Well today I had some great news.

I almost bit the bullet with Cerberus for £10k+ FTTPoD but over the past month really up'ed my calls/emails to OR. Managed to get high up engineers/local planners on the case who have been very good keeping me in the loop unlike the normal fobbing off you get.

Past 2 weeks they have been out with field engineers surveying and had a call this morning from the chief head engineer that they have agreed to build to the half of my estate that missed out! Got emails confirming as well.

Had a good few chats now and they are hopefully it will be completed in 3 months. Not counting my blessing but 18 months of countless calls/emails to OR/council/bellaway my hardwork and pestering has paid off

What a result. Well done you!

if the fod was installed in 2019 you might find the Agg node that the FOD used might be ful;l and therefore you migth have extensively more fibre to get back to aggregation node that has capacity

so it will be with be really cheap or really horrid

the fact it needs to be surveyed tends to indicate there a capacity / issue around it

In reply to a post by Fastman3:

if the fod was installed in 2019 you might find the Agg node that the FOD used might be ful;l and therefore you migth have extensively more fibre to get back to aggregation node that has capacity

That's not going to be the issue. The cable they pulled from the splitter back to the aggregation node was as thick as a sausage: I'd guess 96 strands or more. Basically, when they are installing spine cables, they don't mess about with capacity!

Slightly longer version of this story: the first guys had pulled this thick cable all the way through to the chamber outside my property. Then the auditor said this was wrong: it should only have gone to the chamber where the splitter is installed. So they cut it back to there, and pulled a smaller cable through to serve my 4-port CBT. This new cable was about as thin as a TV coax.

So basically there's a ton of fibre to the splitter node, and there's enough space to pull the smaller cables to each of the (newly required) CBTs in the ducts between the footway boxes.

As I understand it, the CFP survey was required for the physical ducting. For historical reasons, this road has a mix of direct-buried and ducted. The surveyor told me that over time, as and when faults needed to be fixed, they'd upgraded to ducts.

This makes sense: the road was built around 1960, but most of the footway box lids say "BT" which places them in 1980's onwards. There are still one or two smaller covers with "GPO" on them.

Still no quote back from the CFP survey though

to be clear if is gone to CFP survey theres a reason it will have been sent (and it will have been reviewed before it was sent to survey) - either it seen as too cheap and the costing tool does not recognise all the premises (especially if part of the development is built withing the last 5 years or so or the Aggregation node node the costing tool is proposing is not yet in place , or is full or is fully allocated -- (so my assumptions of why it went to survey are still valid)

I would be very surprised if a CFP ever gets to a final committed costing *without* a surveyor visiting at least once. Records can be, and often are, wrong. Do you have experience of a CFP which didn't have a survey?

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Do you have experience of a CFP which didn't have a survey?

I do and the contract was based on a fixed price, I asked about a survey and they confirmed they were happy with the records they had and didn't need to do one.

majority do not get surveyed before contract

only those where an issue is expected or something untoward raises a red flag

Well its only been a week but today spotted a couple of OR vans on the estate opening chambers on my road putting blue pull rope though ducting.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Still no quote back from the CFP survey though

At last the quote came back. Openreach expanded the scope to 57 properties (including an adjacent road), and the quote is £57K. This is in Ofcom area 2, therefore since Feb this year there are no gigabit vouchers available.

Even with a 50% takeup that would be £2K per participant: the CFP organizer is going to canvass everyone, but my guess is that it isn't going to happen.