The trick in most houses is that the interior walls are stud partitions. Consequently with the right drill bit (aka a very long one) and a bit of floor lifting you can get from the loft to the ground floor inside without damaging the decor in the majority of homes. If you have a suspended timber floor then moving around the ground floor is nice and easy too. If it is slab on grade then things do get a bit more complicated.

A lot of modern houses are dot and dab plasterboard on exterior walls. Again with the right tool (aka a very long drill bit) it is possible to get a new cable down the back of the plasterboard without damaging the decoration.

With the right tool most jobs are easy. That said in my house all the walls (including the internal upstairs walls) are either brick or breeze block and everything had to be channelled into the walls. Still happened because visible cabling is yuk, though the labour was all free as it was DIY and a full refurbishment to bring the house up to date.

And for installers it is a lot easier to run a cable down an external wall and clip it on than it is to do all that internally. All the extra labour would have to be paid for and many providers probably wouldn't even give that as an option.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

The trick in most houses is that the interior walls are stud partitions.

Work of the devil, like trussed roofs.

Consequently with the right drill bit (aka a very long one) and a bit of floor lifting you can get from the loft to the ground floor inside without damaging the decor in the majority of homes.

Good luck pulling cables through the holes in the noggins which your long drill bit made

If you have a suspended timber floor then moving around the ground floor is nice and easy too.

Depends how big the space is, and what it's like - it may be neither nice nor easy to move about down there.

That said in my house all the walls (including the internal upstairs walls) are either brick or breeze block

Quite right too.

visible cabling is yuk

Putting to one side the fact that it didn't progress (did they ever say why?)

We chose not to proceed. There were a number of reasons for this. Cost (at that time Hyperoptic wanted a contribution, this has most likely changed), the external nature or the wiring, the lack of choice of ISP. We had an alternative and cheaper offer from Openreach to install an AIO cab for our exchange lines. This was the preferred option for the majority of the property owners, cheaper, no external cabling, choice of ISP.

what sort of property numbers were needed for them to be initially interested

As I think I have already stated, 75, 39 flats and 36 houses. For all intents and purposes all properties were "on board".

Cannot be bothered quoting all those points however;

Stud parition walls can be great and IMO are better than "boomin" concrete block sitting on top of the floorboards nicely bowing the joists over time that many houses built in the 60-80's have. Granted most builders do a pee poor job in construting them. However, when they are constructed correctly with either timber nogged correctly or metal, and then filled with Rockwool or equivalent and having sound board or just a heavier plasterboard they perform super, and much better than concrete in all areas apart from bolting something to the wall. Add resilient bars and jobs even better.

Noggins: You get through the noggin by removing a wall socket and the pattress box and drilling at an angle, easy, just make sure you keep some distance between power cable and audio / data. Access rods and / or magent can be used to fish the wire down

Suspended wooden floor: You don't get in to the crawl space yourself (well you could do if it's big enough), however again you pull a couple of boards up (or make some access holes if it's particle board) and then using fish wire or access rods you can work way through. You can get caught out by dwarf walls, but a couple of smashes with the rod will usually disloge a brick. If not pull up the floor near the dwarf wall.

I find fishing wires through floor (or wall if you have enough opening space) can be easier to do with the top part of plastic pipe conduit.

Thermalite block is more of a annoyance than plasterboard I find for fixing stuff to. Pain in the arris.

Lifting floors isn't so easy depending on the type of flooring that has been put down. This is why I fished a bunch of cat5e cables under our kitchen BEFORE having the Karndeen laid. We have tiles/karndeen/laminates in all but one ground floor room now and I would seriously not want to be lifting any of that as it would cost many £100s to put right after (if not £1000s).

Obviously if it is just carpet then it is much simpler and I concur.

My comments were related to the sub floor only, yes, if you don't have access to it then you are stuck.

One option could be to use the air bricks and the gaps down the side of the sub floor (behind skirting once removed) if the floor cannot be taken up. Might be tricky but it's how plumbers get new copper pipes under the floor (using air bricks) as obviously you cannot bend copper for a long run.

Edited by gary333 (Wed 06-Nov-19 10:08:40)

I would fully expect to pay more, or be responsible, for cabling inside my house. My main concern about FTTP is the exterior mess that seems to be acceptable.

I guess going into this line of business would change things significantly for Hyperoptic and the others. People generally are very particular about aesthetic things in their homes. As soon as they went into this business, they would need an army of builders, painters, carpenters etc. slowing installations down with endless powwows with homeowners about the choice of paint and materials etc. and handling complaints of substandard redec work. It would only take the most pedantic 1% of customers to bring their business to a complete standstill.

Which means this part customers probably should keep doing themselves - but as I wrote, if you take this route instead of their bulk standard installation, they try to be as flexible as they can. They even offered to schedule the installation to such a time when our builder was there had we wanted this so that their engineer is there doing the cabling.

Not sure what you mean about external cabling. Our Hyperoptic installation does not have a single external cable. Fibre comes to the building in underground conduits. We have two buildings with flats in each of them. They dug a conduit under the courtyard to conceal cables between buildings. All cabling to the flats go in risers. I guess if no risers are available, they are left with no other option but to do it externally. If there is a conduit or a riser, they were happy to use it and we did not have to pay them anything for that or the courtyard digging either.

Curiously, in our building, BT lines seem to be external. There is some kind of a gadget or thing on one of the external walls and all BT lines come from that.

I don't think FTTP means external cabling if there is a reasonable alternative available. If residents do not demand it or the building is managed by non-residents/council who do not care, it might be a different thing. In our case I managed the installation and I never had to argue with them about anything. They offered external cabling first, I said no and suggested using existing conduits and some digging between buildings and they were fine with that. They just sent engineers to survey the risers and the courtyard and then another team to do the digging.