NotPaying10K
Casual Member
Apologies for the length here (scroll down for the tl;dr) - wanted to avoid dripfeeding and list all that I've tried - new poster but long time lurker who has really appreciated the advice shared on here!
I moved a few weeks ago to a fairly rural property, leaving a Virgin 500Mbit+ line behind (though trying to get them to behave logically over this house move is a whole other infuriating story)
Both of us work from home in tech, and we have four children who are very much that way inclined, so our bandwidth requirements are far in excess of the 12Mbit generously offered up as our fastest option (yep, checked the BT Wholesale Checker) with the only fibre-like option being FTTPoD.
I assumed it would only be a matter of time until our small cluster of houses, just half a mile away from Virgin and FTTP territory, would be consumed by one or the other. However, when scoping out the house a few months back, I spotted "fibre overhead" on nearby poles, at odds with what I'd been seeing on various maps. More recently, Openreach HAS shown up on those maps, suggesting the install is relatively recent.
Anyway, it's obvious why I'm posting here, it's a story I've seen many times. The pole outside our new house does not have fibre on it - the closest pole with fibre is around 200m away. It appears the entire hamlet, bar our three houses, has FTTP available. From what I can tell there is a standard copper line running from the poles with the fibre on to our property via a few more poles - a route exists. We are all on the same exchange.
Hoping for a database error, I firstly tried the BT Openreach "my neighbour has FTTP" approach, which eventually resulted in a friendly email literally telling me "you can't have it because 'technical reasons'" which was somewhat non-enlightening. We didn't exchange on the house until very late May, so I was reluctant to order a field survey pre-exchange in case the engineer decided to knock on the door of a house we weren't yet committed to buying. Cerberus said as long as we ordered the field survey before 31st May, we'd still qualify for the FTTPoD discount, which might just about make it worthwhile to fork out for the install, so we got in before the cut-off.
We got the field survey results today - they want £10K including VAT, no discount applied. No clue whether Cerberus was wrong (maybe the FTTPoD actual order needed to be in 31st May, not just the field survey application) or if the £600 "civils" cost makes the whole thing ineligible - the language is somewhat vague on the FTTPoD Openreach press release. We'll follow up with Cerberus over that and see what they say.
Anyway, we're not willing to pay £10K and then waiting at least a year in top of that. My worry is that because properties 200m in one direction, and 500m in the other (found fibre even closer than the previously suspected half a mile) have FTTP, no provider will bother with us now as it won't be worthwhile. Three properties are "passed" with our field survey, one is our new neighbour who is quite happy with Three 4G broadband, and the other I have no clue about, but I suspect wouldn't be happy forking out £5K. It's just our three properties missing out, it's fields between us and the properties with fibre.
TL;DR: Anything more we can do? Are we likely to be rescued by Project Gigabit and get infilled, and if so, how long would it likely take? Anything we can do to speed matters up on that front? We're in Bucks, for the record.
In the meantime, we've now got Starlink professionally mounted on the roof (100-150Mbit most of the time, with occasional higher or lower spikes) but the low upload (5Mbit usually) is frustrating and does impact on my work. We have Three 4G broadband as a backup, that maxes out at around 30Mbit, again, very low upload. Tested all the other mobile providers with Network Cell info app, played with Cellmapper, checked local planning for masts - this was our best bet, 5G isn't likely any time soon here. We can hang on like this for a year or so, but not forever, especially as having FTTP will become more of an expectation rather than a luxury!
Thank you for reading!
I moved a few weeks ago to a fairly rural property, leaving a Virgin 500Mbit+ line behind (though trying to get them to behave logically over this house move is a whole other infuriating story)
Both of us work from home in tech, and we have four children who are very much that way inclined, so our bandwidth requirements are far in excess of the 12Mbit generously offered up as our fastest option (yep, checked the BT Wholesale Checker) with the only fibre-like option being FTTPoD.
I assumed it would only be a matter of time until our small cluster of houses, just half a mile away from Virgin and FTTP territory, would be consumed by one or the other. However, when scoping out the house a few months back, I spotted "fibre overhead" on nearby poles, at odds with what I'd been seeing on various maps. More recently, Openreach HAS shown up on those maps, suggesting the install is relatively recent.
Anyway, it's obvious why I'm posting here, it's a story I've seen many times. The pole outside our new house does not have fibre on it - the closest pole with fibre is around 200m away. It appears the entire hamlet, bar our three houses, has FTTP available. From what I can tell there is a standard copper line running from the poles with the fibre on to our property via a few more poles - a route exists. We are all on the same exchange.
Hoping for a database error, I firstly tried the BT Openreach "my neighbour has FTTP" approach, which eventually resulted in a friendly email literally telling me "you can't have it because 'technical reasons'" which was somewhat non-enlightening. We didn't exchange on the house until very late May, so I was reluctant to order a field survey pre-exchange in case the engineer decided to knock on the door of a house we weren't yet committed to buying. Cerberus said as long as we ordered the field survey before 31st May, we'd still qualify for the FTTPoD discount, which might just about make it worthwhile to fork out for the install, so we got in before the cut-off.
We got the field survey results today - they want £10K including VAT, no discount applied. No clue whether Cerberus was wrong (maybe the FTTPoD actual order needed to be in 31st May, not just the field survey application) or if the £600 "civils" cost makes the whole thing ineligible - the language is somewhat vague on the FTTPoD Openreach press release. We'll follow up with Cerberus over that and see what they say.
Anyway, we're not willing to pay £10K and then waiting at least a year in top of that. My worry is that because properties 200m in one direction, and 500m in the other (found fibre even closer than the previously suspected half a mile) have FTTP, no provider will bother with us now as it won't be worthwhile. Three properties are "passed" with our field survey, one is our new neighbour who is quite happy with Three 4G broadband, and the other I have no clue about, but I suspect wouldn't be happy forking out £5K. It's just our three properties missing out, it's fields between us and the properties with fibre.
TL;DR: Anything more we can do? Are we likely to be rescued by Project Gigabit and get infilled, and if so, how long would it likely take? Anything we can do to speed matters up on that front? We're in Bucks, for the record.
In the meantime, we've now got Starlink professionally mounted on the roof (100-150Mbit most of the time, with occasional higher or lower spikes) but the low upload (5Mbit usually) is frustrating and does impact on my work. We have Three 4G broadband as a backup, that maxes out at around 30Mbit, again, very low upload. Tested all the other mobile providers with Network Cell info app, played with Cellmapper, checked local planning for masts - this was our best bet, 5G isn't likely any time soon here. We can hang on like this for a year or so, but not forever, especially as having FTTP will become more of an expectation rather than a luxury!
Thank you for reading!