Liklehood of FTTP becoming available in our area

Hi,

I'm posting on the forum here to try and collect knowledge and advice from engineers and people in a similar situation as me regarding the FTTP rollout, I'll try to be detailed and provide some context where possible=!

I live in South Wales, particularly in the Ogmore Valley within the Bridgend county. I've lived here for around 20 years, and our part of the valley where we live, within the small community of Pant-Yr-Awel, Dan-Yr-Heol have had poor broadband for this time.

To give you an idea, when we first moved here, before Fibre and Gfast, standard broadband was in the region of 16mbps, but we'd top out at 5mbps, then came along FTTC, and this boosted homes to (at the time) 38mbps, though we can only get 20mbps.

We've had 20mbps now for well over 10 years, we live almost 0.75 mile from the cabinet. Cabinet number 7, and on the opposite side of that road if the Fibre cabinet.

In our area, Dan-Yr-~Heol, there's no overhead cable drops, and we're slightly off of the main road, so presumably cables run underground in ducting under pavements.

We were never part of the Gfast rollout, and after trying to contact Openreach, and third parties to try and obtain some details as to whether we'll ever have FTTP I'm finding this difficuilt to get information.

I've tried using one.network, but there's no telecommunication planned for at least the next 12 months.

How would FTTP even be rolled out in an area like this?

Is anyone else facing a similar dilema?

Have a look at this Openreach website to find out what Openreaches plans are for your post code.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

Have a look at this Openreach website to find out what Openreaches plans are for your post code.

Which is about as useful as a bucket of warm spit. It just says for me 'Not yet available'

I've tried every tool. This says "Not yet available" which isn't useful.

I'm trying to get more specifics.

If I use their map finder for an exchange, it says: "We're building Ultrafast Full Fibre in this area soon", within the next 12 months - it's said this for quite a few months already though.

In reply to a post by ryan_holt8:

If I use their map finder for an exchange, it says: "We're building Ultrafast Full Fibre in this area soon", within the next 12 months - it's said this for quite a few months already though.

Not to cheer you up or anything, but it's been almost 5 years since we received the "Fibre is coming soon to your area!" email from OR and they're still yet to materialise on our street. Fortunately, an altnet came through earlier this year, but OR are still nowhere to be seen, so I'd take their "soon" with a significant pinch of salt until you actually see boots on the ground doing real work...

Openreach have set their goal to do areas by 2026, so understandably years ago it might've been a while.

Once they start building, how quickly can they get through it?

Openreach FTTP is very nearly at 50% UK coverage (~16m properties) and they are building at about 1m properties per quarter. Their goal is 85% coverage of the UK by Dec 2026 and ~95% by 2030.

"Once they start building, how quickly can they get through it?"

How long is a piece of string? Some places they seem to get through quickly, but from what I've seen it's often a drawn-out multistage process: if cables can't be pulled because of a blockage, say, then it can take weeks or months for the civils team to come in to fix that blockage, only for the cable pullers to return and find another blockage 50 metres further on. Rinse and repeat. Or cables get left coiled up on poles for months or years.

They'll be picking the cheapest places to build, but if a supposedly cheap area turns out to have unforeseen construction difficulties, they may abandon it part-way through. Difficult areas may wait for government subsidies.

You have to look at all the other FTTP providers like Virgin Media Nexfibre, OGI Wales (which applies in your case) and the rest of the Altnets.
If you rely solely on Openreach FTTP then your options and probability of getting FTTP will be limited.

No telecommunication planned in the 12 months doesn't mean that things can't change in the middle. Sometimes these plans might emerge out of no where. There are also permissions and wayleaves that need to be passed along before deciding when and where they'll install.

For example, in my case after an agreement was made for Community Fibre 3 years ago, I couldn't imagine my management will agree on a second overbuild especially considering they denied permission to Hyperoptic previously 6 years prior. They categorically said they wouldn't give permission to Hyperoptic for whatever reason and they had no plans for any FTTP.

So when Community Fibre came I was almost convinced that that will be the only provider for the foreseeable future since the UK needed to pass a legislation bill through parliament to force rogue landlords to respond.

However, there were no clues on the map or anything about Virgin Media coming but this came out of the blue in April this year. A letter came followed by road works. I saw it in one.network and bidb.uk and only last month several areas around me have had their service go live and more coming later in the few weeks to come.

But nothing was posted in the official management website and nothing is even published on the nexfibre website about them building in my area but it has happened.

Now one of our other properties that we rent out got plan for Openreach FTTP "Build planned between now and Dec-2026". This change only happened recently without any announcement.

Yet in my area it shows "Not yet available" meaning no plan. That's not to say it won't happen in near future.

Before that for years I was waiting on ADSL EO Line and the FTTC super fast plan was showing "You're on a plan, but we still haven't started work yet". I still remember this in the checker before finally in October 2019 we got upgraded to FTTC. And we are in Central London just 10 minutes walk to the City of London! An ADSL service that would constantly drop out and can't maintain stable sync for more than 3 days. Now on FTTC I get over 100 days stable connection up time but it came too late.

So, as you can imagine, if we can be ignored and delayed for so long before getting FTTP then I don't know what to say about those in the more remote areas!

I am over the hill from you (NNE as the crow flies) in Clydach Vale... OGI laid fibre up and down the valley the other month (or 6) and I have swapped Voice/Broadband from Openreach/BT to them.

Painless (thanks to OTS) and issue free so far (voice swap expected on 14th; fibre was hooked up to the house on 31st Oct; broadband available from hookup)

Openreach don't have a date for FTTP availability in our valley and BT semed a bit peeved that I was leaving becasue of available bandwidth rather than price (well price also helped; 50% BT cost for twice the speed...)

Dunno if OGI have laid fibre up your valley yet but they have people who can answer questions, if you ring them. Their availability checker seems to work OK as well.