Openreach costs

Close to me there are two MDUs - 6 & 8 flats. OR are finally installing FTTP into each block and I have so far seen 3 vans with 3 or 4 technicians doing the work, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so far and it may be completed sometime tomorrow.

A total of potentially 10-15 man-days on-site at around £500/day so £5k-7k5. With full take up you are looking at £350-550 per dwelling and more if not all take any OR service. How many years will it take for OR to recover the overall costs of that install?

Everyone demands cheap services but fail to realise some of the costs involved.

Well done MHC, that was a very interesting piece and gives people food for thought.

Very true. All this whilst the company is hog tied by regulation.

Openreach aim for a cost per property passed in the range £250-£350 according to this article. That's across all properties, SDU and MDU. Therefore, what you calculate is in the expected ballpark.

In addition, the cost of connecting an individual property also around £300, although there is a £100+ charge back to the service provider for activating a line.

Yes, it will take quite a while to pay this back. WIth Openreach they can expect a very high take-up rate in the longer term, as they'll be mostly migrating their existing copper customers onto it. But for the same reason, that's why there wasn't a business case for upgrading before, since not many people take high speed services. It's only the competition from altnets which has forced them to do so, to avoid losing customers.

Ultimately they'll have a simpler and more reliable network though, and save money through the much lower fault rate.

£500/day on labour is a big overestimate for this type of work, unless I'm misunderstanding the number.

i was about to say the same thats £66 an hour based on a 7.5 hour day, image £15-20 a hour range.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Close to me there are two MDUs - 6 & 8 flats. OR are finally installing FTTP into each block and I have so far seen 3 vans with 3 or 4 technicians doing the work, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so far and it may be completed sometime tomorrow.

A total of potentially 10-15 man-days on-site at around £500/day so £5k-7k5. With full take up you are looking at £350-550 per dwelling and more if not all take any OR service. How many years will it take for OR to recover the overall costs of that install?

Everyone demands cheap services but fail to realise some of the costs involved.

To try and get some perspective on the comments elsewhere in this topic is the £500/day a buy-in rate, a charge-out rate or an in-house rate with a substantial premium for in-house overheads?

I think with all due respect, it may be something of a wet finger the air. The amounts and numbers can’t be precise / known exactly (unless one is the Openreach estimator on the job). So the figures are not really definitive but pure ballpark - could be +/- 50% easily.

3 or 4 people each day?

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Very true. All this whilst the company is hog tied by regulation.

Aww, I feel so sorry for them.

NOT

For years, they have more or less had a monopoly and charged sky-high prices, now they have competition, and people start to feel sorry for the company