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Message 1 of 7

Newbuild woes

Hi all. Hoping you can help or point in right direction 

Recently moved to a newbuild which are primed for openreach and just need activating. Or so I was told

2 x engineer visit from a 3rd party called circet and it seems whilst I have the openreach box on the wall outside the point inside the house where something he called a "RIP chord" should be is instead just a white wire with a really thin blue plastic wire inside it. He tried to splice an end onto it and couldn't. I can't just stick another point on the exterior wall as I have cat6 Cabling all back to a central point in the middle of the house where the ont is supposed to be. 

Openreach keep insisting on the house is primed. The builder insist it's an openreach issue.

Other houses yards away have been activated fine.

Any help much appreciated. A month (including christmas) with no broadband is a pain to say the least. 

Cheers!

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Message 2 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

@Ianm83 

What date did you place your order with BT Retail and what date has BT given for your service to be activated?

Circet provide a fully managed turnkey solution to BT for the installation of all PSTN and LLU installations across the residential and business channel.

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Message 3 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

The normal new build process is the builder/ developer is provided with various Openreach ‘stores’ , one of which is an internal optical ‘Ezibend’ cable that the developer installs at first fix between the location of the ONT to the external wall ,( so behind walls hidden from view) this has a white outer jacket and a blue inner jacket , the blue inner jacket is around the optical fibre , the end of this Ezibend cable at the house wall end is left coiled for Openreach to cut to the appropriate length , strip and splice the fibre to an external optical cable at the grey CSP block on the outside wall , the end of the cable at the ONT has a green SC/APC plug that fits into the ONT .
Potential problems are , the developer damages the cable installing it , or leaves insufficient cable at either end , so it cannot be plugged into the ONT or there isn’t enough cable length to enable it to be spliced at the CSP .

Before the plot is ‘called off’ as ready for occupation, the Openreach site representative ( called a FBC , field based coordinator ) should check this cable has been provided properly, and if the developer has messed up , they get them to replace the internal optical cable.


The construction of these cables have a ‘rip cord’ used to strip the outer jacket ( insulation ) from the cable , it is between the inner blue and outer white  jacket , but it’s not clear why this is an issue, if it snaps then stripping the cable can be difficult, if the cable is too short , splicing is impossible.


Openreach could provide a new Ezibend cable but only the developer can install it behind internal walls etc , if the developer won’t install the replacement cable because they would have repair or replace plasterboard walls , then the ONT would have to be in a different location and surface wired from the CSP , so this could make redundant any Ethernet cabling provided at the original ONT location.
It seems to me it’s the developer is who needs to resolve this

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Message 4 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

Wow man thanks. That's more helpful than anyone else has been throughout the entire process.

I have a fair length of cable available. So it seems they just need to strip back to find the fresh fibre inside. If that doesn't work I'm looking at the developer putting a new cable in. Which I'll now force the issue now that I understand. I have the blue jacket but its lost the internal fibre at the end I currently have

Hopefully just a case of stripping back.

Many thanks 

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Message 5 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

@Ianm83 

Nothing is going to be activated unless you have placed an order.

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Message 6 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

@Keith_Beddoe order was done back in November. Original switch on date was 11th December. 

Circet guy was here 2 minutes said he needed to kick job back to openreach and left. I then got a text from openreach saying second visit was scheduled 21st December

And guess what? It was the same dude. 

To his credit he spent some time at that point explaining to me what the score was and physically showing me there was no fibre inside the blue jacket inside the white cable.

He even tried to put it in his splicing machine to further demonstrate that what I had wasn't right. 

Obviously Christmas has stopped play now anyway. 

Cheers.

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Message 7 of 7

Re: Newbuild woes

@Ianm83 

Hopefully you are getting regular updates from BT, as to the progress of your order.

Its seems very common to encounter delays on new builds, where the developer has not worked closely with Openreach.

 

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