I considered looking at getting one of the neighbours on board, as i would be able to get the rural vouchers. I'm doing mine through a limited company, and if i could bag a neighbour i'd end up with £5k of vouchers in theory. If the build costs didn't go up much, i could save some money even i paid for their first year of service.

In reply to a post by n3work3d:

You're right on the gamble, i could do this and it becomes native at some point anyway. Is there any way of finding this out? The other thought i had is that, me placing the order maybe brings forward any plans to bring native fttp to the area? Is that a thing?

Doesn't seem to be. In my case my survey fee saw them spend 2 days in my area, a few hours looking at my end of things then the rest of the time they surveyed a couple of streets off mine and left behind pre-planning notices saying new telegraph poles were going in at 3 locations, nothing to do with me as my fibre is all underground. So I did wonder if they were going to enable a few more streets or the whole area but over 12 months later nothing has happened, so I suspect it might be preparation work for yet unplanned future FTTP or more than likely they were just updating records and found some poles not in spec and had too many lines spanned off them.

There are at least a couple of reports in these threads from some people that have had FTTPoD orders cancelled because native FTTP became planned for the area. So they will not go ahead if it is already happening or known to be soon, but of course in 6 months time after you go live they may decide to do your area, we don't know and Openreach probably don't know exactly which areas they will tackle next as there is I suspect an element of towns or cities drawn at random.

Virgin Media actually dug across where my street (a small cul-de-sac) connects to the main road, but because I have a different postcode to the main street, they wont come up my driveway which is only a 100metres maybe, openreach have underground ducts right up to my house from the main road so I assumed VM could use these as part of that ofcom initiative where they have to share them? Ive pestered VM numerous occasions to look into this for me, but alas, no positive outcome.

VM is probably best avoided for business, as they do all odd things with tunnelling in order to provide static IPs and you can end troubleshooting odd issues.

At £3k per premises (Incl Vat) that is still a nice discount on the £8k (incl VAT) for the single premises.

Without the Cerberus charge (£625) it would have been a nice price.

It isn't bad, but the situation we are in (all with 70MB/S FTTC) means that FTTP is a nice to have rather than essential. We were prepared to pay the high first year cost if we could cover the build cost with rural gigabit vouchers but that is not to be. I have to say that I have not found Cerberus straightforward to deal with, from the initial stages where one of their sales staff said a router is supplied then another said one had never been, to taking the survey fee before the linked participants had signed up, to having to prompt for any response through the survey process, to the unexpected appearance of the BT and Cerberus commissioning fees.

Given the size of the group, we are exploring the CFP optionwhich we probably should have done from the start. We also have Gigaclear about 500 metres away who have said that they may build out in 18-24 months but they do not have any demand led or voucher scheme.

In reply to a post by n3work3d:

The other thought i had is that, me placing the order maybe brings forward any plans to bring native fttp to the area? Is that a thing?

I haven't seen any evidence of that.

A few of your neighbours may get FTTP as the result of your FTTPoD - normally those served from the same pole or footway box. The £900 PP deduction, if it comprises the £700 PON rebate plus 4 x £50 PP, implies that your property plus three others would get FTTP.

My FTTPoD install took 14 months from receiving the confirmed survey pricing to service up and running. I think that's an outlier, but an expection of 6-12 months is realistic. A leased line will likely be in place in 3 months.

In my experience, the delays with FTTPoD are down to poor project management. They find one blockage, stop, schedule a contractor, wait for the contractor to fix it. Then they'll find another blockage further down the route, and the whole process repeats.

In my case, after all the blockages were cleared and they tried to pull the subduct through, they found it wouldn't fit into an existing duct, and they had to schedule a road closure to dig 164m of new duct - and that required a 3 month notice period to the council. If they'd found that at the start, it could all have been done in parallel.

For me, it was worth the wait though.

You'll have to take a chance on FTTP native coverage. At current rates, I'd expect about 50% of the UK to be covered by 2025, but it's hard to know where. There is some evidence that relatively new-build developments are being prioritised, as these tend to have modern ducting in good shape.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

I did wonder how the calculated that deduction, as the build stated the below on it. Which matches what you said, as i'm #3.
I think i'm going to take the leap and try and forgot about it, until it lands!

Premises passed calculations below. Deductions of £50 per premises, plus £900.00 per FTTPoD order.

Gold, A000xxxxx, 3, Nottingh...NG22
Gold, A000xxxxx, 2, Nottingh...NG22
Gold, A000xxxxxx, 5, Nottingh...NG22
Gold, A000xxxxxx, 1,

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-Sep-20 15:52:05)

Great, good luck

I suggest you edit your message and blank out those "Axxxxxxxx" numbers - I believe they can identify your individual property.

I suggest you edit your message and blank out those "Axxxxxxxx" numbers - I believe they can identify your individual property.

Eeek, done, thanks for the heads up.

Also just signed the contract with Amvia, so let the clock start ticking I guess!

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-Sep-20 15:58:05)

In reply to a post by steveham:

We have some progress!

Duct has been delivered on Monday (3/08/2020) and we have started to duct up the field towards the two properties.
https://imgur.com/zBHkUQQ - Going at a depth of at least 2.5ft
https://imgur.com/RtfHduG - Nothing like a wet summer in NI

The civil contractors were also out on Monday to build the JF4 on the opposite side of the road to the node (thankfully there was a pre-existing duct than ran under the road).
https://imgur.com/yCpjZJ7 - Shuttered JF4
https://imgur.com/EvH1CAe - Shuttering was removed on Tuesday which revealed the original copper BT cable that was direct buried from here to the properties, pretty impressed they didn't sever it).
https://imgur.com/968SACg - JF4 in background and path that duct took to meet our field under fresh tarmac.
https://imgur.com/uBfNS46 - Duct meeting our ranch fence at farm boundary.

Just an update on our circuit build:

We finished laying the ducts on the 15th of August.

On the 25th of August Openreach were able to schedule one of their subcontractors to pull fresh fibre from the roadside node to a JF4 close to where the CBT will be housed for jointing. They put the CBT in its designated JF4 and ran fibre drop cables from the CBT to each of the properties. The drop cables are ready to be plugged into the CBT once it has been commissioned and the other ends are coiled up outside each property so that the installation engineer can drill through the wall when he's installing the ONT to hook it all up. This picture may make it easier to imagine https://imgur.com/FHiZisJ

We had Openreach out today to splice/joint everything from the Exchange to our CBT.

As far as I'm aware Openreach will now perform an audit to make sure the circuit has been implemented correctly, they'll then commission the circuit and send out an installation engineer to install the ONT.

We should be joining the gigabit club shortly!

It's mad to think we have been waiting 12 months to get to the point we could part with cash and accept an order, but since we have it's only been about 7 weeks and we're already at this stage, it's not exactly been a straight forward ducts and footboxes already in place type of build either.

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-Sep-20 18:26:36)

Adding another datapoint here:

My desktop survey (terraced house in north London) was £11,100.00 ex VAT, and the confirmed build charge was pretty significantly lower at £8,667.00 ex VAT.

One question I have is, this is for 300mb FTTP with Cerberus. Is there possibility for upgrade to gigabit later down the line (by switching ISP), or is there some hardware limitation that caps the fiber installation at 300mb?

Edited by deleted (Fri 18-Sep-20 11:31:47)