Confusion as CityFibre Says Four Story Building Too Tall for FTTP UPDATE

Residents of a block of flats in Edinburgh (Scotland) – called ‘Tytler Court‘ – have been left confused after Cityfibre, which had just completed the build of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the area, told them that they could not serve the building because it was “too tall“.. at just four-stories high.

Cityfibre began their £100m project to rollout a new full fibre broadband network across the city of Edinburgh a few years ago, and they’ve since expanded to cover around half of the city, albeit mostly in the suburbs. But they are now moving slowly into the city centre and coastal area, and the work at Tytler Court is fairly close to all that. Once fully completed, the operator’s fibre network in the city is expected to be 2100km long.

At this point it’s worth noting that network operators often run into problems with serving large residential buildings (MDU – Multi-Dwelling Units), albeit usually due to challenges with securing wayleaves (legal property access agreements) or limitations on access to run new cabling. But solutions to both can often be found.

However, in this case, Cityfibre appears to have completed a highly disruptive deployment around the building (it’s unclear if they did anything inside the building itself), only to then tell residents of Tytler Court that they couldn’t be served because the building “had the wrong layout and was too tall.” Except it’s only four-stories high and contains just 70 flats, which is just one story higher than some houses in the area.

Adam Ferrier, Local Resident, said (Edinburgh Live):

“I find it utterly bizarre that works were carried out for around four months that severely disrupted our lives and impacted accessibility – even for emergency services – at Tytler Court, only for residents to be told that we cannot use the product.

There are around 70 flats in Tytler Court and we have been told that we cannot access it. They began the work in January this year and only finished up in April. Some of the areas that they have dug up look extremely shoddy and there is still purple plastic cable capped off that is visible in the street.”

By all accounts, Cityfibre’s ISPs (e.g. Vodafone) were initially telling residents of the building that they would be able to get the service installed once the area went live on the new network. But residents found out later that the promised engineers were not turning up to make the final connections into flats, due to the aforementioned issue.

In fairness, it is entirely possible that Cityfibre might have run into problems with the layout of the building (i.e. difficulties with running new cables), although saying it was also “too tall” does seem a bit daft (four-stories is not that tall for an MDU) and solutions can often be found to cabling issues (e.g. InvisiLight cables as used by Openreach, Hyperoptic etc.).

The Edinburgh Live report does not include a comment from Cityfibre, but we have requested one and will report back in due course.

UPDATE 21st Oct @ 10:28am:

Some good news for residents of the building.

Paul Wakefield, Area Manager at CityFibre, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“As soon as we heard about this issue, we moved quickly to find a way to a positive solution. I’m pleased to say we’re now working to secure a wayleave for the property, which will enable us to connect the building. We’re delighted that so many people are interested in joining our full fibre network and we are working as hard as we can to get customers connected.”

We should point out that “working to secure” is not the same as “secured“, but hopefully there will be a positive outcome in the not-too-distant future. The issue also raises a question over whether it’s right to mark a service as being available to an MDU (i.e. orders taken) when the operator hasn’t yet deployed or even been granted access.

We understand that the building may have been “too tall” for Cityfibre’s external approach to deployment, but they will now most likely try to do it internally.