Openreach: Planning to ordering

What has people's experience been with the time between the Openreach website saying "We're planning your area" to actually being able to order/receive FTTP?

My postcode has just flipped to the planning stage. I live in a town of ~13,000 people and there is FTTP on some new estates, either from Openreach or an alt network.

An alt network is currently plumbing in the streets at the moment and I can place an order, but apart from the headline speed, the service offering is pretty poor (I'm a SOHO user and this is very much a domestic, traffic-shaped, bottom tier ISP). I'm reluctant to sign up to fibre for 12-18 months and remove the commercial interest from Openreach to provide me with a connection I can use with a quality ISP. But if I'm looking at 2 years until Openreach to deliver, then it might do as a stop gap for just a pure bandwidth pipe.

In reply to a post by Dash:

What has people's experience been with the time between the Openreach website saying "We're planning your area" to actually being able to order/receive FTTP?

Anything from almost immediately to never - i.e. it's not uncommon for it to switch back to "unplanned".

In reply to a post by Dash:

I'm reluctant to sign up to fibre for 12-18 months and remove the commercial interest from Openreach to provide me with a connection I can use with a quality ISP.

Openreach won't really know whether you've bought service from an altnet or not (well, I suppose they can look at PIA records if the altnet uses PIA, and they might notice that you've cancelled your copper-based service)

But if anything, that gives them *more* of an incentive to deliver fibre to you: the more people who switch away, the more revenue they lose, and the stronger business case to complete the rollout.

You could consider using the altnet in conjunction with the AAISP L2TP service. It's only £10 per month and gives you static v4 and v6, no shaping (assuming the altnet doesn't shape the underlying L2TP traffic of course!). There are bandwidth and speed limits, but it might be worth looking into.

(L2TP is basically PPP over IP)

Thanks.

I figured I'd take the punt on the alt as they're offering half price for twelve months. I've gone for the bottom tier package and will run it alongside FTTC - will always have the option of the alt even if Openreach don't get round to here any time sane.

Round my way it was about 18 month from when I noticed FTTP was planned on the Openreach website to being able to order. Other areas near to me changed from planned to not planned.

I'm guessing the build went ahead because the estate is a 2014 new-build so came under the retro-build programme.