When You’re Covered, But Not Covered, by Full Fibre Broadband

The excitement is palpable. You’ve just been told that a UK network operator has deployed a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network down your road and made it live, only to then suffer the bitter pill of disappointment when you discover that your house is one of the few that can’t get it. But why? We take a look.

Most digital infrastructure builders tend to rollout new fibre along streets or lanes, which will typically be run to a nearby telegraph pole (overground deployment) or via lateral cuts to a Toby Box in the pavement (underground deployment) – usually just outside your home. The fibre optic cable is then only deployed to your house (aka – the “final drop“) once an order has been made for the service to be installed.

However, it’s at this point that problems sometimes creep into the process, which can result in homes being perhaps unfairly excluded from the local network coverage – either due to the limitations of the operator’s local deployment, or by choice of the homeowner themselves. Experiences will vary between locations, since deployment methods differ between operators and each area will have its own unique challenges.

Nevertheless, if you’ve been waiting years for such an upgrade, to suddenly find that what was promised is now not going to be available to you can be extremely disheartening. Thanks to feedback from both consumers, retail ISPs and network builders, we’ve been able to put together a short unordered list to highlight some of the reasons why homes may end up being excluded like this – despite the network being present on your street.

Reasons

➤ Database Errors

Sometimes the issue can be as deceptively simple as a database error, which may fail to register the existence of your property in the area. Similarly, if your house is a new build property, then it can sometimes take a few months before the online ordering systems provided by an ISP are able to recognise the fact that your house is even present.

There are also occasions when you might see multiple results for a single address, for example a house that has been converted into flats or one where land has recently been partitioned between several properties, which can cause problems.

Often issues like this can be resolved with a quick phone call to the ISP or some nudging of Royal Mail (here), although getting around the “computer says no” brigade of front-line support doesn’t always make this easy.

➤ Your distance from the street is too great

Most of us live in houses that are situated very close to the road, usually within a handful of metres, but the same is not true for everybody. Sometimes people live in houses that can be set quite far back from the road, which is more common in rural areas (e.g. farms), but can also apply in some quirkily designed suburban locations.

In short, we’ve seen a few cases where houses reach the street via an extremely long driveway, while the house itself may be set back 100 metres or more from the road where the fibre has been run. Often this will fall outside the operator’s ability to reach you via a standard installation approach, and so the property may be excluded from availability.

However, it is sometimes possible to talk directly with the operator about solving this, but doing so may require the property owner to pay Excess Construction Charges (ECC) to run the fibre over a much longer distance. In some cases, that might cost you several thousand pounds. But in other cases, the operator may not even be able to offer that as a solution.

Despite all this, experiences do vary and some operators will go to great lengths in order to reach difficult homes.

➤ No clear cable run from a pole (telecoms pole)

A lot of alternative network operators like to make use of new or existing telecoms (telegraph) poles to run their fibre, but in a given street there can sometimes be a situation where specific premises may not be reachable via poles due to the lack of a clear cable run to the house.

Since resolving this particular issue for individual properties may require more expensive civil engineering work (e.g. trenching or the deployment of several new poles), then the operator may simply opt to save money by removing the affected house (or houses) from their availability checker. Issues like this can cause a lot of confusion for consumers, but they are becoming more frequent as networks grow.

➤ Lack of an infrastructure sharing agreement

Some network operators will, wherever viable, try to make use of existing electricity poles or other infrastructure to run their fibre into homes. But in some streets, or part of a street, this may not be possible if the operator has been unable to secure the necessary permissions from the local power company (note: special training is often required before an operator’s engineers can even work on electricity poles).

Securing such access agreements can take a long time, but are preferable to more costly civil engineering. But this may thus temporarily create a patch-work of network availability in some locations until resolved. In other cases, there may be a lack of space for new kit on electricity poles, such as due to the complexity of a particular pole or existing infrastructure sharing agreements with rival operators (e.g. Openreach), which can be harder to resolve without the costly deployment of new poles etc.

We should add that electricity companies, and indeed many other infrastructure providers (except Openreach), are under no hard legal obligation to share access to their infrastructure with fibre builders.

➤ Lack of spare pole / port capacity

Sometimes all of the right infrastructure might be present to serve an area, but the network operator may not be able to offer the service to new customers because their network has run out of spare port capacity to add lines. For example, we’ve seen plenty of cases here Openreach has filled up all the ports on their pole or underground based Connectorised Block Terminals (CBT) – example.

Resolving issues like this can take time because there are often key limitations involved, such as in terms of how much loading capacity you can place on a pole, which might require the deployment of new poles or more trenching work. At present it doesn’t help that many broadband ISPs aren’t very effective at explaining to consumers when this is the cause of their local availability problems, despite the network itself being present.

➤ Conflicts over land ownership

Some houses are situated in such an awkward position of land ownership and division – between public and private property – that it can be difficult for operators to reach them with a new cable, without first crossing somebody else’s land, which may or may not be solvable via a wayleave agreement.

For example, we’ve seen situations where, in order to connect one house, it is necessary to run a new cable across or under the property of your neighbour, which is naturally something that they may reject if it is perceived as being likely to damage or disrupts their land (a fair concern). Once again, this is an issue where finding a solution can be difficult, but being on friendly terms with the people next door is a good start.

➤ Tree Preservation Orders (TPO)

Some houses may require a new cable to run near a tree with a TPO, which could block overhead cable delivery from poles and may attract tedious / expensive wayleaves if going underground. Situations like this may also require an additional survey and all of this is likely to take extra care and time to resolve.

➤ Flats – access and other restrictions

Many people live in large residential blocks of flats (Multi-Dwelling Units), but operators that want to extend their fibre into such buildings sometimes run into problems with access (i.e. securing wayleave agreements) or face obstacles to the physical build itself.

The law has recently been changed to make it easier for operators to access MDUs, even if landlords prove obstructive, but sometimes they will still find it particularly difficult to actually run their cables through the building (retrofits are always tricky, but solutions like InvisiLight do exist).

Issues of ‘Health and Safety’ may also crop up along the way and, in another example we’ve seen, an operator (here) once declined to fit a four-story building because it was simply deemed “too tall“. The annoying part is that consumers often don’t find out about these issues until the day of the first installations, which is usually after you’ve placed your order.

We covered all this a bit more in another related article (here).

➤ Split availability between ISPs

Some alternative network operators typically build an open-access wholesale network for other ISPs use. But on larger network builds this can sometimes result in a degree of split availability. The most common example of this comes from providers on Cityfibre’s network, where network availability at a local level can sometimes vary between ISPs.

For example, some providers, such as Vodafone, TalkTalk, Zen Internet and Giganet, are either available or almost available across the entirety of Cityfibre’s network. Meanwhile, other providers may have patchy availability and initially only sell to specific locations within the overall infrastructure coverage.

The reasons for this are often two-fold, relating to both a legacy of past exclusivity agreements and the costly challenge ISPs face when adapting to a new network operator in a different area. Independent ISPs have to invest in order to properly connect their network to the new infrastructure in each area (e.g. last May 2022 Giganet announced that they’d achieve national availability on Cityfibre within the next 12-months).

The problem with this is that regular consumers may pick an ISP on Cityfibre’s network, often after being told that the service has gone live (e.g. usually via emails, news articles or mailshots from Cityfibre), only to find that their chosen provider doesn’t yet serve the area. At this point the customer may incorrectly assume that the network is not yet live, when in fact they might still be able to order, just via a different ISP.

As if that confusion wasn’t bad enough then some ISPs don’t help by making it seem like their service is available to locations where it has yet to go live. The customer thus ends up placing an order, which is really more of a pre-order and one that comes attached to a vague or unreliable expectation of future service delivery. The ISP may then string the customer along by claiming that Cityfibre isn’t yet live, when in fact it might be if they’d just chosen a different ISP. We’ve experienced this ourselves with family members in different locations.

➤ Low-voltage cables and other obstacles

Various other obstacles could also prevent new fibre being run to your property. For example, we have heard of some cases where a network operator declined to provide the service because there was an overhead low-voltage power cable that would be in close proximity to the new fibre run between a pole and the property. Sometimes there are ways around this, but it often depends on how much cost the solution adds.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, but it does summarise some of the issues that we’ve seen highlighted in the real-world over the past 3-4 years. As full fibre networks continue to expand, then there’s every reason to believe that we’ll be seeing more issues like this in the future, not less.

In addition, an issue that affects one operator may also impact others, which can sometimes result in ‘patches’ or ‘islands’ of poor connectivity inside otherwise well covered areas. This is particularly true where cost conscious commercial builds are involved, since the operator may not feel incentivised enough to resolve a costly issue, particularly when that issue only impacts a few homes.

However, it is important to stress that not all operators react the same way to the issues above. Some operators are more effective at finding solutions to difficult problems, while others may be so cost or risk sensitive as to skip a property at the first sign of a problem.