ELECTRICITY POLES

Internetty have installed fibre to the home in Wootton,north lincs. However, they were unable to use electricity poles as National Grid will not deal with smaller providers. This has resulted in unneccary digging up of the roads. Openreach can use the poles. This seems to be an unfair competitive advantage which the government should rectify as it pushes up the cost of installs.

As an aside,openreach did not have our village on the list for upgrading to full fibre, but now a competitor is here they have suddenly started installing full fibre. What a surprise !

It is the electricity suppliers who own, maintain, and create the rules over who and what can use their poles.

In reply to a post by 468corp:

This has resulted in unneccary digging up of the roads. ... as it pushes up the cost of installs.

On the flip side though, you haven't had to pay any extra for this, and you now have a service which is less likely to be disrupted by storm damage. Although you might not have any power to use it with

In reply to a post by 468corp:

As an aside,openreach did not have our village on the list for upgrading to full fibre, but now a competitor is here they have suddenly started installing full fibre. What a surprise !

It's understandable. If Openreach deploys FTTP to an area where only Openreach copper exists, they are only taking customers from themselves - there is almost zero return on their investment. But if they deploy where there's an altnet, they reduce the number of customers they lose.

In reply to a post by 468corp:

they were unable to use electricity poles as National Grid will not deal with smaller providers. This has resulted in unneccary digging up of the roads.

Everyone I know would prefer their broadband service undergrounded rather than via poles so I think you are the lucky one

Not sure if that is true as Trooli have an agreement to use electric poles in UK Power Network areas.

Use of electric poles is outside of PIA regulation and up to the electric DNOs and altnet.

In reply to a post by 468corp:

Internetty have installed fibre to the home in Wootton,north lincs. However, they were unable to use electricity poles as National Grid will not deal with smaller providers. This has resulted in unneccary digging up of the roads. Openreach can use the poles. This seems to be an unfair competitive advantage which the government should rectify as it pushes up the cost of installs.

As an aside,openreach did not have our village on the list for upgrading to full fibre, but now a competitor is here they have suddenly started installing full fibre. What a surprise !

It's not National Grid (they do the HV transmission side of things), but rather the local DNO (Distribution Network Operator) like Northern Powergrid or Western Power Distribution, that "own" the low-voltage pole network that would be used. There are I think 6 DNOs that serve different parts of the country.

The Altnet would need to get separate approval /agreement from each of these DNO's to use their infrastructure. Probably not that easy.

Worth bearing in mind that the DNO network will also often include 11KV lines too, which while and order of magnitude lower than the national grid lines, are still rather high risk compared to 240V lines

Yes I think everything up to and including 132 kV is DNO owned. Not that you’d expect an Altnet to be stringing up fibre atop those (hopefully not ⚡️⚡️)

I don't think anybody is putting telecom plant on 11KV stuff any more and what is there is being pro-actively removed.

But can openreach use them to attach fibre?