I can sort of see why it might in our area as we are lucky/unlucky enough that all the houses around us now have two altnets they can connect to who are using OR ducting, OR boxes and just connecting their own cabinets and boxes where required.

Unfortunately streets like ours which haven't been enabled (till now) have been completely bypassed or postponed by the altnets until OR come and lay the ducts first which does seem a little unfair

Probably one for the politicians but the only way I could see it being equalised is if everyone can use everyones ducts but their would have to be a standard for laying, connecting etc which would likely lead to an XKCD 927 scenario or roll outs being slow due to everyone waiting for someone to make the first move.

What I would say is hopefully your ISP is informed and honest enough to advise what the dates supplied actually represent, your date of 20/08 isn’t a contractual installation date , but is a date by which OR should survey and then organise whatever works are needed , this in effect represents the first part of the first stage of the KCI2 ( two stage ) installation process .
Once the work to get a duct to your home is compete, the second stage ( with a new contract date ) should be advised, the first stage completion date needs to be flexible, as there can be varying considerations, noticing the local authority ( in some cases a long lead time if a road crossing were involved for example) as well as organising and then completing the civils work

Edited by Iniltous (Sat 17-Aug-24 10:37:54)

They've been pretty good on that so far to be fair, a few days after ordering we got an email saying they were hoping to have the external survey completed and that by the 20th they would look to confirm what works were needed or if another survey is required.

I'm hoping that it should be a fairly straight forward install after the ducting is outside our house as I've pulled in a duct to the end of the garden already with a draw rope and I've had power installed where the ducting meets the property so once they install the fibre termination outside they can pull it in on the wall opposite and it will be all there ready for them to connect up

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

They do, but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Openreach equipped all the homes in a road in our village (that are underground fed for copper) with Toby Boxes outside each one, (in the pavement). This was 12-18 months ago.

Other homes in the same road, are OH fed for copper, and have no Tobies

Well Openreach came out to visit the house today and overall it wasn't superb news but it wasn't awful either.

The technician was very understanding and it explained that they were expecting to see additional floor boxes fitted on ourside of the street so they could feed through the cables from the CBT on the opposite side of the road.

Unfortunately because they aren't there they will have to scope out some remedial civil works and get them installed.

The escalation contact we have at Openreach spoke to us after the enginner had left as they too were surprised at the lack of floor boxes as whilst they were aware toby boxes may not be fitted the floor box was expected to be there.

Because of this we've now got to wait for a build plan to see what works the engineer has recommended, how much they will cost and if Openreach or our provider will cover them which is concerning since I imagine digging up the road and path to get to our house will take a fair bit of effort time and materials.

Fingers crossed some good news will come however I imagine it's going to breach the excess charge threshold

Presumably when you say floor boxes you mean joint boxes( rectangular concrete lidded buried structures in the footpath ) .
In areas where ‘direct in ground, buried armoured cables were used , it’s often the case that although all the properties are DIG , one side of the street can have some joint boxes ( and usually they can be of use to the FTTP rollout ) and the other side of the street may not have any jointboxes ( apart from JB23 which don’t really count ) , however the new DIG process doesn’t view this as an issue , simply that some jointboxes may also need to be constructed , especially if road crossings are involved.

You said there was a ‘proper’ jointbox outside a neighbour 4 or 5 houses away , presumably that’s on the same side of the street as you , I would have thought was useable for your provision.

, OR cannot really come back and ask for ECC as the construction would extended the OR network and potentially benefit your neighbours, ECC is normally if only you would benefit from any construction , so think very long private driveways etc , not normally duct and boxes in public streets , and it was OR showing availability, not you enquiring using something like FTTPod

It coukd be the ‘proper’ jointbox you spotted 5 doors away was a JB21 , and surprisingly it’s an updated version of a JB23 ( often replaces JB23’s ) but looks like a ‘proper’ jointbox as it has a concrete lid , but they are very shallow and not designed for use with ducts , they are more ‘square’ than rectangular.

Edited by Iniltous (Tue 20-Aug-24 21:17:48)

Yes, joint boxes (I didn't realise the large grey ones had the the name as the smaller ones)

I think half the battle for us is that whilst their is a joint box up the road from us, it is a fair distance away because how our street is setup (We are a cul-de-sac that branches off of a side street) meaning to get from the joint box closes by line of sight to the house would be digging up quite a bit of road or going across the street and then around the footpath.

For the joint box up the road I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case as the engineer came and and wrote it off pretty quickly advising the best route would be for them to cross the road at the bottom of the street and then duct round to us with a joint box near us and our neighbors so they can duct from their into our houses.

Thank you for the info on the roll outs, it is appreciated as I was loosing hope at the idea we were going to be hit with a massive surcharge. As you put I wouldn't mind if it was something that would benefit just me but I know their are neighbors around me interested in buying the service as the current VDSL2 and Virgin Media options are very slow or just unreliable.

The CBT that your address is allocated to will already have been provided, tested and made ready to provide service , it will reside inside a jointbox that already exists, was the correct size and had ‘space’ for the CBT( or CBT’s ) to be installed , that point is fixed , obviously without knowing the lay of the land , there may be more than one possible route from it to your house , but whoever designs that final ‘route’ should take things like making neighbours provisions ( should they order ) an easier proposition.

This change in process ( from building to the curtilage, paid for by FND , fibre network delivery, to this current system, where the last part of construction in the public footpath/ carriageway as well as the ‘route’ across the customers garden is now the responsibility of SD ‘service delivery’ , although different organisations within Openreach , the planning ‘rules’ are the same for both groups .

TBH , my knowledge is primarily on the previous system, building to the curtilage, the change happening around the time I stopped being involved with these process , so I’ve no personal knowledge of how fast ( or slow ) SD deal with these installations

Edited by Iniltous (Wed 21-Aug-24 10:01:53)

Thank you for the info

Yeah, I think you are 100% correct in that they are trying to figure our the most economic route to get the fibre across the street.

I've spoken with the ISP we are going with for now to give them the updated whilst we wait for Openreach to figure out the ECC and they have told me with no uncertanty they don't support ECCs so if it is passed on to them they will just cancel the order which is something, not ideal but it is what it is.

Meanwhile Openreach have advised it will be around 7 to 10 days before they get the costs figured out from the survey which was done yesterday.

From my side it just seems mad that they can classify houses as ready for fibre but upon placing an order a fairly substantial amount of work needs to be done to get the fibre there, that might be because what I classify as a large amount of work is small to Openreach but I guess I will find that out by late next week

If there is ECC, find out how much, and then go to EE/BT. I currently don't know the upper limit that EE/BT will support on ECC. Also if you can ask if you can do the ducting from the road to your house if you competent enough to do so.