Openreach, do they still refuse to talk to Joe Public? If so

It is now official i live in the slowest part of London for broadband 0.5mbits for some folks.
I'm ok right now and have Relish which gives me what i need speed wise, but a new development is going up and will KILL my speed to almost nothing so maybe looking to move back to normal adsl2, is there anyway i can chase up Openreach (OR) to either pull their finger out or make a guess when we will get some kind of modern world comms, i last looked at my local map and nothing is planned so looking at well over 12 months if i understand it right.

Any help or advice would be welcome, please don't mention local MP he is too busy filling his pockets with bundles of cash or being seen on TV at every oppertunity but failing to do jack for his area.

All1

If it's a busy enough area and you think you could drill up enough interest, then there's the option of the communite funded partnerships.

Are you currently served by a cabinet or is your line direct to the exchange?

Or partnerships with others, or encourage virgin media expansion etc

Or email clive selley or gavin patterson direct.

Or give the forum more information, it maybe that there are improvements you can make to your current service to make it more useable ?

Why is a new estate going to 'KILL' your speeds ?

A postcode might provide more clues.

Is your line really that many kilometres from the exchange ?

Relish use 4g wireless so if a new block is built in line of sight it may affect the signal.
Rotherhithe / Bermondsey have a well known history or poor broadband . The London Extenaion Project is addressing some of that.

Ah OK, thank you for the detail witchunt.

A community project would be extremely hard to organise in SE16 (the affected area). All riverside and docks are EO lines. Openreach have rearranged most of the inland of Rotherhithe peninsula, and some of inland areas missing are in scope. Riverside and docks are not.

The area is geographically a narrow strip of land 2-3 miles long. All local cabling is aluminium instead of copper. To get decent speeds, a cabinet must be installed relatively close to properties. G.Fast seems to be working with 350m of copper, which translates to 100-150m of aluminium.

This makes a community project candidate target only a small plot of land. Hyperoptic is very active in the area, and every block of flats with over 30 flats can get Hyperoptic for free if there is enough interest. Most of them have already done so. If someone living in a townhouse or small block of flats somehow managed to raise interest, every large building in the area would just go hyperoptic, as it does not cost them a penny in installation fees. A small community project would become even smaller as those not able to get Hyperoptic are scattered around the strip of land. The affected properties are not in gated developments with a management company structure but townhouses all around. It is difficult to imagine where a cabinet could be placed so that a community project would have even 50 "candidates" participating.

Then there is the problem of being in London. 75% of Rotherhithe residents are tenants. Not many of them would be willing to chip in to a community project that finishes in 18 months when they already live elsewhere. Buy to let landlords are not too keen on financing this, as it does not affect their income in any way. Riverside properties in London sell with or without fibre internet, and rental property market is soaring as well.

A community project that cost £30k would really struggle to find even 20 contributors. And when the cost starts to go from a couple of hundred pounds to thousands, more will drop off because they cannot afford it.

If a gap funding model is expected or required, OR or council needs to come up with a better way of sorting this. Many of those affected probably would chip in 200-300 pounds to solve the problem, but with the traditional community project / cabinet rearrangement model it will not be enough in this area due to geography, strong Hyperoptic presence and aluminium cabling. Or then someone else than OR needs to do this. Cabling townhouses is complicated for Hyperoptic as well. I understand some projects in the area have failed as their cables would have needed to cross someone else's property externally, and they did not get permission to do so.

The area is a mess for many different reasons. This is probably why OR have stopped their cabinet rearrangement process to the "easy" parts of the peninsula and Virgin is actively looking elsewhere. Hyperoptic can solve the problem at least to some, but I cannot imagine what could be the solution for all. OR is not willing to do it without someone paying them to do it. Gap funding model from residents is impossible to arrange. Council does not have money and spending it on this would raise questions whether this is a priority compared to healthcare.

USO might eventually bring in some government money as the affected properties are all hovering just above 2Mbps, and there is no way these lines will ever support 10Mbps without a rearrangement. Relish might eventually get permission to set up a mast there, but it would not be good fod 4k prime time TV streaming. I gave Relish a go and got decent speeds between 2am and 9am, but 6pm to midnight it was slower than my ADSL, which is really slow.

Which means the wait continues for a couple of years at least until USO money becomes available in one form or another.

OR, like all the other businesses you have mentioned are primarily shareholder and profit driven businesses.

If an area is too costly to meet their ROI strategy, then why should the fork out? It's no different than asking you to pay £1000 into a bank and get £10 back every year, but you're never able to access your original £1000.

I did not say they should.

I only explained why very little is happening in the area, and why none of the currently available methods (waiting for OR or Virgin to invest, community projects, public money) seem to work there. This area needs a different approach - or a decision to just leave it as it is and forget the whole thing. Some people will complain but people always complain about something and it is easy to ignore.

For example gap funding from residents. The current model does not work as money needs to be committed now and when the project is complete, quite a many either do not live there anymore or at least hope to live elsewhere. It is different in rural areas where people hope to live in the same place for generations to come. It is also easier in large developments where a community naturally exists, and a majority decision can generate the gap funding collected in service charges. For townhouses occupied by tenants this just does not work.

If there was a way of removing the lead time through a fund that would pay the investment, and those taking up a faster service when it is available would need to pay a £200 one off initial installation cost per property to help this fund eventually recover the money, more people would chip in as they would get a faster connection in days instead of months or years. A tenant would be much happier to pay this than for a future upgrade. This of course is not doable for many reasons, it is just an example where an obstacle of an existing model would be mitigated.

There is also something seriously wrong with the pricing model set by Ofcom. How I understand it, Openreach will get exactly the same amount of money for my 2Mbps capable EO line and a rearranged FTTC line. There will never be a business case to invest. Instead, they should be allowed (or forced) to price lines based on what the line is capable of. The current price would probably be the FTTC baseline as it covers the vast majority of their lines. If a long, aluminium EO line capable of very little would net them only 5% of a FTTC capable line, they would have a motivation to invest into these areas suddenly generating a loss to return them to black.

Council seems to be at least attempting something. I understand they would be interested in tapping into government FTTP money if there is any, and USO money if that ever becomes available. I hope we at least will soon have an understanding what sort of money are we talking about, and are there other obstacles.

https://www.completetenders.com/london-internet-serv...

H

Instead, they should be allowed (or forced) to price lines based on what the line is capable of

This has been suggested before. However, it falls down when someone would be very happy with 2Mb and paying the 2Mb price but unfortunately lives somewhere they can get 330Mb. Many people choose to have 40Mb rather than 80Mb because of priced - if it was priced on the speed a line could achieve then people who happen to live close to cabinets (or on FTTP) will end up paying more for speeds they don't necessarily want.

And as has also been mentioned the slow lines tend to cost more to run than the fast lines. Generally because the slow lines are much longer and therefore have more copper to keep up.

More likely to make a difference over time is a USO. This takes away much of the business case decision and moves it to regulatory compliance.

And the small fact that it is a totally artificial pricing arrangement.

The price difference between Openreach wholesale prices 40/2 and 40/10 and 80/20 products reveal that the biggest element is the port cost, so more speed differentials are not going to create significant changes in revenue, in fact the extra costs of handling the more complex billing/product choices might swallow up the differences, unless the faster services got a lot more expensive.

Bull in china shop - Ofcom is forcing down the cost of GEA-FTTC 40/10 product (and only that product) in 2018. This will get interesting as price drop does not apply to GEA-FTTP 40/10 so those with the full FTTP option may be upset about not getting the price cut.

Selling based on what the line is capable of may also mean full fibre is never going to happen, since full fibre could be charged at the full capabilities of GPON or XGPON potentially, and thus people will simply not buy it.

True. It is a form of taxation where those with modern infrastructure pay more than it takes to keep their modern infrastructure up and running, to fund investment to bring those lagging behind to the same level. This is more or less how Virgin operates, as well as other operators who manage their own infrastructure. They "overcharge" existing users to fund investment to better infrastructure and expansion to new areas, where they eventually hope to be in black when people sign up for their service. Virgin does not expect anyone to pay them before they sign up, nor does Hyperoptic.

Of course it does not need to be so. We can decide that upgrading infrastructure is of national interest and we fund infrastructure investment from taxpayers' money. The role of Openreach would then be mostly maintenance. The current pricing model is geared towards this. If we chose this model, then we would need to allocate public funds to urban areas in England as well, not only rural areas and urban areas controlled by devolved administrations.

Now we have the worst of both worlds. Openreach is not encouraged to invest and public money is not being spent, and there seems to be no apparent solution to the problem of slow connections in English cities. Those who are lucky enough to live in a place where a community project is viable, can take the initiative and solve their problem usually with a manageable cost. Some of us are not so lucky, and being left in limbo without any apparent way out is extremely frustrating. And those 90% whose properties were initially cabled correctly are lucky as well, as they can get cheap connections.

Third option, as I wrote earlier, is to make a decision that we do not care about us suffering from slow speeds, and we should not even expect to things improve. At least there is a decision then. A decision can be challenged and if we know this, we can start thinking about moving.

Now we just do not know. I have checked my line weekly for the past five years, hoping it one day to be "in scope". This far no such luck. I do not want to sell my home just yet as things could start improving tomorrow. It is also possible, that in 2020 I still keep checking weekly and seeing "Exploring solutions".

The least I think we could expect from OR is to be much more open with their plans. They must have an idea whether they are going to eventually upgrade a large area in central London. If they have made a decision not to do this, they should share it with us. If they require gap funding, they should come out with a price tag. Politicians have tried to get this information from OR with little luck, and the saga of not knowing anything continues.

In reply to a post by hvis42:

The least I think we could expect from OR is to be much more open with their plans. They must have an idea whether they are going to eventually upgrade a large area in central London. If they have made a decision not to do this, they should share it with us. If they require gap funding, they should come out with a price tag. Politicians have tried to get this information from OR with little luck, and the saga of not knowing anything continues.

A business has to keep certain things internal and not run out to the public. Think if OR said that in the future they were going to invest in your area. Then that would put off Virgin or anyone else thinking to investing in the area.
Also while they may have plans for the future to upgrade the area. It may well all be dependent on funding being avaiable....
For which Ofcom can put a massive dent in these plans.

Virgin is currently not put off in any way, almost all of their expansion in recent years has gone to areas already served by Openreach FTTC. Why would they be put off with their plans if they knew Openreach might one day go to an area they are not currently serving, if they are willing to go to areas they are already serving now?

I would rather think it working another way. If Openreach announced it has no plans to do anything unless someone pays them, another provider might look that area more favourably.

This would also bring to light the gap funding needed. I have a hunch it might not be an excessive amount in many of the affected areas, but without a community project, which requires a community that is non-existent in many urban areas, they do not reveal it to us.

Have you asked what the required gap funding might be? No community is required to ask that question. I'm also in London and have travelled that route and am now enjoying reasonably fast access from the resulting gap funded AIO cab (WRVAUX54). The initial enquiries were me alone and only after getting an idea of the cost did I start to get our group together. It was at least four years from my first talking to OR and our cab going live last September.

Not at all easy for the reasons you state and easier for me as we had a pre-exiting group/community. Due to BT being a public company answerable to its shareholders for the main part it will only invest where it considers it will se a return on that investment hence the need for BDUK, LEP etc. Here's hoping that some LEP funds find their way in your direction and you see some improvement.

In reply to a post by hvis42:

Relish might eventually get permission to set up a mast there, but it would not be good fod 4k prime time TV streaming. I gave Relish a go and got decent speeds between 2am and 9am, but 6pm to midnight it was slower than my ADSL, which is really slow.

Which means the wait continues for a couple of years at least until USO money becomes available in one form or another.

Funny thing is Relish have been turned down for a mast in Southwark by own wonderful council Christ knows why I have emailed twice and wrote 3 letters and still no reply (what a bunch of ....... we have running our council), I have gone down the Relish route and bought an external antenna and a band 42 router and had the mast & brackets and antenna put up and all has been fine 30+mbits from midnight to 8am but 6pm to midnight i can get as low as 500k.

So reading everyone�s posts it would seem I�m pretty much screwed as there is very little I can do.

I'm far from an expert in this field but given i have an EO line why can they not just throw a fibre line down the pipe with high pressure air and blow it down my pipe so to speak, I have been told this can be done, as some local residents had a meeting with some bods from Hollybrook Homes who are doing a development near here saying it has been done in the past on their developments

All1

Money and time (which has to be paid to engineers are the main reasons)

A very small sample of the large number of requirements - additonal exchange equipment, more nodes and more spliiters( which means more ground chambers, which cost money).

That's without blocked ducts, which will possibly require excavation, clearing, replacing) none of which is free. Wayleave issues for rerouting if unblocking ducts is too costly.

There is lots of work aside from "blowing a few fibres down a tube" and even more possible reasons for the work being delayed or the network needing to be replanned because of potential issues.

All of that, for Openreach to get somewhere in the region of £10 per month from you.

If an average FTTP connection costs even £1500 per property passed (and that doesn't mean they'll all take it) then it would take 150 months, more than 12 years before Openreach break even, that's if absolutely no repairs are made. It's an awfully long ROI time.

Still wonder why they don't invest in mass FTTP?

Not yet. I still hope I can get Hyperoptic installed to us as they are doing a large block of flats next to us. This will probably happen unless something unexpected comes up.

If not, I will ask, thanks for the tip. In our case the number of residents paying would be two or three, so a traditional cabinet build is out of the question, but as we are a freehold, we would be able to host FTTB infrastructure.

Having said that, does anyone know what is the OR investment model? I have understood that they would pay X amount per line "as part of their commercial model". Do they consider each line a separate revenue unit or do they treat areas or even larger entities? The area has the legacy aluminium exchange only infrastructure that must cost something to maintain.

Hyperoptic and other smaller providers have already cabled most large blocks and are busy marketing to those buildings large enough but not taking their service yet. In a block of flats served by Hyperoptic, I would assume most people would sign up at least to their basic 20/1 service as it costs less than an ADSL connection hovering just above 2Mbps mark and is ten times faster and more reliable.

Openreach have to maintain the legacy infrastructure for these buildings as well but they are not making any money.

What I am trying to think about is the optimal size of doing anything. If we now asked Openreach to install FTTP to us only with a gap funding model, they would be upgrading currently active lines. If there was a council initiative or something like that to sort out a larger area, and they would be gap funded (by whom is the question but nevertheless) to upgrade an area where 30% of lines are permanently down for the above reason, competition and offers from VDSL or other FTTP providers would bring some of these lines up again.

Would the "commercially viable part" of OR be larger in this case? I am not a business manager, only a lowly cyber security guru, but to me it seems they might be persuaded to pay a larger share to bring the lines in this area back to business from zero revenue zone, as their maintenance costs are ticking, revenue or no revenue.

H

In reply to a post by lee111s:

Money and time (which has to be paid to engineers are the main reasons)

A very small sample of the large number of requirements - additonal exchange equipment, more nodes and more spliiters( which means more ground chambers, which cost money).

That's without blocked ducts, which will possibly require excavation, clearing, replacing) none of which is free. Wayleave issues for rerouting if unblocking ducts is too costly.

There is lots of work aside from "blowing a few fibres down a tube" and even more possible reasons for the work being delayed or the network needing to be replanned because of potential issues.

All of that, for Openreach to get somewhere in the region of £10 per month from you.

If an average FTTP connection costs even £1500 per property passed (and that doesn't mean they'll all take it) then it would take 150 months, more than 12 years before Openreach break even, that's if absolutely no repairs are made. It's an awfully long ROI time.

Still wonder why they don't invest in mass FTTP?

But i always thought Openreach (OR) was not driven by profit, it was more of a public service otherwise if we take your model then OR would have been wise to invest nothing and stick with copper lines, if we take your idea then we will NEVER get any kind of speed increase

All1

In reply to a post by hvis42:

Not yet. I still hope I can get Hyperoptic installed to us as they are doing a large block of flats next to us. This will probably happen unless something unexpected comes up.
H

I have Hyperoptic installed in a block about 12-15 feet away from me and more often then not i can pick up there wi-fi signal when i scan for networks but Hyperoptic will do nothing for us, I have now spoken to two of Hyperoptic enginers and i know they are looking installing some kind of mini dish system so we could piggy back of the main install but spoke to them on here and via email and phone and they all deny it but i have seen the hardware on one of the guys phones, i just hope something gives before i die after all we have been waiting decades, ok [censored] years

All1

You thought wrong.

They're a plc with the shareholders interest very much in mind.

They invested where they believed they would get the best ROI for the money spent. The majority of the country would still be on ADSL if it weren't for the BDUK funded rollout.

If they never invested in fibre then they would probably have been forced to seperate from the BT group years ago and all those lucrative BDUK contracts would have gone elsewhere. BT would have lost the local loop and all the ethernet revenue would be lost as well.

In reply to a post by lee111s:

You thought wrong.

They're a plc with the shareholders interest very much in mind.

BT are a plc. Openfudge aren't.

Openreach is a trading division of British Telecommunications plc. BT Retail and BT Business are likewise trading divisions of that company. British Telecommunications plc is wholly owned by BT Group plc, which is the company Joe Bloggs can actually invest in. The 'reformed' Openreach will be in the form of Openreach Limited, which will be wholly owned by BT Group plc.

So, BT is a plc but not in the traditional sense (as all the shares are owned by one owner: the holding company), and Openreach *is* that very same plc (for now). But in practical terms, shareholder interest and regulator intervention steer the investments Openreach makes.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by lee111s:

You thought wrong.

They're a plc with the shareholders interest very much in mind.

BT are a plc. Openfudge aren't.

Who supplies OR withthe funding?

The majority of the country would still be on ADSL if it weren't for the BDUK funded rollout.

Not the majority but around a third. The commercial projects by the various suppliers was always expected to end up that 2/3rds of the country would be covered by some sort of "superfast".

By what date though?

I'm talking about right now.

Yes, the commercial projects have already I believe delivered more than 2/3rds of the country as they are pretty much finished. The country was over half way I think when BDUK started so to say the majority would have been on ADSL is incorrect.

You only have to consider the Virgin already covered over half the country before BDUK to know that the majority were not stuck with ADSL. BTs commercial project was well on the way before BDUK contracts were signed and was to some extent put on the back burner whilst BDUK was implemented.

Cheers, didn't realise as much