Awful Broadband - How to get FTTP ?

[Cnwcywig]

I get really annoyed when I hear of people complaining because they have to put up with "only" 10 Mbps. Our line is rated at a theoretical maximum of 0.5 Mbps, but in practice 0.3 is the most we ever get. On many days it is slower than that, and frequently it drops to almost nothing, and becomes unuseable.

We have tried all we can with our provider, but they advise they are completely in the hands of BT-Openreach, and although we are only 5 miles from a town with high-speed Broadband availability, there are apparently no plans to upgrade our locality.

They did advise however that we can ask BT to provide a personal Fibre To The Premises optical link. Is that possible, and how?  People have told me it  costs £1000 per mile to run a fibre optic cable from the poles, and obviously if true £5,000 would be an awful lot of money to pay. But it is comparable to what people have been willing to pay for connection to mains electricity, so we would be willing to seriously consider this option.

I have looked on the BT checker and it says FTTP is available for this phone number. How do we go about getting it? Is the price negotiable depending on whether any other takers can be found nearby? Has any one any comments or experience?

[Keith_Beddoe]

Is that FTTP or FTTP on demand?

[john46]

Can you run this checker and post back a screen shot of the results. Make sure you delete your phone number before posting.

http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.welcome

[Cnwcywig]

It won't let me paste a shot into this reply.

The first line  says;

FTTP ON Demand    330     30     ---      Available

[jac_95]

@Cnwcywig

That's Openreach's FTTP on Demand service. Currently only about one Service Provider has offered this service to it's customers - FluidOne. BT Consumer and BT Business do not currently offer this service.

With FTTP on Demand there will be an installtion cost to get the fibre from the nearest aggregation node to your property, prices can be very expensive i.e in the £thousands (see Openreach's FTTP on Demand Install price list) 

There is also a high monthly service fee (around £300+VAT per month I believe).

[john46]

It is also a 3 year contract

[Cnwcywig]

Oh well, that's that then.

That's so prohibitively expensive they might just as well have said it was unavailable.

A single one off infrastructure set-up cost might just about have been justifiable, and perhaps enhance the house value for the future. But an on-going charge of that order is outrageous - a fibre optic cable is only a glorified wire. We've one at work linking two buildings and it doesn't need monthly maintenance - it just sits there.

So much for improved rural Broadband.

Thanks very much anyway.

[TelephoneBob]

The Fibre Cable itself isn't the expensive part. It's the Planning, Civils Work, Network Build, Paying Engineers, Paying Contractors, etc. Then said Cable doesn't just plug into thin air, it connects into a Head End, which is a very expensive piece of equipment that is interconnected to yet more complicated and expensive equipment.

Just because you don't physically see anyone working on or maintaining the fibre cable to your house/business it doesn't mean there isn't a small Army of people behind the scenes making sure it's working.

[john46]

FTTP on Demand is basically a business product not a residential one