"full fibre to the house", with ridiculous speeds, how?

[RobinsonUK]

I was looking at other broadband deals and noticed they now have some amazing speeds.  But this is "full fibre to the house".  Presumably that's not something I can get if I live in a top floor flat. 

Didn't really understand how it's installed anyway.  Going to assume BT engineers don't come and dig up the pavement from the cabinet all the way to your property, so how does it work (it does give that impression in the diagram)?

[licquorice]

It's just a fibre 'wire' instead of a copper wire. It gets to the property the same way that copper does.

[RobinsonUK]

Ok but does the copper get replaced?  Presumably it's up two floors on the outside of the property or something?  I'm just trying to imagine what the engineer will actually do if I buy this package... I don't want to inconvenience anyone else in the block.

[iniltous]

There can be more than one type of a ‘top floor flat’ so it’s impossible to give a single one size fits all type answer , you could have a top floor flat in a converted house , or  a top floor flat in a ‘tower block’ that’s 15 or 16 stories up , the methods used for providing FTTP would be nothing like each other , so without knowing what type of top floor flat it is  , it’s impossible to say how providing FTTP would be  handled.

In the example of  a converted house , if it were served overhead ( so wires from a telegraph pole ) and the top floor flat presented no complications to being served from the telegraph pole , then that would be no different to a regular house in the same street that hadn’t been converted into flats , in the example of a tower block , they are excluded from the general FTTP rollout , but can be dealt with by a separate specialist MDU team , where the entire building is retrofitted with FTTP , obviously in these cases with  the various permissions etc need to be obtained from the building owners , management company etc they can much more difficult to give service to than a regular dwelling , because of this they can be relatively low priority so it’s often the case that all the SDU ( single dwelling units ) after an area is upgraded to FTTP can order it  , but occupants in a MDU in the same area cannot order FTTP until the MDU is picked up by that separate program, and that could be years after the neighbouring SDU have FTTP availability 

If your flat has FTTP availability, then the survey note on a checker site will advise the installation method . 

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

put your address in here , the survey note looks like this 

Our records show the following FTTP network service information for these premises:-Single Dwelling Unit Residential UG Feed with no anticipated issues.

What does it say for your flat ?

[RobinsonUK]

Interesting.   Yes, it's not a "tower block" and it's not a conversion.  It's just six flats built ~ 2005, two down, three up.  I'm not sure if there's a line from a telegraph pole.  I'll have to check that.

I put my address into the checker but I don't know what most of this means:

Availability Checker Result

[iniltous · Accepted solution]

As can be seen , MDU , no anticipated issues , it also shows 1 stage install process …so Openreach are happy that service to the flat should be fairly simple, if the construction were from 2005 , it’s likely to be underground service but there could be variations on the way the copper pair was provided, generally FTTP copies the method , there may be ( for  example ) there were a duct to a central point , and a riser to the first floor , or could be duct to an external wall  and the ground floor flat and the flat above could be served from that point ( this potentially may need the ground floor flat having a cable on their wall leading upto the first floor , but you would expect instead of ‘no anticipated issues’ the note would be ‘ potential wayleave required’ ….but whatever the exact method it’s not really your problem, you order it , Openreach deal with it 

[RobinsonUK]

OK, that's great.  Thanks for the info.

[brookheather]

You might want to check the availability for your neighbouring flats as it will show if they already have an FTTP ONT installed - if they do you could ask them about the install process.