Openreach Place Stop Sell on FTTPoD Orders After Spike in Demand

Customers trying to order one of Openreach’s (BT) business focused FTTP on Demand (FTTPoD / FoD) ultrafast broadband products from a supporting UK ISP are currently unable to do so because the service recently experienced a spike in demand, which has strained their operational capacity for new provisions.

FTTPoD is designed to be requested (“on demand“) in slower FTTC capable areas where Openreach’s pure fibre optic cables usually only go as far as your local street cabinet. Essentially it enables you to get an ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) line built right to your property (e.g. business or home), even if FTTP wasn’t previously planned for the area, albeit with the customer having to pay the significant build costs involved.

The installation cost of FTTPoD, which can reach into the tens of thousands of pounds (examples), and its close proximity to certain Ethernet / Leased Line style solutions has always made it a difficult product for ISPs to place. Despite this there are some people who have found a use for it. This has also been boosted by the Government’s new Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme for small businesses.

At present Openreach’s overall industry-wide operation capacity for supporting individual FoD provisions is 20 orders per calendar month (April 2018 to March 2019), which is largely due to their recent re-focus on the new native FTTP roll-out to 3 million premises by 2020. Suffice to say that it doesn’t take much to put that under some strain and now a new Stop Sell has been implemented.

An Openreach Spokesperson said:

“We’re asking Communication Providers to hold back from placing any new orders for FoD, after a recent spike in demand.

We’ve always been clear with industry around our operational capacity to deliver FoD and this temporary measure will allow us to work through our existing orders and avoid the risk of any backlog.”

As stated again above, Openreach has previously said that they might have to ask ISPs to “hold back from placing further orders” when “order capacity for a period exceeds our ability to supply” (here), so this isn’t terribly surprising news.

We should also point out their projected capacity for both single and multiple project orders for the 2019/20 financial year (starting from Q1 – April to June 2019) is currently expected to be able to support 100 industry-wide FoD orders per calendar month, which suggests that this issue should resolve itself in the near future. As above, it is only temporary.