An unexpected Christmas present from Openreach

Canonbury, London. A month or two ago I noticed on the BT wholesale checker that FTTPoD had suddenly become available for our property. We have only ever had available an EO copper service from Openreach and a pretty pathetic sub 20 Mbps ADSL2 service. We were not in any of their FTTP build plans until at least 2025...

So for shiz and giggles, on 8 November I went through Cerberus for a desktop quote for FTTPoD, not expecting to hear back for another month or so and probably with an astronomic build figure. But I thought nothing ventured etc.

Separately Hyperoptic had notified us, possibly around 6 months ago, that they were now 'available' and so I had arranged for them to put in a service. They were here on the 12th doing a pre-install site survey / recc'y. When they had the footway chamber open, there had been an Openreach CBT installed, possibly some time in the last few months. Apparently CBTs had been installed in chambers along the entire street, according to the Hyper guys who had been trying to pull their fibre in.

A week or so later, on the 20th I had noticed an article and related thread over at ISPreview that our area was spelled as as one the London areas currently in FTTP build, as noted in their Dec 2024 UK FTTP Broadband Build Plan.

Interestingly on the same day I received back that desktop FTTPoD quote from Cerberus - and predictably it was, staggering, at a mere £9,900 - but even more intriguingly the premises passed figure was a very high 24. Now of course I knew from first hand evidence and their own published plan, that they ALREADY have built here anyway! So something perhaps is not quite right / healthy in Openreach database-land me thought.

Anyway a few more searches on the BT Wholesale Checker, revealed that there was definitely no native FTTP available at our address (yet anyway!). However a few surrounding searches revealed that our neighbours two house away, actually *did* have FTTP available to order.

OK too much - there was definitely an OR database delay / muddle up going on here. So dutifully filled out the Availability Checker form yesterday. Having received the standard 'thanks for your enquiry' email, I did not expect *any* real reply for at least a few weeks...

Imagine my surprise when an email arrived just after 1pm today, Christams Day, with the following update from Fibre Customer Service at Openreach:

"Hello Sean,

Thanks for your recent enquiry.

I have looked into this, and the fibre network has been built in your area but there is an error in our records which is preventing you from placing an order. I’m now in the process of correcting this for you.

I need to associate your address to the nearby fibre equipment. It will take us about a week to complete this and you should then be able to place an order. I will update you as soon as our systems reflect this.

I’ve got all of your details, so shouldn’t need anything else before coming back to you. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

Kind regards

Divya Divya
Fibre enquiries
Infrastructure solutions customer service
Openreach

Web: openreach.co.uk"

Some six hours later and we now have Openreach FTTP available to order, according to the BT Checker!

So there you have it. An unexpected Christmas pressie from Opnreach 😂

Merry Christmas to all 🎄🎅

A Christmas miracle indeed … you can donate the saved £9000 to the engineers benevolent fund now.

Hope it all goes smoothly from here.

Haha 😜 once I’d laid eyes on that CBT, I thought….surely they’ll can the desk FoD quote… who could have the front to quote £10K for a drop cable! 😅 Let’s just give em the benefit of the doubt.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

A Christmas miracle indeed … you can donate the saved £9000 to the engineers benevolent fund now.

Hope it all goes smoothly from here.

Hampshire Branch?

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Haha 😜 once I’d laid eyes on that CBT, I thought….surely they’ll can the desk FoD quote… who could have the front to quote £10K for a drop cable! 😅 Let’s just give em the benefit of the doubt.

Well that was a good prezzie.
I wonder how much it costs for a 'simple' FTTPoD, people down the road from us have a FTTPoD service on a pole one side and BDUK installed FTTP on pole other side, but their pole only has copper.

In reply to a post by MHC:

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

A Christmas miracle indeed … you can donate the saved £9000 to the engineers benevolent fund now.

Hope it all goes smoothly from here.

Hampshire Branch?

Hampshire ? Pah … leafy Surrey more like. 😄

In reply to a post by burble:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Haha 😜 once I’d laid eyes on that CBT, I thought….surely they’ll can the desk FoD quote… who could have the front to quote £10K for a drop cable! 😅 Let’s just give em the benefit of the doubt.

Well that was a good prezzie.
I wonder how much it costs for a 'simple' FTTPoD, people down the road from us have a FTTPoD service on a pole one side and BDUK installed FTTP on pole other side, but their pole only has copper.

I think the days of 'simple' and cheap' FTTPoD have long gone. At one point Openreach were openly going to withdraw it completely, concentrating their efforts on normal commercial builds etc. But they relented and kept it.

But realistically it's now a 'trophy' service. For some time even the simplest/cheapest/easiest FoD quotes have had a starting off price of over £8K. It was possible 5 years ago to get quotes under £3K. I'm not sure if @candlerb is still keeping his google spreadsheet of costs going...but there was good selection of quotes there for info.

Back in the 'heyday' of FTTPoD (i.e. a year or two prior to the pandemic) we had done an FTTPoD install in rural Suffolk (September 2018) and we came in at £6450+VAT. There was a generous £3000 DCMS voucher available and we ran it all through the business at the time. So our net cost was £3450 - which we amortised easily over the next 5 years.

There's no way I would do it now given the state of regular Openreach FTTP build + the sheer cost of doing it and virtually no workable cost reduction incentives (unless you want to beg and plead with your neighbours, no thanks) like we had back in the day. The payback would be severely in the negative.

Out of curiosity, I checked up the differance between installing FTTP at one of our other properties and at the property down the road from the house I'm in ATM.
At our other property, the nearest two poles don't have any CBT's, but it is listed as a 1 stage install, the property down the road has a pole with CBT's much closer to it, but isn't listed as having FTTP available. There may be other constraints, but it's not obvious to me what they might be.

Completed this?

https://www.openreach.com/forms/fibre-broadband-avai...

We only ever speak to them when they are walking their dog, next time I'll mention the Openreach query form.