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Our part of the street in London is in a fibre black hole:
- G.Network stopped short two doors away
- Hyperoptic say they can supply on broadband checkers but can't
- Community Fibre stops short a few doors away in other direction
- Openreach fibre is on a pole a few doors down on opposite side and in duct on opposite side but only connects no 3 on our side (we are no 11)
- Our landline came in through back garden but blew down recently and Openreach will only replace the copper, bizarrely to the side of premises across the road and right by the fibre pole...
Thankfully we are on Virgin coax but I was holding out for FTTH and are paying a lot for an out of contract service.
Should we cave in and sign up to an 18 month cheaper Virgin contract as fibre may never arrive?
I toured the area with an Openreach guy when our landline went down and he said he could see no plan to connect us despite the ongoing fibre build at our exchange.
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I think only you can decide if signing up to an 18 month contract is better value than paying your current out of contract price. It is a gamble - you might find a better/cheaper service becomes available in that 18 months or if you don't decide to do it you could end up paying more for the service than if you bought into a new contract.
People here may give an opinion but we don't have any more information than you so it is down to your risk appetite and how much you want to pay. I don't see how we can really help you make that decision - you already seem to have all the info you are going to get.
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Have you tried the "my neighbours can get FTTP but I can't" route with BT? @Pheasant gives the process in this post.
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Our part of the street in London is in a fibre black hole:
- Openreach fibre is on a pole a few doors down on opposite side and in duct on opposite side but only connects no 3 on our side (we are no 11)
- Our landline came in through back garden but blew down recently and Openreach will only replace the copper, bizarrely to the side of premises across the road and right by the fibre pole...
What does it say for those other properties who where connected to the blown down pole ....... Also check TBB's fibre mapping
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I guess the info I'm missing is whether Openreach will cover us in the foreseeable future or do they often just not bother with one side of a street.
I've checked and fibre is available from the pole at no 5 and we are at no 11. I can see it is installed at no 3. Then it is not available until no 45 on our side, but 'we are building in your area'.
This I think is because landlines run from behind the houses overhead our gardens but some have been severed now including ours, and there is no footway duct on much of our side (apart from Virgin).
What is the length they'd run overhead fibre from a pole?
Are they putting in ducts? It's frustrating as the duct and an access chamber are tantalisingly close under the opposite footway of a fairly narrow road.
All this could have been solved years ago with shared passive infrastructure. I'm especially cross with G.Netwok, which has done all the streets here bar a short leg of our road. The neighbour at no 15 paid them to extend it to them as it stopped at 17 but they won't do it for us.
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As far as I know no-one here can tell you if Openreach will come to you. The "building in your area" is not property specific so they are building in your area - in fact they have already built in your area, unfortunately it doesn't necessarily mean they will build to your property. There is no detailed plan available to the public that I am aware of so people here can only speculate and the fact they have stopped before they got to you suggests that was probably the limit of that phase of the build - whether there will be another phase and when that might be is not going to be public knowledge.
Someone else suggested the "my neighbour has fibre" form - that is probably your best bet. Other than that it is just sit and wait. You already have Virgin so already are capable of gigabit speeds so the government won't help and Openreach may not see adding your houses as worth the cost as there is already competition.
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Well another factor is this is inner London (Kingsland Green exchange) and I would expect Openreach to make a reasonable effort to not leave out half of a street.
Also, they will reinstate our landline from the same location as the fibre and offer FTTC - I do find it odd that they'll install copper but not fibre at this stage of the switch off.
And a word about Hyperoptic - are they cowboys? I can order it for our address and have done so twice but they visit and tell us they can't service our address, but persist in offering it to us and our neighbours. I pointed out that new neighbours bought their house happy in the knowledge they'd get Hyperoptic...
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Well another factor is this is inner London (Kingsland Green exchange) and I would expect Openreach to make a reasonable effort to not leave out half of a street. I don't think being London makes any positive difference - historically I think London has often been harder for Openreach.
And they still support FTTC in any area that doesn't have a stop applied (that is areas that have high levels of FTTP coverage) and even then they will still provide FTTC if they don't service FTTP at the specific address. They stopped FTTP for some reason (usually cost) so someone ordering a service that provides them an income of a few quid a month is not enough to override those project/cost considerations.
No idea about Hyperoptic. Chances are they go by postcode/general area when sending marketing - a lot of providers find when they market they are not to the granular level where it can account for small pockets of addresses not yet covered.
The fact that the providers have stopped before your address suggests there is something in your location that is making it harder to deliver - Virgin may have used a different method or had historic provision that means they can provide where others cannot.
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https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?tab=...
whats apparent is theres a scattering of properties don't have fttp but are surrounded by properties that do have fttp.
The problem for the op is that he is already on a Gigabit capable connection, that means no vouchers or state intervention.
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Yes, the OP has as much access as quite a few other people will - they have gigabit via Virgin - a lot of people only have gigabit via a single network provider and whether they like that provider or not they won't have any other option. If they are lucky then they might get other providers but it is down to the market and whether other providers have a business case to provide.
It isn't a black hole - a black hole is where there is no gigabit capable provider available (and in a small number of cases likely still only having ADSL).
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Yes, the OP has as much access as quite a few other people will - they have gigabit via Virgin - a lot of people only have gigabit via a single network provider and whether they like that provider or not they won't have any other option. If they are lucky then they might get other providers but it is down to the market and whether other providers have a business case to provide.
It isn't a black hole - a black hole is where there is no gigabit capable provider available (and in a small number of cases likely still only having ADSL).
Exactly, I have only one gigabit provider, and thats OR. No provider is perfect.
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I looked at the TBB stats and 80% of the country have gigabit but only 27% have more than 1 provider. That means most people only have a choice of one network provider. And some network providers I suspect are a lot worse than Virgin.
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I'm not looking for perfection but I was hopeful of getting a symmetric fibre line. Until recently I was uploading large media files for jobs and slow upload on one job took 2 hours...
Virgin has been getting better but we've had significant downtime and area faults.
I suppose we have been lucky to have the cable - it's been in our street since Cable London days it seems. There are Cable London sockets in various rooms in the house. Useless now and I have wired the house with ethernet.
The other possibility is Virgin replacing DOCSIS with its fibre product but I doubt we'll see that anytime soon here.
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Exactly, I have only one gigabit provider, and thats OR. No provider is perfect. I have only one available, Virgin coax, and due to their pricing I choose slower service than gigabit. There are two altnet FTTP providers in my road, but my MDU owner has not been reachable. No sign of OR, but that’s likely because we have no telegraph poles.
25 years of broadband connectivity since Sep 1999 trial - Live BQM
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I'm not looking for perfection but I was hopeful of getting a symmetric fibre line. Until recently I was uploading large media files for jobs and slow upload on one job took 2 hours...
Virgin has been getting better but we've had significant downtime and area faults.
I suppose we have been lucky to have the cable - it's been in our street since Cable London days it seems. There are Cable London sockets in various rooms in the house. Useless now and I have wired the house with ethernet.
The other possibility is Virgin replacing DOCSIS with its fibre product but I doubt we'll see that anytime soon here.
I wasn't being harsh on a personal level but realistic in your chances of any extra help via government schemes. I do apprecite the upload frustration, especially when its large data sets, or video files etc. I understand how it slows things down.
The biggest issue is the lack of poles. I would as others have suggested to fill that or form and see if you get any response. London is like most large cities great for fast internet connections but the downfail is that there can many singular properties that miss out.
Have you looked at 4g/5g coverage so that at least you have a usuable connection whilst uploading.
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No sign of OR, but that’s likely because we have no telegraph poles.
Ducts are fine as long as its not collapsed or congested. Worse obviously would be DIG
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Ducts are fine as long as its not collapsed or congested. Worse obviously would be DIG 1970/1971 build, so potentially DIG, but road is half houses and half MDU’s so I guess when OR turn up they will be planning to do the MDUs…
Virgin’s project to replace Coax with FTTP is running, see Thinkbroadband maps; as they have their own ducts, they can in theory do this fairly routinely, and it should reduce their maintenance costs.
Virgin have already said it will take until 2030 to get FTTP out to all the coax areas, and then hopefully have product parity to Nexfibre areas (e.g. symmetric options).
25 years of broadband connectivity since Sep 1999 trial - Live BQM
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You're said what's wrong - it shouldn't be down to the market. That's why we've got a Wild West in utilities.
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If it wasn't down to the market then I suspect you feel it should be a national infrastructure. If it was national my guess is that it would be the OpenReach delivery in which case the OP wouldn't be getting the symmetric bandwidth they are after. Symmetric is available to an even smaller proportion of the population (at least at cost effective prices - of course pretty much anyone could get it if they have the money for a lease line).
If we had national infrastructure then everyone would be in the same boat but I suspect some would be worse off than they are now. GPO was a real wild west and I don't think that would have improved much if it hadn't been privatised and the market opened up to competition.
The market is what has resulted in 27% of people having a choice of network providers and that number is growing. Without the market we would have had one provider and my betting is we would not be as far forward as we are now (look at how wonderful the water services are).
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If we had national infrastructure then everyone would be in the same boat but I suspect some would be worse off than they are now. GPO was a real wild west and I don't think that would have improved much if it hadn't been privatised and the market opened up to competition.
The market is what has resulted in 27% of people having a choice of network providers and that number is growing. Without the market we would have had one provider and my betting is we would not be as far forward as we are now (look at how wonderful the water services are).
The markets have driven 25 and 50G pon, coverage under a national infrastructure would be different had it been done in the 80s/90s i think we would be around 97-98.5% fttp. It would have taken years for it to be completed too.
Thats the good bit, but speeds would not have been faster, probably slower. Case of you got fttp its the best tech - speeds don't matter. So symetric may have never happened with a national infrastructure.
Re: water, that was the result of selling off water, to private companies who had no proper restriction on profits etc. Should have been 50% to 80% profits ploughed back into infrastructure - then share holders.
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Sorry, yes, my bad on water - bad example. I don't believe a national infrastructure would have worked - it would either have been a monopoly private company (or company per area - like water) or it would have been government run. If government run it would almost certainly have competed with other gov funding and I think it unlikely that government would have prioritised it over other services (like NHS, highways, etc).
Either solution for a single national infrastructure doesn't work for me. Market forces are not perfect but I don't believe we would have had better without it. This country just would not have invested the money needed to make it a success - even now I suspect a lot of people would not vote a party in based on them giving symmetric gigabit access to all, there are a lot of people that would just say it isn't necessary and would rather the money is spent on lower taxes.
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Either solution for a single national infrastructure doesn't work for me. Market forces are not perfect but I don't believe we would have had better without it. This country just would not have invested the money needed to make it a success - even now I suspect a lot of people would not vote a party in based on them giving symmetric gigabit access to all, there are a lot of people that would just say it isn't necessary and would rather the money is spent on lower taxes.
Investment would have been the issue, and i'm gonna metion trains, we are soo behind mainland europe. Thatcher scalped profits from the train service and sucussive government has used that kitty too. Then it was privitised with no real way for companies to invest. Sure stock was brought etc but for many nothing has changed. You look at south western trains Twitter feed for a week and then remind yourself theres nearly weekly updates and yet theres still signal issues ..
note: i'm not trying to move this into the political arena but mentioned stuff that is non partisian
Edited by Taras (Wed 15-Oct-25 11:06:22)
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My point is more about passive infrastructure - given the multiple times streets are often dug up and existing ducts it really shouldn't be beyond our capability to ensure each house is passed by shared ducts that people can then have a choice of service.
Instead we have some properties with multiple providers each with their own infrastructure and some with nothing but an ancient landline from a pole.
I'm talking about urban areas.
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Duct sharing exists for OpenReach infrastructure. I guess there is a question of whether ducts are big enough for everything being put in them but we are fairly close that where OpenReach ducting exists it can be shared with other providers.
The problem is other providers aren't forced to share their ducting - only OpenReach.
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Openreach is a wholesale provider and should really be the universal provider. It's regulatory failure that's behind this.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/10260-openreach-...
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Openreach is a wholesale provider and should really be the universal provider. It's regulatory failure that's behind this. Can you please explain why you believe Openreach should be a universal provider and why its a failure by the regulator as they are already subject to conditions that no other provider is subject to including sharing their poles and ducts which gives other providers a financial advantage?
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Openreach is a wholesale provider and should really be the universal provider.
Yet even the government that privatised BT realised we needed realworld competition and licensed the cable companies in the late 1980s.
25 years of broadband connectivity since Sep 1999 trial - Live BQM
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Firstly Virgin are now doing 24 month contracts.
Don't ever pay Virgin full price by being out of contract.
I started getting good offers to renew 3 months before the end date, the last being £25 off.
After some haggling using online chat, got offered £38 off my current plan, now paying less than 3 years ago.
By having a sim only with O2 qualifies for VOLT. M500 becomes 1 GIG free upgrade, and double data on the sim. nb: Use a comparison site to get a better deal than O2 offers.
nb it might say newbie, Been building PCs since 386SX25 late 80's
My network is VM connection Gigabit Hub5 - Gigabit routers - Netgear Nighthawk R8000 & R7800 2 x cat5e cables to work room, have 3 gigabit switches at key points. Routers give me 3x 2.4 & 5 5.0 GHz WiFi channels - one for each device.
Edited by bigluap (Thu 16-Oct-25 16:02:53)
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Openreach is a wholesale provider and should really be the universal provider. That is not an uncommon opinion on these forums - however, it is not how it is.
I personally don't believe having a single universal provider would be any better than what we have now - my suspicion is we would be further behind and costs would be higher - but that is just an opinion.
As it stands OpenReach ducts can be shared by others. Maybe other providers might share their ducts (by choice or by force) at some point but there doesn't seem to be any real move to that. You can blame Ofcom as well, they certainly have their issues but again I have no influence on what they do and have to live in the world where the decisions they make (or don't) influence what choices I have.
Wishing it was different is not going to change the reality of your situation and believing that a single universal provider would fix everything is not something I personally buy into.
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Take out a contract, the next month is black friday deal season. Even if FTTP arrives you might only have six months of overlap, it's not going to be the end of you.
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If the alt nets didnt show up then OR would still just be rolling g.fast from cabinet to a few areas with the rest on adsl or vdsl, not sure why you think thats better. Of course you would have had the option of getting FTTP via FTTPoD.
If your job requires extremely large files to be uploaded, I also think thats not a fair fit for consumer broadband, and have they considered something like a leased line for you?
Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 16-Oct-25 20:43:59)
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Could you e-mail us on team@ and link to this post and share your full address.
Also if you're happy to speak to national media let me know as we're looking at a feature with one of them soon on this problem. You may have ticked a lot of boxes so would be a great example.
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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I take the cynical view on the question of the Universal [State] Provider vs the Free Market.
In either case, we are looking at large organisations, which tend towards a stability which does not rock the boat. So looking at the small outfits which have competed and shifted Openreach out of a comfortable position to the point of doing something new, we can categorise it as insurgency vs incumbency. Over the long run, insurgents desire to become incumbents and resist insurgents.
What is interesting about the present time is that the insurgency has had some seriously new technology to be insurgent with. This didn't happen in the early days of BT - who remembers Mercury? Mercury only had the same technology and a different take on marketing, which was not enough and they disappeared.
No mistake, the larger network providers are now all heading to incumbency and will be as inflexible as BT-OR was in due course. Consumer choice is not going to force the bigger players into anything, they will just get their marketing departments to round up enough nodding donkey consumers that they can become fatter and lazier.
The only hope is to separate ISPs from Network operators to a much greater extent, because smaller ISP's will have enough of an overview of what can be done and what can be offered and they can have a clout with the network providers which consumers alone could not aggregate to match.
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who remembers Mercury? We had Mercury pay phones, and the landline telephone handsets with the blue Mercury button. Long before Mercury One-2-One.
25 years of broadband connectivity since Sep 1999 trial - Live BQM
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BT holds the universal service obligation (apart from Hull) and owns Openreach. Ofcom did not divest the network from BT, which has been a big mistake in my view. The USO should be in the hands of an independent infrastructure company, and the current USO is pitiful. It's 2025 - we should be doing a lot better than this in a core utility.
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Which independent infrastructure company would you suggest ?
Why do you think they would be any further ahead than Openreach already are ?
One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.
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Ofcom did not divest the network from BT, which has been a big mistake in my view.
Look back in time; the reason Openreach is structurally separated but not physically separated is well documented. The govt of the day couldn't afford to plug a hole, that you could blame a previous government for creating (not BT or OR's fault).
There is now plenty of competition, so much that current CEO of BT Group is talking along the lines of Openreach exiting mandatory regulation eventually because they won't serve the entire country, other companies will. This is clever talk from what I see as a very interesting relatively new CEO.
25 years of broadband connectivity since Sep 1999 trial - Live BQM
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BT holds the universal service obligation (apart from Hull) and owns Openreach. Ofcom did not divest the network from BT, which has been a big mistake in my view. The USO should be in the hands of an independent infrastructure company, and the current USO is pitiful. It's 2025 - we should be doing a lot better than this in a core utility.
The previous goverment couldn't fully seperate OR from BT, because of a massive pensions black hole. OR, is seperate from bt all but in name and a few other things like pensions etc. Day to day running they are seperate. VMO/nexfibre and cityfibre will along with or will form a natural oligopoly, it may even end up with four major players.
London sadly has narrow roads in some places and victorian underground system which is very hard to upgrade
That should be a good thing for us - hopefully
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BT holds the universal service obligation (apart from Hull) and owns Openreach. Ofcom did not divest the network from BT, which has been a big mistake in my view. The USO should be in the hands of an independent infrastructure company, and the current USO is pitiful. It's 2025 - we should be doing a lot better than this in a core utility. You came hear for advice on your predicament and then went on about why wasn't you upgraded to FTTP when your copper line blew down although thats not how it works otherwise everyone would be finding their copper line been blow down. You are served by Virgin so I'm guessing you're above the USO threshold so its not going to help you. I do get cheesed off at people's entitlement to Openreach (a private company) providing them with FTTP, If you want better speeds especially if it is business related you could always get a quote for something that meets your requirements. A lot of your focus has been on Openreach although you admit you have a number of fibre networks in touching distance of your property so why don't you start rattling their cages.
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