Full Fibre Broadband

[MikeTheGuru42]

My area code ( 01294 ) is served by TWO BT exchanges - Irvine Stanecastle is mostly residential but does appear on the Openreach Full Fibre scheduled listfor an upgrade, but my exchange - Irvine Old - which has more customers, and three times as many business lines does not. How do I contact Openreach for information as to why this is the case ?

[Keith_Beddoe]

---

@MikeTheGuru42 wrote:

My area code ( 01294 ) is served by TWO BT exchanges - Irvine Stanecastle is mostly residential but does appear on the Openreach Full Fibre scheduled listfor an upgrade, but my exchange - Irvine Old - which has more customers, and three times as many business lines does not. How do I contact Openreach for information as to why this is the case ?

---

You cannot speak to Openreach, as you are not their customer, but you could email them, but you would just get a standard reply.

[MikeTheGuru42]

This is what is so frustrating to me as former BT manager who had a spell in Customer Service during my near 40 years service - unlike the "good old days" it is almost impossible to speak to a human being ! I find it incredible that despite my having BT broadband, BT cannot tell me when I will get this upgrade.

[Keith_Beddoe]

As you are aware, Openreach and BT Retail are now separate companies, and BT Retail has no more access to Openreach, than any other provider. Ofcom would not allow any priority.

[pippincp]

As you should also be aware as a former BT manager, any roll out plans are treated as confidential information until the roll out in a particular area is "good to go" and will then be announced.

There are a lot of pegs to be put into a lot of holes until and upgrade to infrastructure can be put in place. It can't phyiscally be done all at once and while one area is being done other areas are being planned.

As regards businesses in an area, they have no bearing on residential FTTP deployment, in fact they may already have it. They would not share a 2.4Gb download and 1.2Gb upload with 32 others as residential do.

I really thought a former BT manager would know this.

[MikeTheGuru42]

Perhaps I should have mentioned that my time in BT ended in the early 1990s, long before the creation and subsequent split of Openreach and BT  - even before ADSL, never mind High Speed Broadband.

Even more ironic I was by then in Network Planning, replacing all the Strowger,  Electronic, and Crossbar exchanges - in fact, my Team and I designed the two exchanges in question !

[MikeTheGuru42]

I'm sure that it is a remarkable coincidence, but I've just received a link to the latest 170  exchanges to be upgraded to Full Fibre Broadband - and, amazingly, my exchange appears for the very first time, albeit anything up to five years away !

Still, at least it is on the list - if I don't get tempted by the presence of Virgin Media fibre already outside my front door...