Openreach Fibre Availability

I was curious to see if any news regarding FTTP was available on the Openreach website. TO my surprise, it says

'We're sorry, our fibre products aren't available for you yet. However, we are starting to roll out our Superfast Fibre product in your area, giving you speeds of up to 80Mbps - provide your contact details and we'll keep you up to date with progress and what this means for your address and let you know if our ultra-fast, ultra-reliable Full Fibre, with speeds of up to 1Gbps is planning to come to your area. In the meantime you may still be able to get our Standard copper products - check with your provider of choice.'

This seems odd given I do have FTTC with my current provider! However if I pretend to order broadband with several providers (BT, Plusnet, EE, COOP, One Stream and Cuckoo), it shows only ADSL is available to order.

Is it likely that the Openreach information is wrong or just that the cabinet is full?

Check your address on this site.
If the cabinet is full it will show a waiting list.

The waiting list doesn't show if you use your number and already have FTTC.

Thanks for the info.

Yes it confirms the cabinet is full.

I better stick with my current provider as I doubt Openreach will be upgrading anytime soon!

Luckily, I am not with BT.

not sure what Bt has to do with anything - changing from you provider to any other provider would have the same effect - you slot would dissapear with the cease order and be provided to the next person in the Queue (irrespective of service provider)

The OP is talking about FTTP not FTTC in which he has.
FTTP does not come from the cab.

re ''I was curious to see if any news regarding FTTP''

Edited by APTMAN (Thu 29-Apr-21 21:13:02)

Just comparing experience of being a BT customer against Plusnet. I was with BT before moving to plusnet 2 years ago. The reason I left was because BT wanted £50 a month for an ADSL. On speaking to to customer services they said they don’t offer existing customers deals as you get one when you first join. At this point I left for Plusnet for FTTC for half the price BT wanted for ADSL.

My point is that if I was currently with BT and my contract was up, I would be left at the mercy of their price increase. With Plusnet they automatically offer you a new deal before you existing one ends, so even if the cabinet is full, I don’t need to worry about huge price increases when my contract is up.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

The waiting list doesn't show if you use your number and already have FTTC.

I really wish it did show the fact that there is a waiting list. It would have avoided me losing my FTTC line.

FTTC has been getting worse and worse here. We are in a small group of houses, at the end of a longish very faulty length of cable that OR refuse to replace.

Every time one of the neighbours nags their ISP about the speed, OR spend months trying to shift pairs and waste time generally. Often this results in slightly faster speed for the person who nagged their ISP, but also results in slower speeds for some of the rest of us

I'm convinced they've spent more on engineer visits over the last 8 years than it would take just to replace the faulty cable (something various OR engineers have also hinted at).

So, I'm on 4G now instead. But I'd kept Plusnet on FTTC as a backup for the last 18 months.

I recently decided it was time to ditch the backup, with the knowledge that I could very quickly get FTTC re-enabled with zero hassle in an emergency with AAISP.

I regularly check the immediate area on the FTTC/ADSL/FTTP checker, to see how the FTTP rollout (that seems to be skipping us) is doing.

When I did the check on our line, shortly after cancelling Plusnet, I had a nasty surprise. It now showed there was a waiting list for FTTC

Had I known there was a waiting list I never would have cancelled my backup FTTC line.

The best way is to go high up, we emailed the CEO, and eventually, part of the our line to the cabinet was replaced. Not sure why they did it just for us and didn't just remove the old section and replace it so others could benefit, but there you go!

Edited by Grimers (Fri 30-Apr-21 10:52:42)