Community Fibre Project

Hi

I'm running a Community Fibre Partnership for a small village in Somerset.

Please may I tap into others' experience and knowledge?

We attracted 45 properties in our initial pass. Openreach has given us an indicative price of £73,000 for FTTP to these, or about £1,600 each. We have a few businesses in our 45 so at best would raise £85,000 in voucher subsidy.

All good then, but not much contingency!

We're at the point now where the Openreach lady wants to confirm our addresses. So ... there are perhaps half-a-dozen new builds currently empty but where new people are soon moving in. Should we take a chance and include these in our confirmed list? On the one hand the downside seems small: if (say) 3 of the 6 decide not to commit we've still got 3 x £1,500 = £4,500 in vouchers more than we would have had.

That decision all hinges in what the incremental cost from Openreach is in adding each new house. I am assuming that the £73,000 is now pretty static, and that the cost to them of adding a couple of extra homes close to ones already in the programme is relative buttons, which means it's likely worth including houses we're not 100% certain on.

But that IS just an assumption. Does anyone have any real-world experience and advice please?

Thanks
N

In reply to a post by ntruby2:

Hi

I'm running a Community Fibre Partnership for a small village in Somerset.

Please may I tap into others' experience and knowledge?

We attracted 45 properties in our initial pass. Openreach has given us an indicative price of £73,000 for FTTP to these, or about £1,600 each. We have a few businesses in our 45 so at best would raise £85,000 in voucher subsidy.

All good then, but not much contingency!

We're at the point now where the Openreach lady wants to confirm our addresses. So ... there are perhaps half-a-dozen new builds currently empty but where new people are soon moving in. Should we take a chance and include these in our confirmed list? On the one hand the downside seems small: if (say) 3 of the 6 decide not to commit we've still got 3 x £1,500 = £4,500 in vouchers more than we would have had.

That decision all hinges in what the incremental cost from Openreach is in adding each new house. I am assuming that the £73,000 is now pretty static, and that the cost to them of adding a couple of extra homes close to ones already in the programme is relative buttons, which means it's likely worth including houses we're not 100% certain on.

But that IS just an assumption. Does anyone have any real-world experience and advice please?

Thanks
N

Hey - We're going through this at the moment with a mixture of Business and Residential Vouchers/.

Our property list is 116 for £59k so looks like your area is a bit more rural than mine!

To date we have 26 / 116 which has hit our target with several business and the rest coming from a residential properties.

My biggest advice would be to target the properties you know who will be on-board, whether that is local knowledge or just knocking on their door and asking. We used a platform called NextDoor which our local parish uses to communicate which was how i managed to get word of mouth out, in combination with letter box stuffing.

I wouldn't add any more properties unless you know they we're for certain happy to pledge their vouchers / understand what you're talking about!

Best of luck!

Hi, thanks for your reply. Yes, we are pretty rural and spread out. Our properties are in 3 clusters, the village main, a cluster of 3 about 1km away, and another hamlet with 7 addresses about 2km away and actually served by a different exchange about 2km away.

Done lots of door knocking and used nextdoor. We have deliberately kept it restricted to people in our area that we know and trust us.

Openreach is reluctant to tell us how much each cluster is but I suspect if we'd thrown one of the smaller ones under the bus it would have been way cheaper for the largest one. But we're not like that!

I still would like to know, if anyone has any sense of it, in a cluster of houses being included anyway what's the incremental cost from Openreach to add one more. If it's £1 it's probably worth taking a punt that a new resident will sign up. If it's £1,499 it isn't. I just have no idea.

In reply to a post by ntruby2:

Hi, thanks for your reply. Yes, we are pretty rural and spread out. Our properties are in 3 clusters, the village main, a cluster of 3 about 1km away, and another hamlet with 7 addresses about 2km away and actually served by a different exchange about 2km away.

Done lots of door knocking and used nextdoor. We have deliberately kept it restricted to people in our area that we know and trust us.

Openreach is reluctant to tell us how much each cluster is but I suspect if we'd thrown one of the smaller ones under the bus it would have been way cheaper for the largest one. But we're not like that!

I still would like to know, if anyone has any sense of it, in a cluster of houses being included anyway what's the incremental cost from Openreach to add one more. If it's £1 it's probably worth taking a punt that a new resident will sign up. If it's £1,499 it isn't. I just have no idea.

It honestly really depends - It could be anywhere from £100 if it's a next door neighbour for example to £2000 if they need to put ducting in etc.

If you know roughly where your nearest aggregation node is you'll be able to work out which properties will be cheapest

A few other things to consider:

* You could contact the developer and find out what Internet connectivity they are putting in. It's possible they already have FTTP already arranged with Openreach (even if that seems unlikely, given the location)
* If not, then you could pass on a message to the new buyers via the estate agent. Some of them may bite your hand off to be included in an FTTP project.
* Talk to the Openreach CFP manager and be up-front about your conundrum. If these new-build properties are very close to the CFP, such that they would be in the footprint of an existing FTTP splitter, Openreach may add them in commercially. (That doesn't help your voucher target of course). Or she may be able to give an indication of the incremental cost.

Thanks for the suggestions. I have indeed tried to contact the new owners in this way.

>> Talk to the Openreach CFP manager and be up-front about your conundrum.
Mmm, that would be nice! But I've already had my 7 minutes allocation this quarter ....

include them regardless as there will be an relief provided for them - they will be on a new DP - otherwise the scheme will be built those new build will not be covered and the cost of doing them alone in another scheme will be ridiculous (if the development is only 6 premises 100% include it)

Developer will probably have done nothing (if they have openreach will know and let you know you dont need them)

whitehall -- there are many things that determine what might make an addition to CFP -- dont make assumptions about what costs might be incurred as they could be wildly inaccurate and set the cummunity lead in a difficult conumdrum) and any number of things could affect the gap (which could be significantly more that your assume figures) new node, new splitter, direct in ground, buried and of the above could change the figure

In reply to a post by ntruby2:

That decision all hinges in what the incremental cost from Openreach is in adding each new house. I am assuming that the £73,000 is now pretty static,

Hi,

Have you checked that is the cost including the OR Demand Led CFP contingency ? They will add around 30% on top of the actual cost to give you your 'voucher target' for DLCFP projects.

Have you checked that is the cost including the OR Demand Led CFP contingency

Hi, thanks for your reply.
I don't know what this is and have never heard of it, so I think the answer must be "No". .

In none of my exchanges with Openreach has it ever been suggested that the final cost will be significantly different from the £73k. If it is, our scheme will be unviable as the very most we can hope to raise in voucher subsidy is £86k, and that's if everything goes our way.

We may as well give up now if this is a significant possibility?