't want to fully commit until they are armed with the figures in case there is some wildcard that comes out of the woodwork

Have I missed the point? The original post states that

"the BT Wholesale checker had the following statement:

Our records show the following FTTP network service information for these premises:-Single Dwelling Unit Residential UG partial Direct In Ground.

FTTP is available and a new ONT may be ordered."

While there is a lot of expert and informed knowledge following that post no-one has posted any definitive outline of the situation to say that there is any doubt about that statement from BT Wholesale or any mention of any actions or charges outwith the normal process.

Why all the angst and second-guessing? Unless you have the professional background and knowledge to pin down anything incorrect or inconsistent in the BT Wholesale statement you are backing your pre-conceived ideas and beliefs against those paid to do the job.

Chill out and let things take their course.

I wholeheartedly agree that I lack any sort of experience or in depth knowledge with Openreach or their operations

The posts and thread as a whole is purely because of info that I have had from my ISP and Openreach escalations as when we were told of the roll out initially we were advised there would be toby boxes outside everyones house before the fibre was "live". Since then many people here have explained why that isn't/wouldn't be the case but that is the reason why the thread exists

I dont mean to come across as second guessing, im just anxious as based on the site visits from OR so far there seems to be confusion over the equipment located in our street and I'm worried it could affect our installation however you are right in that it is most likely nothing they haven't seen before and it'll all proceed as normal.

I would like to add that overall so far ive been impressed with the work and comms from OR so I hope it hasn't come across as me having a dig at them (Pun not intended) as that was not intended, its more curiosity in if anyone has had similar circumstances and how it worked out for them so I can prepare from my side

Edited by TechMinerUK (Thu 22-Aug-24 06:39:12)

If I've identified your account correctly it looks like the activation date has been set to 04/10/24 so Openreach are normally pretty confident at this point that they can complete the installation on that date. We'll keep you updated if this changes.

In reply to a post by GonePostal:

Have I missed the point? The original post states that

"the BT Wholesale checker had the following statement:

Our records show the following FTTP network service information for these premises:-Single Dwelling Unit Residential UG partial Direct In Ground.

FTTP is available and a new ONT may be ordered."

While there is a lot of expert and informed knowledge following that post no-one has posted any definitive outline of the situation to say that there is any doubt about that statement from BT Wholesale or any mention of any actions or charges outwith the normal process.

Why all the angst and second-guessing? Unless you have the professional background and knowledge to pin down anything incorrect or inconsistent in the BT Wholesale statement you are backing your pre-conceived ideas and beliefs against those paid to do the job.

Chill out and let things take their course.

KCI2 Assure means a survey needs to be done to see how much work is actually involved in getting the fibre from the cbt to the house usually this is easy as the copper line would go down the same duct but until they check they dont know.

now they have done the survey the wholesale checker will change to the amount of stages required to supply the connection.