Attempting to push for fibre broadband in Central London

Hello, I'm a social housing tenant living within a terraced house in Central London. My entire neighbourhood is hooked up to fibre either via Community Fibre, G. Network, Virgin or Openreach.

Annoyingly my specific street has had a bit of an issue regarding this and we've had to use a EE 4G/5G router for home broadband for a while now however this is incredibly slow due to how many buildings are between us and the cell tower, as well as the sheer number of workers, commuters and tourists using the network simultaneously. It is only properly useable late at night and is essentially crippled from 12-8pm. Yes we can receive around 200 down at 3am however the congestion during actual waking hours means it is unusable.

We currently can purchase a maximum of 14-19mbps via copper internet (at a bizarrely high price) through one provider however this isn't suitable for our needs. Just finding it a little ridiculous how we can be surrounded by offices, businesses and homes with fibre yet we're so isolated.

Here's the low down.

Virgin Media - Spent about 6 months requesting this, Kelly Communications attempted to do cabling however gave up in the end as it was too 'complicated' of a site (despite being a simple terraced house directly on the street. There's some sort of VM cabinet in a broom cupboard on the estate about 10 metres away with our house number on a little tag on a cable?) and gave us a sum of compensation for the wasted time. I believe this was an issue regarding planning permission or possibly just sheer incompetency as my next door neighbour has Virgin fibre. We have now been grayed out from the 'available' sites on the VM website.

Community Fibre - The rear portion of the estate (flats, not houses) are hooked up however we are not in the plans and they've dropped us from plans.

G Network - Their fibre infrastructure exists right outside the property (less than a metre) and is ready to be installed in our home however they have legal difficulties providing us and are finding it difficult obtaining a wayleave from our social housing provider, tried to contact G Network regarding this however I've had zero responses, my landlord is also impossible to speak to regarding this issue, there is no response whatsoever. This feels like the best option to me, their toby box is literally there by my front door. This is so painful.

Openreach - No infrastructure and no plans whatsoever, very difficult to find a means of communication to them.

If anyone with more experience on the matter could help out that'd be greatly appreciated. Many thanks.

Your story isn't unique. I've only recently read about someone with similar issues in terms of wayleaves from a freeholder not being easy to come by.
Can you share your postcode with me by private message?

I was living in a block of flats which included some social housing. The social housing tenants complained all the time about the lack of information from the housing provider - e.g. on service charges, etc. We ended up sharing details with them as direct leaseholders. They did try to engage as a group which helped a bit.

I think you can take the freeholder to a tribunal over it, however this would be complicated by the fact you're not a direct leaseholder but through a social housing company. Are there others who want faster services who are direct (non-social housing) leaseholders? It may be easier for them to do that.

This is probably an article we need to write up. If you're interested in sharing the story further, we could use your local area as a case study and speak to the providers.

This is worth a read:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/7/section/1

Sebastien.

Edited by seb (Sun 09-Jun-24 08:33:10)

I had this very same problem myself with EastendHomes where in 2015 they'd refuse wayleave for Hyperoptic even after getting 30+ people to register their interest. Me being a Hyperoptic Champion at that time, even the Hyperoptic representative was emailing me on a couple of occasions that he still can't get hold of them. It looks like my management were ignoring and hanging up on their phone calls.

At that time my management said that if they are to provide wayleave they'll do it with another provider not Hyperoptic. Yet, we didn't even have FTTC until October 2019. Our old ADSL EO Line would drop out every 2-5 times roughly on average within 24 hours. My maximum connection uptime would not be any higher than 3 days in the 10+ years of having ADSL.

Each time I spoke to the housing estate manager in their 1-3 monthly leaseholder association meetings he would refer me to the technical services manager who I never had the chance to speak to in person.

Like I said in some other posts that it is all about the authority that manages those properties and buildings. It's indeed ridiculous that some properties and MDUs have 2-4 FTTP overbuilds including Openreach FTTP and some of us only have 1 FTTP network or none at all like in your case.

A new UK law was introduced in March 2021 but it only deals with gigabit capability and does not give emphasis on whether it is 5G, Coax or FTTP but as long as it delivers gigabit speeds that's all that it can try and help achieve that https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/03/new-uk...
Exactly 2 months later wayleave agreement finally happened!! https://www.eastendhomes.net/latest-news/eastendhome...

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 under the discretion of their own goodwill. 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.

Now, I do not know about your particular case. If you know your housing estate association that manages your social housing building then you can try to speak to them or try and offer to make an appointment to discuss with them. It would also be useful to find out if the other buildings managed by your housing estate are also left without FTTP. If they have FTTP then you'll know the problem is somewhere else that's being the obstacle. But if all of them are without FTTP then that'll be an indicator that the wayleave issue is due to your management.

It's indeed a shame that you don't have even FTTC. Luckily we got upgraded to FTTC and since Feb 2020 I have been happily connected with 80Mbps download and 20Mbps upload and no longer suffer from these intermittent dropouts compared to ADSL.

You should mention this to your management that you are less than 3% of the country without FTTC and you should be prioritised for FTTP due to this reason alone! FTTC isn't dependent on wayleave but it seems like it is too late now as Openreach will concentrate their focus on FTTP instead. You are more likely to get Openreach FTTP than FTTC but your only obstacle will be the wayleave agreement.

My FTTC connection so far last 2 years with BT has been superb that I didn't have the urge to switch to Community Fibre yet. With 60+ days connection uptime, if I had this amazing reliability with ADSL I would not have been nagging them for a wayleave for FTTP. I needed this service 10 years ago but my selfish management has zero empathy.

This law desperately needs changing. I'm concerned in future that we might be delayed for a second FTTP overbuild. I'd like to have Openreach FTTP as I'll have a range of ISPs to choose from.
You can also try and get your neighbours involved if you know of some permanent residents who are not just individual tenants this might be helpful. You can try and meet with them and together attend the office of your estate and give some regular pressure! Eventually it might work.

Have you tried speaking to your local councillor? In my experience social housing landlords are quite happy to ignore individual tenants, but when a query comes on official council paper it becomes a bit more of a priority - they may be able to enable a wayleave discussion between G Network and landlord.

In reply to a post by potterer:

Have you tried speaking to your local councillor? In my experience social housing landlords are quite happy to ignore individual tenants, but when a query comes on official council paper it becomes a bit more of a priority - they may be able to enable a wayleave discussion between G Network and landlord.

MP may be useful too, once you have one.. especially if it's someone new..

I just want to chime in, Openreach would have the same issue as VM and other providers have with the OPs situation. FTTP and gigabit capable internet is transformative especially when you come off of 16mbit or 40mbit services .

Even today many don't grasp the necessity to have a good fast internet, not only downloads but uploads too. Not Seb 😊 but cedar01 to push citing the new laws to have the way-leaves signed ..

There is an article I found exclusively published in the Financial Times from April just 2 months ago.
BT’s Openreach pushes Labour for easier access to flats in fibre rollout
https://www.ft.com/content/535ffbbb-7e10-4d63-9e1b-1...
If you can't open the article because of FT subscription paywall, you can paste this article link or heading in DuckDuckGo search engine and open the article from there. Up to 5 articles can be read for free on FT then you have to clear cookies and it will allow you to read again for another 5 articles for free.

Or alternatively there's another link to the same article from another site https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/openreach...
https://www.telecoms.com/fibre/openreach-wants-to-by...

Selley told the FT, that Openreach has asked for existing agreements with MDU landlords, which enable Openreach to maintain and repair copper cables, to be extended to automatically provide permission for upgrades to full fiber.

What basically Openreach and Clive Selley want is for the existing copper wayleave agreement to be used in place to bypass wayleave requests for upgrading to Full Fibre.

Now, I'm not sure if this is feasible, but technically it should work. Because if Openreach have the power to repair existing copper cables; let's just say in the unlikely circumstance a copper cable were to get torn inside a building or some other engineering work took place in an MDU and they accidentally ripped off the cables. If Openreach has the power to enter and repair this copper line then naturally they should have the same power to replace those cables with fibre without seeking additional permission.

But the problem with this request is that while it may solve Openreach FTTP getting into MDUs. If people want an Altnet to come over then again this might not help. There's a danger with this that Openreach might become a monopoly where Altnets are not present in a particular MDU. Some have complained in the comment section of FT that Openreach wants an easy way to bypass wayleave and it isn't fair for the Altnets that have spent hard work trying to gain wayleave access. There is some truth to this. But from a consumer point of view, I suppose for people like the OP and many others like myself we probably won't care as long as it is serving our interest to get FTTP.

Eventually I think we will need a legislation to bypass those wayleave requirements but it shouldn't be giving special favouritism to any Fibre builder. According to the article 1 million MDUs in the UK suffer from Openreach wayleave and maybe a little more as I'm sure Openreach have not yet gone round to requesting wayleave for all of the buildings yet.

Indeed, some of those 1 million buildings like that of mine are covered with Community Fibre and others with Hyperoptic, G.Network, etc. There's no guarantee that a wayleave agreed for the Altnet will necessarily mean that the freeholder will also agree Openreach FTTP. The problem with the present law is that the freeholder/landlord has the power to choose what FTTP network they want to grant permission and reject all the others regardless of the residents requests!

An example I've come across is Poplar HARCA housing association signing a wayleave exclusively for OFNL - Open Fibre Networks. In places like Balfron Tower Poplar East London there is no copper line at all! Despite being built in 1967 formerly owned by the council, Poplar HARCA took over and decided to scrap away all the copper cables inside this building as part of their refurbishment plans! Is this lawful? I don't think so but they did this while the building was evacuated for building renovation works.

These residents are real victims as they are only served by OFNL network, no ADSL, no FTTC! Which from what I'm reading they are quite outrageous in terms of price packages and the number of wholesale network ISPs they can choose from. They should have the power to want another Altnet provider or Openreach FTTP but they don't because the present law doesn't allow them to force Poplar HARCA to sign wayleave for the network that they want.

Ironically, I'd rather have Openreach FTTC than OFNL FTTP and I'd say that even if I didn't have Community Fibre available! But for others of-course the position may be different if they have no better choice.

Thank you all for your responses. I wasn't aware of the local councillor route and will try and have a chat with my representative. I'll also try to make a push with the housing officers directly, seems like those are my only two options.