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FTTP for 20+ properties blocked by neighbour

matthw

Member
Having registered my interest with openreach regarding their FTTP rollout, I was excited when I was notified that it would be available very soon. My excitement grew when I saw a CBT installed on the poll that served my house. However months passed without any further progress. Homes and streets around us came online during this time including the entirety of our neighbours across the road.

I continued to utilise the openreach checker which one day stated that we were no longer in the rollout plans. I tried contacting openreach through their online forms before emailing the CEO and getting an update from a very polite member of their executive complaints team.

They informed me that one of our neighbours is preventing them from updating their equipment as it is on private land and consequently preventing me and to my estimate, 20+ neighbours from getting FTTP.

I was told that this would be periodically reviewed which leaves me to believe this will not be resolved anytime soon. Does anyone have advice of know if there is any other way this could be resolved? Do I try and identify the landowner myself and reason with them? It is surprising that a single neighbour can impact so many of us and openreach has no further recourse.
 
It sounds like Openreach cannot find any documentary evidence of an Access Agreement (wayleave/lease) for part of their network on a third party's land. This could be a past error or boundary change. As always there will be history.

The cost of diverting service is probably currently too high or gaining access has just been placed into the "too hard" box. They will return to the issue one day but probably under a different budget.

I would suggest that it would be well worth gaining the history behind the issue and if you can identify the neighbour, politely, approach them as to what their issues or concerns are. Often it is simply not knowing what is going to be done, any likely damage and restoration.

It may help if the neighbour apparently refusing access is also supplied via this network (duct/box/pole).

Once you know more you will be in a better position to approach Openreach and possibly mediate access.
 
I would add to the above and don't assume the landowner has been approached or even aware of a request to access the equipment on their land. Hope you can get it sorted. If there is a local FB group, maybe highlight the issue on there, just state what OR have told you, but don't try and work out who it is or accuse anyone of blocking - I would say. It might just get back to the right person or gee things along. Hope it gets resolved soon. Speaking as someone who had OR build FTTP right past my front door but not connect me. Did the same, emailed the CEO asking to investigate, they surveryed, realised a mistake within a month I could order.
 
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How many of these "lost streets" or even lost properties? I was one of the affected ones as Openreach (OR) decided not to upgrade my telegraph pole as it was marked as defective so couldn't be climbed and needed a cherry picker (but not so defective that OR would bother replacing for years). In their defence FTTC G.Plus (max 300mb) was available to the 15 properties served by the pole and VM had already completed the 1Gb upgrade and was available too.

But then just before Xmas last year the Father Altnet decided we have been good and sent us Community Fibre (CF) to deploy their FTTP service in our whole street including our "defective" telegraph pole. Two weeks later OR showed up out of the blue and upgraded the left over telegraph pole as well, competition is such a beautiful thing! From no FTTP service to 2 networks in the space of 2 weeks.

But even on my street there is still people that can't get CF since they are 15 houses being served by a hollow metal pole and CF can't install their boxes in them under PIA, there is no space for that.

I wish Ofcom would force all ISP networks and ISPs to create a national broadband database and report what services are "possible" in each address, what services are "available" and let customers challenge this information so that they can help ISPs find errors in their coverage database. I mean don't get me wrong tools like Better Internet Dashboard, Samknows and the Think Broadband coverage map are great and produced for free at great effort but opening this information to all will make it much easier for Altnets and other networks to find these underserved "no spots" and target them putting more pressure in the bigger networks to serve 100% or addresses on an area rather than expanding to new areas. I suspect as the FTTP build progresses these no spots areas will be revisited, as the cost of doing them becomes lower than going for more remote and less populated areas. I also suspect the majority of broadband networks do web scrapping against each other to detect where their competition has service and when they enable new services in new areas. This is very inefficient as it is heavily duplicated across all of them.

The US and the FCC are attempting to do this. But guess what happened? ISPs got caught lying to the FCC and saying they have service where they don't!
 
Thank you to everybody who has provided advice. I've gotten hold of a WhatsApp group for the road that has quite a few members in it and will drop a polite message explaining the situation and take it from there.

Hopefully this will start some conversations and push things forward. I'll drop another update if I make any progress.
 
Thank you to everybody who has provided advice. I've gotten hold of a WhatsApp group for the road that has quite a few members in it and will drop a polite message explaining the situation and take it from there.

Hopefully this will start some conversations and push things forward. I'll drop another update if I make any progress.
Also check th9is post for few more things you can do:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/threads/fttp-so-close-yet-so-far.39397/post-298101
 
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