Underground ducting direct to property?

[Iceman1]

The openreach checker shows it is soft.

 

Also forgive for the silly question but what is a Toby box.

The nearest 'box' to my house is one of these probably about 50m away. 

A few weeks ago Openreach installed cabling to this point. When I asked them, they said this serves all the houses in the estate and they are fed by ducting.

[iniltous]

That’s a joint box lid not a toby box , the duct from here to the toby box should be new ( so scars in the footpath ) search for a Toby box image but they are normally a black plastic square about 4” , that the visible part on top of the new duct placed outside each address , occasionally a duct marker rather than a Toby box is used,  this is a 2inch round duct cover ( has OR printed on it ) ….there is always the possibility that the survey network note is plain wrong ,  or the area many have been designed to have toby boxes , but to save money initially on the build stage , they and the associated duct in the footpath were never provided, in which case a duct is provided from a jointbox ( like the one shown ) directly to the house wall when an order is received ( the correct SNN for that is ‘partial DIG’ ) , and that will confuse the installation people ( SD division, Service Delivery ) as they will expect less excavation than will be needed and they also will be scratching their heads wondering where the toby boxes are , either that , or they are there , you just haven’t noticed them …when was the property built approximately  ?

[Iceman1]

Housing estate was built in 1974 and there definitely is not any Toby boxes for my house or any other houses on the estate.

When I spoke to the Openreach engineer, he said every house is served from the joint box via ducting.

[36ULW]

Openreach don’t use Toby Boxes anymore, they briefly used them for a couple of years but have stopped now for a variety of reasons.

Instead now on DIG Sites they’ll put a CBT in either the nearest 4 or 6 box or possibly have to build a new one. Then when EU’s order FTTP they will then duct all the way up to their property from where the CBT is. 

[iniltous]

The Openreach planning policy changed somewhere between 2022-2023 , that’s when designing DIG  areas  was changed from planning to use Toby boxes to only using existing plant ( duct and joint boxes  ) , to  save money and not  give the Alt Net competition an even bigger advantage than the one they already enjoy , the planner simply plans  for the CBTs to be  in the nearest existing correct size joint box  , no new duct  or jointboxes are provided, and nothing further is done  until an order is received , there is no point providing a toby box in this scenario…this policy does have disadvantages though , as the number of CBTs in a single box has a limit , so some addresses may find they are excluded when very near neighbours can order FTTP , simply because of the existing jointbox capacity,

The late 1970’s was when the copper network build changed to  UR ( underground radial ) DP’s , from simply ‘U’ underground ,  UR used many more underground jointboxes and that is much more forgiving than the early ‘U’ underground DP’s where a DIG area may have virtually no concrete lidded jointboxes and very little duct , using prefabricated  boxes like JB23’s , which cannot house a single CBT .

The odd thing is the SNN ( survey note ) still states built to the curtilage, which suggests the survey was done much earlier than the FND network build was done  , that could explain why it’s been done this way.

TBH most of this is explanation is ‘nerdy’ , from the consumer point of view it matters little apart from it will probably take longer when service delivery realise they have to provide much more ‘ civils ‘ work rather than simply a dig across someone’s garden from a Toby box