I do not know how many houses there are served from the cabinet. There are poles and overhead cabling to many of the houses. There are 16 houses in my close in the situation that I am in. There are other similarly aged houses which may be fed from the cabinet where there is no overhead option, but I do no know about trunking there. We did not ask for FTTP. Openreach have already laid trunking and installed a pavement chamber. No one is going to order FTTP to give them some kind of ROI if they are going to charge that kind of money. It is not as if we have asked for FTTP over FTTC. It was their choice with no consultation that I was aware of.

Post deleted by bdo21

Have raised the issue and pointed out that planning should have spotted the issue for these properties.

My guess is someone was willing to underwrite the costs at one time, but they have forgotten about that.

Yes no reason why multiple lines down the one armoured cable, since it would usually carry multiple pairs

Andrew, thank you for escalating this. I, and some of my neighbours, will be interested in the result.

What kind of distance is your house from the pavement area?

The wayleave that I signed with BT stated that they would install a 12m duct across my garden. It is then a similar distance to the pavement chamber on the other side of the road. There is nothing special about my situation. I do not live in a huge house. I do not have a huge garden. I can just about park 2 small cars on my drive (although we have only one). I am probably 800m from the exchange with the cabinet about half of that distance. The exchange is in the middle to our small town.

Edited by deleted (Fri 23-May-14 12:34:32)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Have raised the issue and pointed out that planning should have spotted the issue for these properties.

My guess is someone was willing to underwrite the costs at one time, but they have forgotten about that.

I think it is highly immoral that a potential customer should have to pay a company to compensate them for the strategic mistakes of one of their employees, no matter how long ago those mistakes occurred.

Except there is nothing that requires BT to provide a fibre service. So, rather than giving the option of paying excess costs they could just refuse to deliver at all.

It sounds like they had originally planned to go underground but have hit some sort of issue (perhaps utility pipes that weren't on plans or something like that). Because of that they would have to put in a pole to deliver which has changed the costs to do so. It is bad news and maybe MrS will be able to get to the bottom of it and see if BT really should be charging but in the end there is no requirement for them to do anything here.

In reply to a post by dabotsonline:

I think it is highly immoral that a potential customer should have to pay a company to compensate them for the strategic mistakes of one of their employees, no matter how long ago those mistakes occurred.

I wouldn't call it a 'strategic' mistake. It could be very much as Andrews says, that in the planning stage Openreach were going to fund the cost themselves and now they just need reminding of this.

You also have to look at it from Openreach's view point with regards to their excessive construction charges generally. Say they designate an area to be FTTP and believe the ducting runs to all properties in the area. Joe Bloggs orders FTTP and the Openreach engineers doing the external work find that a builder has poured concrete down the ducting, completely blocking the whole thing. Should Openreach be responsible for the cost of rectifying the ducting (which could easily run into the thousands if it's a large blockage and patios/paving etc need to be removed)?

This is one of the reasons why a widespread FTTP deployment is unlikely any time in the next decade. If every duct was clear (not blocked) and ran to every property, things would be so much simpler. Unfortunately, the FTTP trial areas have shown that blockage are extremely common and they are both time consuming and costly to fix.