Different Openreach ONTs. Number of ports?

[drenk1976]

Hi all,

This may be one for the real FTTP experts!

We moved into a new build in 2018. This (incredibly luckily) was I believe one of the first new build estates where Openreach had installed a fibre only line instead of copper. There was already an ONT on the wall and plugged in, ready to be connected, just like this one.

We contacted Zen at the time who got it all connected up with no problem whatsoever without an engineer visiting.

18 months later, BT have offered us a better deal on 150Mbps at £35 rather than £50 so I decided to take them up on it. What they've told me is that they cannot take over the port which Zen are using so I need to cancel directly with Zen (no problem-that can be done online) and they will activate service on port 2. The eagle eyed may spot a problem here-we only have one port on the ONT!. The lady at BT said all ONTs have 4 ports (although she subsquently looked at the picture above on a link I gave her and agreed that this one hasn't). She said she'd never seen an ONT like this only a different design. I recognised her description and it sounded like the one I have in the office which looks like this and does appear to have four ports.

As things stand, the (fairly dodgy sounding) plan is to try to connect port 2 next Wednesday. If/when that doesn't work, I need to call repairs and get an Openreach engineer out to try and sort it out.


Can anyone shed any light on this?

Should BT be able to take over port 1?

Why have I only got one port?

Is there any chance that BT trying to activate port 2 will completely mess everything up and I'll be left with no service from anyone?

I'm more than aware that this is beginning to look like a world of pain but £180 a year is a big saving on what should be an identical Openreach FTTP product.

Any thoughts would be appreciated as much from a point of view of personal interest as help!!

 

[ManOfMeans]

They should be able to migrate the service without a problem I know it is possible.

Have you tried to see if Zen will match the price BT are offering?

Personally if the migration fails I wouldn't like to go down the fault route given its a order they know they shouldn't be doing given the lack of the extra ports.

 

[drenk1976]

Thanks for your reply. I’m sort of hoping that when this moves from sales to some kind of provisioning Department, they’ll pick this up.
I did call Zen. They wouldn’t budge on price. They did point out that their service is better than BT’s though (quite accurately it seems!!!). I’ve been considering changing for a while as BT have been £10 pm cheaper for a while. The extra £5 off which I got through a mailer swung it.