The going rate to book a survey was £250+VAT for a long while, but may have recently gone up. There's only a handful of service providers that will undertake FoD order. Whom did you ask for a quote?

[Do you get an OR employee FoD discount? 😉 Just kidding]

Hi.

I am awaiting for 2 desktop quotes pre survey. The 275 +vat was for amvia. Ball Park guess was 2-8k plus vat....

Still waiting on the other one to get back to me.

No OR discount as no longer work for them.

Cheers

Edited by choppersrock (Sun 16-May-21 18:12:39)

Cerberus charge was £250+VAT three years ago when I did mine. I think it’s still the same so marginally less than Amvia appear to be charging.

So you’ve asked for 2 desktop quotes? You do realise they are purely indicative, often or not wildly different to the post survey quote and would both undertaken by OR in any event.

Yes I am aware of that. If you had a desktop quote how different was it from the survey out of interest.

I may just push ahead with a survey then I will proper info.

Thanks

In reply to a post by choppersrock:

If you had a desktop quote how different was it from the survey out of interest.

Often wildly different. Here is the info collated from forum members since the new pricing scheme started in March 2018:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QFkK1sLBFQjl...

Note that for the last year or two, the minimum is generally £8K+VAT.

Amvia is a reseller of Cerberus, so in my opinion you're better off going straight to Cerberus (unless you are already an Amvia customer or are buying other services from them as a bundle)

It’s practically ancient history now as prices recently for FoD appear to have a floor of around £8K.

But for interest my desktop quote was £4,900 before VAT.

My confirmed build cost (after survey charge, deductions for properties passed etc. etc) was £6,450 before VAT (and before £3000 DCMS voucher).

There’s a spreadsheet link here that candlerb has kindly put together that tracks the desktop and post survey quotes. But as said there was a step change in FoD pricing last year that has resulted in virtually no quotes below £8K and usually much higher.

Edit: oops posted at the same time as candlerb. Apologies for the duplication

Edited by Pheasant (Sun 16-May-21 18:27:45)

Thank you both for the useful information. I think a survey is the only way forward for me.

Cheers

Just to echo the other responses. I recently got a desktop quote from Cerberus at £5,100 + VAT and the full survey came back at £9,184 + VAT. When I challenged the increase, Openreach provided the map of the local infrastructure - agg node is 250m in a straight fully ducted line. Splitter node is even closer at just over 100m away, again straight fully ducted line. They were willing to drop £600 odd if I put a duct in my own flowerbed (7m ish) between the road and the house (currently direct buried phone line), but stood by the quote.

The overall conclusion then, is it doesn't really matter how close you are to the infrastructure or how simple the install is, best case you won't get a lot of/any change from £10k once you add the VAT. I suspect Openreach has decided it doesn't want to be spending time on FTTPoD installs unless it can charge a real premium to do so. Any commercial business can decide that of course, but if that is right, I think the desktop quoting formula should be changed to add that level of realism.

Unless you can do linked orders with close neighbours, or qualify for some kind of rural voucher, I don't think it is going to be an option for most.

Cheers for that...

Might be cheaper to move house! Lol... been here 13 years but no fttp on the horizon... heavily cabelled VM area but they aren't interested in cabling our estate even though the houses on the main road have vm services (old telewest days).. have tried over the years but to no avail....

In reply to a post by choppersrock:

Might be cheaper to move house!

Stamp duty on a £400K house move is £10K, so if you think of it in those terms, maybe FTTPoD makes sense.

However the time window for FTTPoD relevance is rapidly shrinking. It might take 12 months from ordering FTTPoD to getting live service, sometimes more. In the meanwhile, Openreach is now saying it will cover 80% of the country with native FTTP by December 2026. So you might be buying yourself a service that only gets used for a year or two.

Moving house to where FTTP exists *today* guarantees that you get service right away, but restricts your choice greatly - only about 15% of properties have it currently.