Openreach Offer Limited Saturday FTTP Broadband Installs via UK ISPs UPDATE
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has indicated, via a new briefing, that they are “making a limited volume” of Saturday provision (installation) appointments available for Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband line deployments. Retail ISPs will be able to select these if they so desire, at least for a limited time.
The briefing itself contains precious little information, and our hails to Openreach yesterday have thus far gone unanswered. The network operator does not typically offer Saturday FTTP provisions as standard, but in the past they have used such methods in order to cope with high demand, clear a backlog or as part of premium (flexible appointment) provisions.
Internet providers can of course choose whether or not to partake in this, and if they do then that should show up as part of the usual broadband order process (i.e. when you select to book an appointment). Consumers would no doubt welcome the greater availability of Saturday appointments, but such things do often come at extra cost and hassle for the network operator.
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UPDATE 11:50am
So far as we can tell, this limited change is about trying something new and because, operationally speaking, Openreach’s contractors currently seem to have spare capacity available on Saturdays. In other words, the network operator wants to see if this will be something that would work to pick up customer provisions.
But appointment availability will be fairly limited and is somewhat being offered to ISPs on a first come, first served basis.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
Lovely – but irrelevant as we /still/ can’t get fibre, despite several places not even 300m away now being enabled. Openreach vans are everywhere, the BIDB map is festooned with local telco works, but all we get is “available within the next year” possibly. What did we do wrong? Around 100 modern houses, 1.5 miles from the city centre, all champing to leave the copper world behind, but the wait goes on and on…
Well, if it’s irrelevant to you Mark had best ignore the half the country it’s relevant to right now and take the story down.
@Polish Poler, make that 60% of the country (certainly within the next month).
If it’s any consolation I don’t think they bother updating the checkers. For us Openreach was saying ‘by the end of 2026’ until the day it was live. Similar with CityFibre went straight from ‘building in your area’ to live skipping all the intermediate steps. And the street over was live about 2 months before us for both Openreach and Cityfibre. So don’t worry, they’ll (probably) get to you soon.
@john – that’s good to know! Yeah, looking at the maps, things seem to happen “suddenly”, i.e. live areas appear even when there wasn’t a thicket of telco works showing on the map. So there’s still hope that we won’t have to wait another whole year…
As for CityFibre, I’ve definitely given up. They stopped and started many times in this area, but there’s been zero sign of activity locally for many months now. Shame, as they would be notably cheaper than Openreach for the same speeds (actually better, as symmetric).
Woe is you @A Stevens.
I’m in the same position. In a suburb of the second largest city with only Openreach FTTC available. Openreach FTTP and Virgin DOCSIS stopped about 100 metres away and CityFibre about a mile away. At least I’m not far from the cabinet and the FTTC performance is good enough for the moment. In any roll-out, someone has to be first and someone has to be last, I suppose. Incidentally, what will OR do with the fibre that goes to the cabinets when the cabinets are redundant? All the cabinets around here are actually in areas that have FTTP so the number of people connected must be reducing.
I can see this being popular
For residential customers it would probably be better if they worked Saturdays & had Mondays off instead.
About time! Virgin have been doing Saturday installs for a wee while now
I’m sure so did CityFibre
How about Sunday 7am to 12pm slot Openreach?
Surely you and the engineers would all be at church?
I never went to church myself.
I guess OpenReach employees have families, kids in school and partners that work Mon-Fri so value their weekends as much as the rest of us in those working patterns. Soon as they can replace them with an AI controlled robot, we’ll have 24/7 provision service. Thinks – unless that would need a high speed broadband connection to work, then it becomes a bit chicken and egg
BT technicians did and I presume continue to working days covering all 7 days a week. There is (was) a requirement that the ‘field’ guys had to work 5 Sundays, 10 Saturdays per year with a day off in the week to ensure that they continued to work their annual conditioned hours without mandatory overtime. Whether that still works with the reduced staff levels I don’t know but maybe someone will confirm.
Certainly I see OR vans attending the cab in the village at weekends.
Naughty BT – see link here as Mark has missed this news.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/bt-offering-full-fibre-upgrades-when-service-not-actually-available-at-an-address
Not missed, just covered several times before in other articles. It’s a common industry problem and one that’s not unique to BT. Lots of providers send out similar notices at postcode level, which won’t be accurate for every single property that receives them. As I say, it’s sadly a routine issue.
The rest of the email in question would be good. Doesn’t make any sense based on that screenshot and was definitely sent in error if that’s all of it.
Mistakes happen either way. They mention having a single example of this which given the pace of the build isn’t bad.
The second hand car dealers have got competition.
Think your nurse needs to attend to you.