FTTP 900m over pole supply

Our local area (Wirral) was upgraded to full fibre over 2 years ago. We live out in the fields with only our house and the neighbouring farm fed over a pole supply. The green cabinet is approx 900m away.

I know other premises fed from the same cabinet can now get FTTP and I can see the nodes mounted to the poles in that area.

We appear to have been bypassed and with it being 2 years and a big job to feed 2 houses I feel like we will be ignored until the copper network is removed in another couple of years and they are forced to upgrade us.

Attempting to get any contact from Openreach has proved futile and the few engineers we have had out recently (our copper is unreliable!) seem to think it's a lost cause.

Does anyone have any advise that could help me speed up the process? At the very least it would be nice to know i'll be getting done in 2027 and just stay quiet till then!

Frustrating thinking there may be something I could do to influence the situation in the meantime !

You could pay, and get FTTPoD ?

Or use Stairlink.

Or use a mobile sim enabled router.

And now the good news. The copper won't be removed in 2027, they'll just turn the phone service off leaving the internet unchanged (assuming you have it). "Land line" phone calls will continue to be available over the internet.

Sounds like it will be expensive to get FTTP there, just for two premises. Doesn't help you, but the context is that if they spent say £20K getting fibre to you, then from a pool of funds, that's possibly more than a dozen other premises that would miss out, that they could enable elsewhere for the same spend. Not saying they wont do it in time, but its difficult to justify on commercial grounds.

Are you 900m away from the FTTP infrastructure because there's 900m of your land to cover, or is it a public road?

It's 900m over a combination of probably 5 different people's farmland and then some distance on the public road at the end.

Oh and it crosses a Railway line at high level too for added complexity 😥

That's what i thought 😥

The railway will be the reason why it's not been upgraded. I don't think they'd string a cable above it any more, they'd have to directional drill underneath.

Five different peoples farmland certainly wont help either. There may be a variety of wayleaves and access consents involved -> in the too hard basket it goes.

There are an additional 14 houses just this side of the railway line (700m away from me across the fields), but I imagine this adds another ££££ to the price.

I've submitted a FTTPoD desktop quote request. I'll post the results on here so you can all have a good laugh 😄

In reply to a post by DL75:

Oh and it crosses a Railway line at high level too for added complexity 😥

Are you certain your copper line goes to the cabinet on the other side of the railway lines? can you see how your copper line gets across as there must already be a route if it does?

Yes, i've traced it more than once as it used to regularly fault back in the landline / dialup days it would get so noisy it was unusable regularly in the winter.

It runs across poles for 700 ish metres, down the side of the railway line and then crosses onto the road at high level over the tracks by a level crossing, up the street and down into the cabinet.

All the houses in that street have FTTP available.

It's better now but still needs attention at least once a year as speeds drop from the absolute max of 30Mbps to 4 or 5 and they get a call.

In reply to a post by Thinker27:

And now the good news. The copper won't be removed in 2027, they'll just turn the phone service off leaving the internet unchanged (assuming you have it). "Land line" phone calls will continue to be available over the internet.

So we'll likely be stuck on Cabinet fibre for the foreseeable 😭

Fibre may or may not necessarily follow the same route as the copper.

Openreach FTTP (generally) doesn't come directly from the cabinet. The exception for Openreach is where they use a subtended headend (SHE) design which is essentially putting a small version of the OLT (fibre headend) in the cabinet, that would otherwise be in the handover exchange.

The FTTC cabinet and nearby FTTP can be fed from the same fibre aggregation node, coming from the same headend exchange however.

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 09-Jan-25 14:16:19)

In my area, BT had a major duct under a railway line with warning at ground level.

Network Rail came along during electrification and ignored the warnings - drilled down into the chanber and ripped out most of the cabling.

An exchange oneside provided FTTP & FTTC to properties the other side and a second major exchange was providing voice to the sunsidiary in te other direction. So people lost either voice or data - or in my case both (VoIP). All mobile operators had masive outages too!

So, under a railway is not always good!

In reply to a post by DL75:

It's 900m over a combination of probably 5 different people's farmland and then some distance on the public road at the end.

Oh and it crosses a Railway line at high level too for added complexity 😥

https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?tab=...

The rail line seems to go in three directions, is there any properties that have fttp, that are near you and on the same side as the rail line.

Crossing a rail line with overhead wire needs to be done in coordination with rail engineering works line closure.

Well maybe. But we are 500 metres from the end of a FTTP deployment, with no obstructions or private land to cross and they didn't bother to connect our group of five houses.

So it definitely doesn't need anything as complex as crossing a railway to stop them extending FTTP 😢

In our case the 500 metres gap is where the copper lines from two cabinets meet. So they would have needed to install a few new poles to reach us (as our copper comes from the other direction, but that direction there is 1,000 metres of copper before you reach the closest FTTP deployment).

FTTPoD quote was £30,000+ (unchanged after that FTTP deployment).

I think the insanity of the system becomes apparent when you’re quoted near enough £10K for FTTPoD but they’ve already built the CBT in the chamber serving the property just outside. Just ‘forgot’ to update the database 😵‍💫😂