A Case of Confusing Delays and FTTP Availability on Openreach’s Network

It’s happened to a few people. You move into a new house and are told by your ISP that Openreach’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network is available to the property, but soon after placing your order it becomes clear that some part of the network hasn’t been completed. Cue several months of waiting.

The situation described above is what recently happened to one of our readers, Jack, when he moved into a new house during October 2022. The house was showing up in various availability checkers as being covered by the FTTP network, and Jack wasted no time in placing an order with UK ISP Sky Broadband (20th Oct) for one of their Full Fibre packages. But problems soon emerged.

In this case, Sky contacted Jack to inform him that they didn’t have the necessary “equipment” to complete his installation and Openreach would thus need to conduct a survey, before being able to set a final date for the installation (the original date was 25th Nov). A full month passed with no movement from either Sky or Openreach, during which time the house was without any fixed line internet connectivity.

In a normal situation it can take anything from a few days (e.g. if the property has had FTTP before from the same operator) and up to 2-3 weeks to get a new FTTP line installed from Openreach, depending upon the circumstances and local resources etc. Most lines are deployed fairly quickly.

However, some more complex installs may require additional work (2 stage), such as surveys and street closures, which could take a little longer, albeit still usually measured in weeks rather than months. On the other hand, there are the extreme installs, which may attract excess construction charges, but that’s a different story (example). We suspect Jack was in the two-stage category.

Jack told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Currently having an issue when I’ve moved into a house that doesn’t have fibre but is on the street and so far I keep getting the usual messages from Sky, saying they don’t have the equipment. A survey was supposed to be done by now for an engineer to take a look, but so far no one has been to the property, leaving us without internet for over a month.

Unfortunately Sky have not been very helpful as they’re not able to communicate with Openreach it seems.”

It was around this time, after a month had passed with no certainty of when he might be connected, that Jack came home one day to find that some new fibre optic cabling had been taped up near to his house. But Sky was still unable to provide much clarity and, to make matters worse, the best they could do was to merely promise an “update” in mid-January 2023 (nearly three months on from the order!).

It was at this point that ISPreview.co.uk got involved and, after a couple of weeks of nudging, Openreach finally informed us earlier this month that all of the external work was now complete, and the operator just needed to speak to Jack to get his availability for the next few days, so they can complete the install inside his property. Brilliant we thought, finally some progress.

A spokesperson for Openreach said:

“We’re really sorry for the delay here and can understand how frustrating it must be for the customer. We have now completed the external work required for this install and are working with the customer to have the internal installation completed as soon as possible. This is a priority for us, and we hope to have the customer connected to the network in the coming days.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple, since Sky initially gave Jack a new installation date of 18th January 2023 – hardly an improvement. After a bit of pestering this was reduced down to 9th January, although that still meant waiting around another 6 weeks before being able to get his full fibre connection installed. Rather different from the “coming days” remark given by Openreach above.

“Even the Sky person said at this point it shouldn’t take that long to complete and the date given is a bit much and too far away, so hopes that Openreach will contact me with a sooner date,” said Jack.

We found this all rather curious and continued to press Openreach for more detail on why the installation itself took so long, as well as why Jack is still being expected to wait almost a quarter of an entire year to get connected to a service that has remained – throughout all of this – marked as being “available” to his house, when the infrastructure clearly wasn’t yet in place.

The good news is that Openreach and Sky were eventually able to move Jack’s date forward to 21st December 2022 next week. The bad news is that Openreach did not respond to either of our two follow-up questions, which sought further detail on the underlying causes of the original delay. In fairness, this is unusual for Openreach, as they’re usually quite good at helping to fill in the blanks.

Sadly, this is not the first time that we’ve come across situations like this, and it should be said that such problems can occur on other networks too, which is why it’s wise never to assume that a new installation will always be completed within the typical 1-2 week wait. On the other hand, lengthy waits like this are somewhat of a rarity, but they clearly do happen.