Hi, I live in a rural area of Scotland have been having a problem with getting FTTP. I know this is a BT retail forum and not an Openreach one, but my post involves both parties.
Almost 2 years ago Openreach laid a fiber optic cable through the villages near where I live. Lots of people now have FTTP, but some of us are unable to order due to some bureaucracy.
It is quite difficult to explain but, but about 100 properties on the route of the fiber optic cable are listed as being on one telephone exchange, but about 20 others on the route of the fiber optic cable are listed as being on a different telephone exchange. But they will only connect the houses on the telephone exchange with the 100 properties and they will not connect properties on our one with the 20 or so.
They have allowed one of the properties on our telephone exchange to get FTTP for some unknown reason, but they are not allowing the other 19 to connect to the cable.
There are joint boxes to access the fiber optic cables right next to the properties, so we should be straight forward to connect to it.
We have been dealing with Openreach for 18 months and they have been difficult to deal with, they seem bureaucratic and rather than explaining things properly they have a Little Britain 'computer says no' style way of responding to things, which is quite unhelpful.
They have told is that the problem is that because the r100 funding is distributed per telephone exchange they have not received funding to connect the 20 properties but have recieved it to do the 100 on the other exchange. They said that they won't connect us until they receive the r100 funding for the telephone exchange we are on which might not be until 2026.
It doesn't really seem to make sense to do the roll out by telephone exchange area because where we live the telephone exchange area does not really match with the geography. The telephone exchange we are is a huge geographic are and they will have to lay many miles of fiber optic cable, so it doesn't make sense to lump us in with other areas when we already have the fiber optic cable right next our properties and could be connected quite easily.
The joint box on the fiber optic cable is only about 15 meters from out house, we have tried saying to Openreach that we would put in the ducting ourselves most of the way from our house to the joint box and we would pay to be connected out of our own pocket but bizarrely they don't seem to even consider that. They keep telling us just to wait 5 years for the r100 funding.
Openreach said that our only other option was to try the BT Universal Service Obligation (USO) to see if they could help us get connected, but we contacted BT retail and they said that because we could get 4G signal they would only offer us a 4G option and could not help us with the FTTP.
Does anyone know if there is any way we could get BT help us progress an FTTP if we offered to pay the full cost of installation ourselves?
We would like someone to give us a quote of what it would cost us to connect to the cable, but it seems impossible to get anyone to give us a quote, as we are so close to the fiber optic cable we don't believe it would cost that much, so wouldn't mind paying as it would be worth it to have good internet.
