In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

It is not just "my" property and I am not taking it at all personally, it is just a clearly inefficient way to manage a country wide rollout, to do it in tiny sections, revisiting each street many times.

How do you know it's inefficient? Openreach do not - generally - employ idiots. They also have very extensive experience in rolling out network upgrades.

By comparison how much experience do you have in managing national infrastructure upgrades?

Well, maybe you would paint the fence at a number of houses by sending people to paint one panel at each property in turn, but I would get them to paint the whole fence at each property and then move on to the next.

That should tell you all you need to know.

Edited by TechGuyUK (Sat 13-Nov-21 18:06:06)

Agree with all you’ve said there Andrue, and would add that there’s now fierce competition to supply FTTP in many locations.
All this tightens the purse strings more, and hones budgets, and makes the largesse of historical roll outs seem very unlikely to be repeated.

Don't reckon the historical roll out of the telephone network was anything like as fast as the tens of thousands of homes passed a week roll out of FTTP.

The OP was in plan and now has slipped. That suggests a problem that was discovered which we can only guess at. I've had my guess.

TechGuyUK

Having looked at the info you gave and the situation on Google maps I would suggest that the cul-de-sac has had an FTTPoD installation with 1 12 post CBT provided which gives the whole cul-de-sac FTTP. As this is all that was paid for the rest of the close will not have been provided.

However as the splitter would have been provided to serve the whole close any further FTTPoD orders are likely to be cheaper, only requiring a CBT.

If OR had provided FTTP to the whole area it would not have been an FTToD order.

Again if this was a subsidised build rather than FTTPoD any additional premises OR provided would have made it a commercial build and therefore OR would not have been entitled to subsidy funds. They are told which premises to build too by the subsidising body and these must not be included in OR or anyone else's commercial plans for the next x years when the subsidy is agreed. ( x depends on which subsidy scheme). This means any commercial build may be some years off ! ( However FTTPoD again should be cheaper for the reason above)

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I have previously said below so your cul-de-sac is not an isolated case.

In reply to a post by dect:

I could provide you with a cul-de-sac not to far from me where half have FTTP (funded by BDUK) and half don't and the half that missed out were getting the same poor speed as the half that got upgraded, sadly nobody ever said these rollouts are done fairly.

Openreach have never said they will do every single property in the UK using their own money so if you and your neighbours really want FTTP sooner rather than later get yourselves a quote for either FTTPoD or a Community Fibre Partnership.

Hi Kitkat and thank you for a very inciteful and informative response - far more so than those received from official OR channels.

Some years ago, I got in touch with Ian Binks, who had visibility of OpenReach operations and he was extremely helpful in getting a cab activated for FTTC - OR staff and expertise had deemed it "uneconomical" to upgrade, but once it was in place, it was at installed capacity within 2 weeks and fully populated and at capacity within about 4 months. A 2nd larger cab was installed in addition to the original cab to meet demand. OR clearly do not have a great understanding of customer demand.

Ian's apparent replacement kasam.hussain, as well as rob.g.jones and richard.powley (all at OpenReach) have all come up with different explanations and excuses as to how the properties got upgraded and all come back with basically "go get funding" if you want FTTP - or "wait until 2024 and see if we get around to it"...

In any case, even if the costing for FTTPod was done accurately and took into account the existing infrastructure, for me to fund FTTPoD is going to cost more than it would have done to install it along with the rest of the road - and then maybe 11 other properties get the option for nothing, as has already happened 100m away in the same road. This is neither fair on myself - or indeed the cheapest way overall to provide the service, and is naturally deterring people from ordering FTTP who could already be paying customers IF the whole road have been provided for.

What has come to light is that the properties that have been upgraded had reliability issues with FTTC and they still seem to have them on FTTP. I get frequent disconnections and resyncs like my neighbours despite a Draytek router on a 15cm cable directly into the master socket with no other internal wiring at all, powered via a UPS... No one seems interested to look at the root cause of the problem and individually we all get threatened with the OR charges for getting an engineer to come out and look at the problem, IF the ISP will even entertain the idea, which the ones at the cheaper end of the market avoid at all cost.

At the end of the day - and from comments repeated on here, having a private company with shareholders expecting profits and dividends is never going to be the most cost effective way to get a full fibre rollout and that comes back to my point that OpenReach is simply not fit for purpose.

The irony is that I would stand more chance of getting FTTP to my whole street, if I lived in a moderately remote village that suited the OR rollout and marketing machine - or in a densely populated area that was more attractive to other service providers. But living somewhere in between with an "acceptable" speed over 30Mbps regardless of reliability and two thirds of the street falls into the "OpenReach says no" black hole.

The level of frustration among the people living here, seeing fibre being selectively installed all around the surrounding area in just about every road over the last year with no consideration of peoples individual needs is immense. There was even a door to door Ipsos-Mori survey asking every household what they used their Internet access for in great detail (with a telephone follow up interview and online session) - I don't know who funded that, they could not tell me - but asking end users what they need from Broadband in 2021, after 10+ years of councils doing the same countrywide is just a complete waste of time, effort and critically money that could have gone towards installing what we need - a country wide fibre infrastructure, which would provide for any practical speed, at a range of prices from different ISPs and customers could make their choice and market forces would bring prices down, just like 20+ years ago with the original 0.5 / 1 / 2Mbps ADSL roll out..

It should go without saying that fast and reliable broadband is allowing more people to work from home, reducing contact with others and in turn saving lives as well as reducing our carbon footprint, road congestion and fossil fuel use. I would expect the power requirements of FTTP to be lower overall, although the power consumption is moved from the FTTC Cabs back to the end of the Fibre at the exchange or similar - but some of the 400W or so per cabinet across 90,000+ cabs will no doubt be saved once we get to full FTTP, as well as being able to tidy up our streets with the ultimate removal of the Cabs and associated PCPs one day.

While my road is a sample of 1 in 1.8 Million post codes, i doubt it is the only similar example of a minority FTTP rollout. And when we consider the 1.8 million figure and how many repeated visits will be made, the extra costs, charges and the additional environmental impact of those journeys (like I said before, 3 vans and 6 OR staff to add two properties a couple of weeks ago) - then there is more to consider than just OR lining their share holders pockets, not just the damage to our economy and finances during a drawn out process - but also the damage OR are doing to the environment by making many trips to do piecemeal installations in this way.

It is time OR were made to do the RIGHT thing for the many - not the most profitable thing for the lucky few.

Edited by TechGuyUK (Sat 13-Nov-21 23:41:49)

In reply to a post by TechGuyUK:

At the end of the day - and from comments repeated on here, having a private company with shareholders expecting profits and dividends is never going to be the most cost effective way to get a full fibre rollout and that comes back to my point that OpenReach is simply not fit for purpose.

Unless you have access to the full data about costs involved (like any local provisioning issues or capacity problems further upstream) that sort of comment is only an internet sound-bite which looks good to the man in the saloon bar and is the sort of simplistic analysis which always finds easy black-and-white answers to the real world grey. Perhaps you can shed some light by providing some further real-world, commercially confidential data so that we can know that you are providing insight rather than riding a hobby-horse.

The conclusion drawn is from previous comments posted here stating OpenReach is in the business of making a profit and fulfilling contracts to supply - NOT providing the most cost effective and prompt rollout of Fibre for the country.

I am however, not in the habit of breaking confidentiality agreements.

If you cannot grasp the need and benefit of providing a country wide fibre rollout as efficiently and cost effectively as possible and with minimal environmental impact - rather than lining the pockets of shareholders - then I really do not think you have understood the point of the thread at all.

On the one hand, OP accused Openreach of "Profiteering" in the post subject. On the other hand, they are accusing Openreach of doing their rollout in an inefficient manner - i.e. it could be done at lower cost.

To quote from Dire Straits: "Two men say they're Jesus: one of them must be wrong"