Unfortunately, residents have no power to say, which network provider they want to go for.

For example, I am a Hyperoptic Champion of my building here in Central London. My initial ambition was to get Hyperoptic wayleave agreement by getting all the residents to register their interests between August 2014 to February 2015. Even after gathering 30+ signatures my management company did not agree a wayleave with Hyperoptic. That's despite that at the time we didn't have FTTC and our ADSL EO Line service was dreadful.

I would've got 1 year free Hyperoptic 1Gbps if this had happened. But me as a resident of my building have no power to persuade them to choose what Altnet I want.
In the end the wayleave was done with Community Fibre 6 years later, which to be fair is an excellent choice but not something the residents voluntarily chose. There's no voting system to ask residents what Altnet they want.

The Altnet is able to offer cheaper deals because they become the established monopoly by getting all the Openreach customers to switch to theirs.

It's all about the authority that manages those properties and buildings. It's ridiculous that some properties and MDUs have 2-4 FTTP overbuilds including Openreach FTTP and some of us only have 1 FTTP network. In this respect I support the Openreach FTTP wholesale network as it gives us a variety of ISPs to choose from. Now that I have only Community Fibre I will be stuck with them for the foreseeable future. If they price hike, I really won't know what to do other than to try and haggle or temporarily return back to FTTC. Because naturally no one will want to downgrade back to FTTC. Altnets know this and so they are also taking advantage of it and throwing all sorts of offers to get us to switch.

I'm still with BT FTTC and recently had a door sales person from Community Fibre try to entice me to join. He gave me a leaflet promising me 3 month free promo code if I call him along with vouchers. I did not opt through his sales and instead I am thinking to join via Uswitch or MoneySuperMarket instead. As you get Amazon vouchers that sometimes the sale reps don't offer you.

This is a free market economy and the government doesn't care, which network provider wants to come and connect their cables. Because I'm sure their philosophy will be that no one is forcing you to join their service.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Unfortunately, residents have no power to say, which network provider they want to go for.

For example, I am a Hyperoptic Champion of my building here in Central London. My initial ambition was to get Hyperoptic wayleave agreement by getting all the residents to register their interests between August 2014 to February 2015. Even after gathering 30+ signatures my management company did not agree a wayleave with Hyperoptic. That's despite that at the time we didn't have FTTC and our ADSL EO Line service was dreadful.

I would've got 1 year free Hyperoptic 1Gbps if this had happened. But me as a resident of my building have no power to persuade them to choose what Altnet I want.
In the end the wayleave was done with Community Fibre 6 years later, which to be fair is an excellent choice but not something the residents voluntarily chose. There's no voting system to ask residents what Altnet they want.

Is it the management company (in which case you could go down the right-to-manage (RTM) route to replace the management company), or the freeholder?
Freeholders are often predatory and have zero interest in anything except their own profit. Whilst that's understandable from the perspective of a commercial business, the way they work is hugely problematic. They have backhander deals which they can pass costs through to residents. Whenever the paying party is not making a decision there's a conflict of interest which in this case is structural.

FWIW in a building I used to live in, Hyperoptic did a great job putting cabling above dropped ceilings. Then Virgin Media did a hugely bodge job when they ran cables. Again freeholder couldn't care one bit what the building looked like as it didn't affect their revenue.

This particular issue could be solved by having a right for residents to get wayleaves approved by default under some conditions. Better still, abolish the freehold system completely.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

This is a free market economy and the government doesn't care, which network provider wants to come and connect their cables. Because I'm sure their philosophy will be that no one is forcing you to join their service.

It's a free market when it comes to freeholders, not residents.

seb

In reply to a post by seb:

Better still, abolish the freehold system completely.

Do you mean "leasehold"? Abolishing freehold could be quite interesting.

In reply to a post by behuk:

In reply to a post by seb:

Better still, abolish the freehold system completely.

Do you mean "leasehold"? Abolishing freehold could be quite interesting.

sorry yeah.. I was thinking about freeholders who are being twits

Cityfibre and Netomnia(Youfibre) both offer a wholesale platform to allow pick and choose of ISPs. Cityfibre have multiple ISPs who signed up as partners, although obviously none of the BT group ISPs and Sky who sadly didnt take part. Sadly Netomnia despite launching such a platform has no 3rd party partners yet. The ISPs that use their own back haul like Zen and Talktalk also dont cover 100% of CF areas. ISPs that use the Cityfibre network I assume will cover all the CF areas though, so Idnet, AAISP, Acquiss etc.

Yes, the management company is the housing estate association EastendHomes.

The building I live in last 32 years since 1992 formerly was owned and managed by the Council. But in 2005 East End Homes was formed through a partial stock transfer from Tower Hamlets Council in 2005 and currently manages around 3,800 homes. My parents are the leaseholders of the flat. Their office is located right next to the block and have leaseholders meetings scheduled every 1-3 months approximately. But there's a technical services manager who never attends any of these meetings. If anything technical is mentioned like broadband the housing estate manager will say that is for the technical services manager to deal with but if you contact him via email, he will ignore and never respond. Nor can you get hold of him in person.

In 2015 when I spoke to the housing estate manager in the office regarding Hyperoptic and I showed him evidence of the number of registered interests. He told me he will call me 2 days later, which he did but told me at that time following his discussion with the technical manager that if they are going to sign wayleave for FTTP they'll do it with another provider and not Hyperoptic!

6 years later... A new UK law was introduced in March 2021 https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/03/new-uk...
Exactly 2 months later wayleave agreement finally happened!! https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/05/commun...

But it was Community Fibre instead. Frankly, I'm not sure if my management team from EastendHomes was ever going to voluntarily sign the wayleave agreement. It was only because of this new government ruling to force wayleave agreement made the difference and sped up this process. Now this is highly unlikely to be a coincidence considering that this has happened only 2 months later yet no wayleave was agreed all these years prior that.

All residential buildings owned by any particular management are therefore affected and can only go by what is being agreed.

Till this day many housing associations view Fibre broadband more as a luxury than a priority. They couldn't care less that my old ADSL would constantly drop out! I only luckily got upgraded to FTTC in Oct 2019 that resolved all these problems. Now my FTTC connection up time is stable several weeks onwards but that's not a credit of my management but Openreach who agreed to upgrade us.

Now with FTTP we basically need a new wayleave law where residents and leaseholders should be able to have the power to request what provider they want. The freeholder that manages those buildings shouldn't have the power to deny permission for FTTP or select only what they choose.

Unfortunately, this present government law only helps for the first FTTP network to go live for a premises without full fibre. For example, if I want Openreach FTTP, Hyperoptic, G.Network, CityFibre, Netomnia, etc I won't get any support because I already have Community Fibre.

Management is no longer obliged to agree a wayleave for a second FTTP provider and will not be penalised for refusing. That way you are stuck with an Altnet and that Altnet now becomes the monopoly.

Wholesale networks are indeed a better idea. We don't need multiple FTTP networks, all we need is one fibre cable and that's it. But the problem with the present Altnets is that we artificially require multiple Altnet providers to avoid being stuck with only one monopoly! Yes, they are cheaper for now compared to Openreach but in future things can change. Any second overbuild agreement will be at the hands of discretion of goodwill. We have no say on what we want and we can't do anything if such request is refused. Perhaps a new legislative law in parliament will change that in future.

Similar problem where I live. Small block of flats, owned by a "registered social landlord" (non profit making) Housing Assocation. 90% of the flats were bought under RTB, and then sold on the open market, we are thus "leaseholders" legally.

It appears that only legacy Openreach copper, and worn-out/faulty Virmin Media coax are my options. The new FTTP AltNet in the street is unable to get the housing association to even acknowledge their existance, nevermind sign a wayleave.

I assume when Openreach FTTP appears (our town is in this week's list); that they will ignore this as well; and probably when Virgin come round to replace coax with FTTP (by 2030) that will be ignored.

That law doesn't seem to have achieved much.

Yes, that's because you already have Virgin Media and even though it is coax but because it is gigabit capable, that's why your housing association isn't obligated to sign wayleave for another FTTP provider.

This law is flawed and only addresses gigabit capability broadband that's available in an area. It doesn't priorities Full Fibre as long as the service is capable of delivering gigabit download speeds whether via 5G or Coax. FTTP no longer becomes a mandatory requirement.

But in our case we don't have Virgin Media and most of the premises do not. Frankly the system is daft and doesn't fully resolve the issue for many. Again, even if Virgin Media can deliver gigabit it is still not the solution for many as for example Virgin Media are notorious for their price hikes. Their broadband packages on average are more expensive than most of the Altnets and even compared to Openreach FTTP. Leaseholders are paying a lot of service charge to their housing association and deserve better choices and not be stuck with only one provider.

If this law doesn't change then it is very difficult to see how all of those MDUs will get FTTP from Openreach by December 2026 especially in London where Hyperoptic and Community Fibre are the dominant providers.

From my observation some housing associations are very easy to grant wayleave like Tower Hamlets Homes. In many buildings I see Hyperoptic, Community Fibre and either G.Network or Openreach FTTP. They of-course aren't obliged to grant these wayleaves but they happen to be granting them without any fuss unlike my housing association EastendHomes.

Probably one of the biggest hindrance for this permission is because the UK was slow to upgrade to FTTP. Because Openreach made FTTC available and most people are happy with 80/20Mbps the urgency to grant permission for FTTP has not been taken seriously. If in the first place this jump happened from ADSL to FTTP then there would've been greater progress.

Those Altnets would never have appeared in such great numbers if we had a single wholesale network provider like Openreach or CityFibre. Now Openreach are more desperate to upgrade to FTTP as the Altnets are stealing their existing ADSL/FTTC customers and are enticing those customers with significantly cheaper packages.

But of-course that doesn't excite me too much because the risk of price hikes is still on the agenda! If those Altnets establish themselves then they will eventually price hike once they acquire all their old Openreach customers! The way to break this potential monopoly is either to have a second FTTP Altnet overbuild or to have Openreach/CityFibre FTTP. Without competition the Altnets will eventually become expensive as well as they will take advantage of being the only provider and that's not good for anyone of us who is being served by only one provider.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

This law is flawed and only addresses gigabit capability broadband that's available in an area.

Agreed.

Probably one of the biggest hindrance for this permission is because the UK was slow to upgrade to FTTP.

Fully agree, the problem with DSL is that generally there is the thought they are getting a good service when in a significant number of cases there is twin copper planned for voice in really poor location for high speeds. My flat started off with 55 down, 9 up, but when I left DSL I was managing 38 down and 3 up; apparently due to crosstalk from all the flats moving to VDSL. (Thanks to competitive pricing tempting customers from other services).

Without competition the Altnets will eventually become expensive as well as they will take advantage of being the only provider and that's not good for anyone of us who is being served by only one provider.

It is painful, and one for your MP, when you know whom that will be !

I think you might be ok on the VM, apparently the law allows someone with existing installations to update it under old wayleave agreement, providing they only accessing the same areas.