That's pretty quick. Hopefully mine will also be somewhat fast, looking forward to see how our prices differ.

So, here is the final quote:

Desktop survey price: £5200
Confirmed Price: £8833
Broken down as follows:

Labour £5,001.00
Contract Labour £0.00
Civils £750.00
Stores £3,502.00
BT Connection Charge £495.00
Deduction £-665.00
Field Survey charge paid £-250.00
Total £8,833.00

If this is typical of recent quotes I think they might as well 'call it a day' with FFTPod.

Distance to Aggregation node is about 750m (the Openreach surveyor told me where it is), there are no roads to dig up, existing ducts can be used, and the final delivery would be via existing polls.
I am glad I proceeded with the survey but it isn't going to be worth getting this installed at this price.

In reply to a post by Cabinet13:

If this is typical of recent quotes I think they might as well 'call it a day' with FFTPod.

Sorry you got such a bad quote. I suspect you're right - Openreach probably doesn't want to deal with the pain of FTTPoD any more, and it diverts resources away from Fibre First.

However, badly underestimating on the desktop surveys is not a customer-friendly thing to do.

Similar to my quote (similar distance from agg node, existing ducts then two new poles, which from memory are about £500 each):

Labour £4,830.00
Contract Labour £649.00
Civils £924.00
Stores £3,584.00
BT Connection Charge £495.00
Deduction £-1,200.00
Field Survey charge paid £-250.00
Total £9,032.00

I had understood that FTTPoD quotes were more or less at cost. Though the benefit to OR of having someone else pay for their network expansion may well be more than is reflected in the deduction.

Watching the work happen, I think I probably got my money's worth - there were lane closures on a trunk road 5 miles away, contractors with specialist equipment to jet blocked ducts, a number of OR vans doing work over several days.

Edited by shortshrift27 (Wed 17-Feb-21 19:12:58)

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

If you read that spreadsheet in detail you will see something seemed to change with the full quotes in early 2019.
In 2018 there was lots of £2k, £3k, £4k build costs.

Since 2019 there have only been 2 final quotes (inc survey) under £7k.
They were £6,875 in Feb 2019 and £4,050 in June 2019.
Since then every single desktop quote below £7k has gone up after the survey.

Every quote now seems to have £4-5k in Labour or £4-5k in civils/civils labour, or both.

Going by the above pattern your final price was very likely be £7-8k or above.

The cynic in me thinks that could have been Openreach reacting to the fact that a large percentage of FTTPoD connections after the pricing structure changed in early 2018 were leveraging the Giagbit voucher scheme funds to offset their build costs...and this was simply a natural reaction to that. Perhaps at the same time curtailing oD demand for them to divert scarce resources to the wider general rollouts.

Edited by Pheasant (Wed 17-Feb-21 21:50:49)

In reply to a post by shortshrift27:

Similar to my quote

Thanks. For completeness, could I ask what your initial desktop estimate was?

I think it's in your marvellous table. "Estimated Build Cost: £33,000.00 ex VAT"

In reply to a post by shortshrift27:

I think it's in your marvellous table. "Estimated Build Cost: £33,000.00 ex VAT"

Oops, I didn't realise it was an older one.

I've sorted the table by date now. It's certainly looking like £8-9K is the general going rate these days.

I just got an email today saying Cerberus had sent my order through to BT.

I can imagine that I will probably get a very similar result as you. In my email it said the Survey would only look at external work, did they come to your property and talk to you or did you catch them surveying?

The Openreach surveyor phoned the previous evening to agree a suitable time, I did not get an email. We met outside the property in the morning, he did not come in but I told where the equipment would go (or in this case would have gone!). Very helpful chap, he told me the route the fibre would take and where the node is, just a shame it was so much more than the Desktop survey.

Edited by Cabinet13 (Thu 18-Feb-21 11:45:21)