Interested by your experience, I'm in West Kent & have had a similar experience (& I suspect the same OR community manager), started getting ball park figure April last year having to increaser the size of the project to try & get overall costs down, ended up at £450k for 280 properties, just about doable with the KCC topup. Our project was added to the "going to happen" list on the 15th Feb as well - (well timed as KCC announced that the top up funding had run out on the 16th), & the latest update message also sent on the 10th Sept had almost identical wordingNothing too exciting to report as yet as not seen any build activity, but received the 'standard' email about progress...
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I’m writing to give you an update on your community funded FTTP Project in Monkton and I am pleased to say that we are making good progress and the survey and planning work is complete. We are now in the build stage of our deployment where we can actually start to install the fibre network and associated infrastructure. You might see our engineers working nearby but they could also be working anywhere on the route from your community back to the local telephone exchange.
We will be in touch with you again in the next few months as we get nearer to the go live date, however I just wanted to let you know that as it stands, we are on track for your go live date in January 2022.
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Separate to this, some of the 'poorly served' part of the village has had the FTTP infrastructure installed and is now live. We also have Orbital/VFast rolling out their AltNet FTTP service in parts of the village (not to my postcode however but not too fussed).
Interested by your experience, I'm in West Kent & have had a similar experience (& I suspect the same OR community manager), started getting ball park figure April last year having to increaser the size of the project to try & get overall costs down, ended up at £450k for 280 properties, just about doable with the KCC topup. Our project was added to the "going to happen" list on the 15th Feb as well - (well timed as KCC announced that the top up funding had run out on the 16th), & the latest update message also sent on the 10th Sept had almost identical wording, though they apparently tried calling me by phone as well.
We have seen some signs of progress locally - the fibre connectors have appeared on a couple of local poles & some blue rope around the base of others
Only just seen this update, we're out by Marden (on a larger scale between Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells) & our project has just started to go live - 3 of 5 PONS (about 160 properties) are now in & taking orders as of last week. 1 of the PONS that is live was only finished earlier last week so the commissioning process *can* be quick (my PON was apparently ready before Christmas but only went live for ordering on the 18th). If you can see the CBT then it's on it's way.Yes, I think many of the emails are automated and sent at certain periods (perhaps when a task is completed). The email recently received was more personal, I guess this is because they are actively working on this project!
Looks like you have more visible progress than us, that's for sure! How is your project going now? What area of West Kent are you in?
that's goodAs it's a couple of weeks later, thought I'd add another post to this.
Having checked the project area this morning, all CBTs appear to be in place with cable coiled in various places. Looks like we're just awaiting the jointing team to come and do the associated splicing and final bits.
I emailed Openreach as I hadn't had any update. Quite a confusing response as they basically said the build had been completed and that the network just required final testing and visual audit before going live - to me, seeing cable coiled up (as pictured) and not connected does not equal 'completed'!
I think one of the biggest issues I have had with the Openreach Fibre Team 'email support' is that whenever you email and get a response it's always from a different person. Unsure why they cannot assign a project with an agent to ensure communication and correspondence is always consistent, that would improve the process massively in my book.
Anyway, hopefully this will all be completed in the next couple of weeks.
EDIT: As I'm at work I've been informed that engineers are in our area 'finishing up'. Hopefully I'll come home to see a joint box on my pole instead of coiled fibre!![]()
that's goodI suspect the problem is the people that communicate out to us Community Leads get b****r all communications from the PMs, I've seen a couple of emails begging the PM to give them something to tell me ;-). When you do go live I'd be interested in the installation timescales especially if you are using ISPs outside the BT group (I've got a thread else where on ispreview complaining about apparent discrimination against non BT group companies)
Excellent news, be *really* interested in other installation timescales (my isp has been told 5 weeks, all BT group installs locally are happening in 3 or less)