So I either wait or get FTTPod…
For another option, I suggest you get some quotes for a leased line. If you're lucky and you're close to an existing leased line node, you may not have any excess construction costs, or they will be amortised over the contract. If you end up paying (say) £300+VAT per month, then that's £10,800 over 3 years.
That's less in total than FTTPoD, it doesn't have to be paid up-front, and there is a clear incentive to install quickly because they don't start getting paid until the service is live. And of course you get a top-notch service, typically 1G/1G with static IPs (you can perhaps save a few quid and get 100M/100M)
The downside is that after 3 years, you have nothing to show for it: if native FTTP hasn't arrived by then, then you're continuing to pay these high charges. Beware also that the contracts tend to be a bit sneaky, e.g. some will auto-renew for a whole year if you haven't given notice of termination 90 days *before* the end of the current contract period. Check carefully what you sign.
So how does this compare to FTTPoD? Well, I had FTTPoD installed around the same time as Pheasant. I placed the order in March 2018, paid everything up front once the survey was done, but the installation wasn't completed until September 2019. There were various engineering difficulties, culminating in 164m of new duct having to be laid in a minor road. 5 days of roadworks, and all at Openreach's expense since they'd accepted the contract.
Now, for me, it's been great. Like Pheasant, I benefited from the earlier reasonable pricing, a government voucher, and being able to write it off as a business expense. And it was in place in time for Covid. My exchange area is now in OR FTTP plans, but I see no sign of construction. I'll have had at least 6 years benefit from it.
Would I recommend it to anyone today? No: it seems like an extraordinarily bad gamble. You could pay your £15K(*)+VAT up front today, and you might not have any service for a year or more - and in the mean time an altnet might come along, or even native Openreach FTTP (although you'd never be sure if Openreach would have deployed it at that time *without* your FTTPoD order kicking things off)
The current Openreach plans are 25 million by end 2026, and "aspiration" for 30 million by 2030. That's around 95% coverage. You'd have to be quite unlucky to be left out by then, if there's already FTTP less than a mile away. In any case, by then I reckon Openreach will be quietly weighing up the operational benefits of being able to *completely* decommission their copper network, whilst going cap-in-hand to government to pay for it.
A stop-gap solution will give you service more quickly and much more cheaply - maybe Starlink, maybe a leased line. Also, 4G/5G coverage in your area could improve over the next few years. (**)
(*) Presumably what you have now is a "desktop quote". There is a chance that once the order is placed and the physical survey is done, they might find it's easier than expected and the price falls. But equally, it might not - in which case, if you cancel the order at that point, you've lost a non-refundable £300. Or it might even go up.
(**) Maybe it could work today with the right equipment. You said "external antennas", but if you had long cables from the antenna to the router - by which I mean more than a couple of metres - these will cause huge signal losses. A weatherproof 4G/5G router, with directional antenna and CAT5e cable back into the house, might work much better.
Edited by candlerb (Thu 19-Jun-25 16:24:28)
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