Missed off the OpenReach Fibre Survey - Neighbours have it but BT deny its existence outside me HELP

[1IwantFiber]

Hi All,

I have Fibre cables in the road outside my property.  My neighbours are able to utilise them and have fibre to prem with good 50Mb (ish) speeds but although they pass my house I am on Fibre to cabinet & then copper with a poor 7Mb speed.  Open Reach have been out numerous times and say it is utter madness as there is spare cable but as the presence of the cable passing our property isn't on the system they can't provision it to us.  I have called BT numerous time, I have called and emailed open reach and no one will help.  BT say it is OpenReach's responsibility, Open reach say it is BT's responsibility. 

What can I do?  I call and call and call and get nowhere. 

I am positive that it is fibre to prem cables as at the start of lock down it came down and my neighbours where up in arms that they lost their fibre.   I have also asked my neighbours to do a speed check and verified with the OpenReach engineers that it 100% is. 

My husband and I are both working from home and trying to home school children.  For important work calls we literally have to turn off all devices to guarantee we can get the Zoom calls not to buffer or freeze.  Our offices are now closed until Jan 2021 so we are pretty desperate to access better broadband. 

Doesn't BT have to treat customers fairly?

Please can someone help me.  

Kind regards,

Sally

[imjolly]

BT like all ISPs can only provide what openreach say is available

enter your phone number and post results remember delete number 

https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL

[1IwantFiber]

Thanks for your help, these are the results I get from entering my number:

And these from entering my neighbours number

According to the results they are on a different cabinet to us but I know that their cables run outside our property and as I stated earlier Open Reach have expressed surprise that we are not able to use the better Fibre cables.  

Appreciate BT can only provision what Open Reach say is available but not sure how I request open reach to do a survey.  I have emailed and called them.  

Many thanks for your help. 

[NeilO]

Hi @1IwantFibre welcome to the community and thanks for posting, I'm sorry that you're not happy with your broadband speeds. Your neighbour isn't on FTTP as the screenshots show you are both on VDSL which means the broadband is supplied using fibre to the cabinet technology. The difference in speed is due to being connected to different cabinets and this, unfortunately, is not something we can help with as Openreach won't change your lines routing to another cabinet in order to improve speed.

[1IwantFiber]

Hi NeilO, 

Thank you so much for your response.  I also noticed that and it concurs with what another neighbour (who has excellent speeds) told me, that they are not on full fibre but manage to get great speeds after the cables were changed.  

So I suppose that does take me back to my question, about 12+ months ago we watched the engineers put the cables in down our road, then all our neighbours got much better speeds and we didn't - why is that and is there anything we can do?  The last OpenReach engineer I spoke with last week said it should be achievable if we could get a survey done but are you now saying it is due to the Cabinet we are on and it is just bad luck. 

Also, why would our cabinet provide such slow speeds and another provide such fast speeds? 

Many thanks  

[imjolly]

there are numerous posts on the forum similar to yours where a move of cabinet would improve connection speed but openreach refuse to make the massive routing changes just so you can get a better broadband connection.

All the cabinets are capable of same speed but speed depends on distance from the street cab - further from cab the slower the speed

[iniltous]

You are already on a cabinet that has FTTC , but it ‘seems’ your neighbours are on a different cabinet to you , that also has FTTC, but the speeds are better , because they are closer to their cabinet than you are to yours...
I think there are two possibilities, they were fortunate and their connection was ‘re-parented’ onto a closer cabinet and your connection wasn’t, there may well be reasons for that , you don’t say if the neighbour is really close , or ( for arguments sake ) on the other side of the road.Has everyone else improved and it’s just your address that hasn’t, or is it a group of property’s that haven’t improved and you are one of them ? or your connection was moved but the records to show this move haven’t been done.

You ask why your cabinet is ‘slow’ and a different one ‘fast’, but they are the same, it’s the distance that is the key, looking at your neighbours prediction, their cab must be very close , possibly 100-200m , but yours (assuming the records are correct ) is much further away , there is a chart showing speed against distance if you search

The distance you are from the cab is what determines speed you get, that’s just physics

[1IwantFiber]

Thanks so much for the replies, really interesting and useful.  I am sorry if I am being stupid but I am still struggling to understand the following:

 - Impact re: Distance from the cabinet

 - That all cabinets offer the same potential speed

Let me introduce a 2nd Neighbour. 

I should have said earlier we are very rural so the neighbour I mentioned earlier (neighbour 1) is about 1/2 a mile to my right.  Here is the results from my 2nd  neighbour who is 1/3 of a mile to my left.  Neighbour 1 and Neighbour 2 are further away from each other than they are from me so 1) why are they on the same cabinet (and a different cabinet to me) and 2) If distance to cabinet has a detrimental impact why aren't they impacted as it is not possible for them both to be near to the cabinet. 

There was definitely a wiring upgrade done that we don't seem to be benefiting from.

Many thanks in advance. 

[1IwantFiber]

I have looked up the cabinet locations and then drawn on to the map the property locations.  

Hopefully this helps highlight my confusion! 

[imjolly]

the graph I posted shows the speed drop off over the distance from your home to the cabinet.  This is no different to the previous adsl but that was distance from the exchange to your home but principle is the same- further from the source cab or exchange the slower your connection speed.  That is nobody's fault just the laws of physics