My local Openreach FTTP install but sub contracted to Morrisons is odd, the manholes with ducting were installed and blue ropes could be seen coming out of the manholes before the covers were put on.

They came around this week to pull the fibre through and the blue rope is only 3ft long tied to a much stronger bright orange cable. Wonder if the blue rope was breaking so they moved to a stronger rope but to keep the colours put short lengths of blue on each end. Anyway I now have some 400m of orange nylon rope with 2 3ft blue ends.

Out of reach seems to be upping their game, maybe they are getting worried about the amount of Alt networks springing up, I hope that the alt networks can compete against Openreach.
I have no idea what is happening here, Zzoomm seems to have gone quiet around here, but still nothing about when they will be live and Out of reach was at the bottom of my road a few days ago, stuck them barriers around a pole and that is the way it has stayed.

I don't really buy into this idea that Openreach haven't been putting effort in, sure if you look at a local level you might find an altnet doing a better job at getting to people than Openreach, but Openreach are able to serve 8 million premises now, building at 70k a week. Zzoomm's entire network, for example, was 50k as of June.

Competition is good, altnets are doing some innovative things and symmetrical products are always welcome, but I wouldn't want to only have an altnet available to me. It would genuinely be a difficult decision between FTTC and an altnet such as Trooli where you can't use your own router, or one of the providers that is CGNAT on residential services and doesn't offer IPv6.

Openreach are certainly making progress - although for some reason they have decided to connect fibre up to all the streets in our area except ours (and we can see a fibre-enabled pole only about 50 metres away). I'm guessing there's a blocked or missing duct that they've decided is uneconomic to dig up at this stage.

As for altnets, it depends on which one(s) are available to you of course. Fortunately although we don't have Openreach full fibre here we do have CityFibre, and some of the ISPs available to us (currently a choice of 8) offer a quality service with IPv6 etc - and where they use both networks they are often cheaper on CityFibre. We've just been connected to Giganet, who have a reputation as a top-class ISP, and it's all been good so far.

Out of reach seemed to have no or little interest here before Zzoomm started up, now Out of reach have FTTH in the same estate that Zzoomm started out in, strange that. I also hated that out of reach have had public money chucked at them over the years. They are a privatised company with shareholders and yet our tax have paid for it to build networks in different places, I bet we won't get that back, instead the shareholders will get the benefit. Out of reach have had the original infrastructure for peanuts and only in the last few years have started to update it.

What we need is a single network, but not run by a private company, it should be owned by all of us and then different providers can use it, like they do with Openreach now, but the network should be a not for profit company.

All these altnets while good in theory will confuse people and a lot of people will have no idea what is what. I already hear it where people think that they can use the service they have now with Zzoomm, not realising that Zzoomm is a separate network

I would love Zzoomm to do well and knock openreach down a peg or two, but this is Hereford and I am pretty sure Zzoomm will lose a load of money and sell the network to someone like Talk Talk, saying that Talk Talk have their own problems at the moment cash wise.

as i said above, it has gone quiet now up by me, I have not seen a Zzoomm van or any of their people for a couple of weeks around here I can't even hear any drilling.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Out of reach seemed to have no or little interest here before Zzoomm started up,

I think you're seeing a correlation where there is none. Its possible the OR vans you saw were helping with unblocking as part of the PIA requirements who knows. OR have no date for my town and an AltNet has been at work for over 12 months. No sign of any OR vans.

The level of planning and logistics involved in these rollouts is huge, there is simply no chance that an altnet is spotted deploying and Openreach move teams in to cover them off within a couple of months.

When you see manifold boxes fitted to the poles you'll be very close to going live. Our village took about two weeks from the manifolds going up to being able to order FTTH.

In reply to a post by neo_wales:

When you see manifold boxes fitted to the poles you'll be very close to going live.

Assuming you have poles

In reply to a post by jchamier:

I think you're seeing a correlation where there is none. Its possible the OR vans you saw were helping with unblocking as part of the PIA requirements who knows. OR have no date for my town and an AltNet has been at work for over 12 months. No sign of any OR vans.

I saw a couple or so years ago that Openreach was coming up here, it may have been longer, but then it all went quiet, but it does seem a coincidence that openreach have now got FTTH running where Zzoomm first started laying fibre.
it just seems very strange.