In reply to a post by candlerb:

Has anybody actually got any survey results back from the new system yet? I placed my order on March 9th and am still waiting for the survey to take place.

I have took the gamble with Cerebrus and paid them my £250 back in Mid April. I have not had the suvey done yet. I just receive weekly emails telling me my case has just been escalated to a further step in the que that I do not know what it means each time.

But I was told by Cerebrus on the phone after paying the £250 that the survay quotes have all been what the desktop ones have been and some of them have been more. So expect the worst is what I was literally told.

What annoys the hell out of me is Hyperoptic have installed FTTP to a large block of flats around the corner from me last month. And there is no way they could have got the FTTP cable to that block of flats from the Aggregation node without literally passing my house with it.

But I have been told by Cerebrus that Openreach will not use Hyperoptics ducting and will want to install their own ducting at great cost to me when if they could just install the cable inside Hyperoptics ducting it probably would be around a £1000 to give me FTTP to my house given everything in place already brand new by Hyperoptic and just need a new Openreach FTTP cable in there from the Aggregation node to my house.

But no, Cerebrus say Openreach will not use any of Hyperopitcis ducting. It makes me so mad as I am suspecting I will get this bill of £20 grand plus vat quoted to me that I cannot afford.

Hyperoptic have their own network and is nothing to do with Openreach so their ducting will not go to the Openreach FTTP aggregation node so there is no way that their ducts can be shared by Openreach to get fibre to you.

But it could potentially save a lot of digging, as potentially the ducts could follow much of the same route, just needing to branch off the other end.

Openreach are forced to allow others to use their ducts, but as far as I'm aware no one else is forced to allow OR to use their ducts.

Hyperopric were using openreach gigabit Ethernet circuits to connect buildings to their POPs. May use some of the same duct as FTTP but not to an aggregation node.

And this distinction between the different fibre networks is almost always over looked.

The Openreach FTTP network is a GPON based deployment with shared light.
The Ethernet circuits EAD are dedicated fibre links so if you buy a Gigabit link between two points you are guaranteed the Gigabit.

In reply to a post by witchunt:

Hyperopric were using openreach gigabit Ethernet circuits to connect buildings to their POPs. May use some of the same duct as FTTP but not to an aggregation node.

Which is how Hyperoptic were going to connect our development to their network. Although we never finally signed with Hyperoptic they jumped the gun and Openreach started to install a fibre link to where Hyperoptic had planned to place their equipment. Eventually, for a number of reasons, we went instead for a community funded network rearrangement with Openreach which gave us our own AIO.

In reply to a post by Anth:

But I was told by Cerebrus on the phone after paying the £250 that the survay quotes have all been what the desktop ones have been and some of them have been more. So expect the worst is what I was literally told.

Thanks - that's what I was expecting too. At this stage, you are not buying a quotation: you are actually placing an order for delivery of the service, and agreeing to pay the previously quoted price. You only pay the £250 if you decide to withdraw from the order before KCI2.

Given that you've already placed the order, there's no reason for OR to give you a reduced price retrospectively - even if for some reason it turns out the work is easier than the desktop survey predicted. They're just going to pocket the difference. Of course, I'd love to be proved wrong with a real-world counterexample, but I don't expect anyone at OR gets a bonus for reducing revenue on orders that have already been placed.

As for the people quoted £30K but who live right on top of the fibre aggregation node: it's possible the desktop survey knows something you don't (e.g. that they are completely out of capacity at the agg node, or have no spare OLT ports, or a full duct). Of course, it's also possible they made a mistake when preparing the quotation.

What the new system seems to be missing is either for OR to provide a simple breakdown of the costs in the desktop survey, or a way to appeal the quotation *before* placing an order.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The Openreach FTTP network is a GPON based deployment with shared light.
The Ethernet circuits EAD are dedicated fibre links so if you buy a Gigabit link between two points you are guaranteed the Gigabit.

My point exactly: EAD and PONs aren't actually that different topologically, just that the EAD has a more traditional switch at the other end. PONs are very limited shelf life, slower, less invested and less researched, and splicing fibre to create the PON is actually harder than just laying a bunch of dark fibre.

I still haven't seen any good reason why we can replace point-to-point copper with point-to-point fibre that will actually last us the 40 years that copper has lasted us...

And which is deployed more around the globe?

Point to Point or PON?

How is the shelf life of PON limited and to what life span?

> splicing fibre to create the PON is actually harder than just laying a bunch of dark fibre

Citation Needed�.

You just connect the fibres into an optical splitter, which is a little box with (typically) 32 downstream ports and one upstream port. Some splitters are connectorised; some splitters have tails that can either go to an ODF or can be spliced individually. You definitely don't join 32 fibres with one big splice!

If you didn't have the optical splitter then you'd have to lay a fat optical cable with 32 fibres all the way back to the POP - and you'd still have to splice onto each of those fibres individually.

But more importantly, at the POP end you would have to plug those 32 fibres into 32 active equipment ports instead of 1. This would make it much more expensive.

As for future proofing: 10G PON already exists today. When there's demand, you upgrade the equipment.