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Openreach failing on Community Fibre Project

RobinP63

Member
My small hamlet in rural Herts had a fibre network installed by Herts County Council in Q3 2019.

The only problem was that it wasn't connected to the national infrastructure. All the hardware is installed - confirmed by an 'engineer' visit in June. All dwellings (18 in total) have an ONT which are all connected together and the house closest to the Green Cabinet does have FTTP but it stops there. Apparently, the Herts CC budget was used getting that far.

Since March 2020 we have engaged with the Openreach CFP team. This has worked at glacial speed to confirm what we knew and that £9.7k was needed to switch the network on (£10k for what???). This was easily fulfilled with 3 SME Rural Gigabit Vouchers and the contract was signed early August. [The 4 months+ this took could be attributed to the March-July Covid lockdown]

Since then NOTHING. Emails to the Manager get read but nothing more - standard, you are in the system reply. To whom can I complain? If Herts had asked us for the Rural Gigabit Vouchers in August last year, we'd have been turned on by Christmas.
 
It is pretty normal for Openreach's CFP team to move at a snails pace and be difficult to reach (sadly this seems to be a very common complaint, almost everybody with a CFP issue now mentions it). Likewise it can take up to around 12 months from contract signature to network completion.

From their website:

7. How long will it take to get our fibre broadband once we've signed a Community Fibre Partnership? Once you sign the agreement, it'll take around 12 months for us to put your fibre infrastructure in place. Exactly how long will depend on how complicated it is, but we always aim to take no longer than a year.
 
Thanks for your observation. The counterpoints are:
  1. The infrastructure is in place - there is no requirement for any external work.
  2. The claim about 'network management' which they have made when challenged on the 'you just need to switch it on' is specious. In July 2019 when the Herts CC money ran out they must have been planning to attach these 18 dwellings to the UK network, so again no work to do other than 'flick the switch'.
  3. The 'kit' has now been installed for 16 months so the year is well and truly up.
I 'just' need someone to tell them to 'make it so'.
 
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The reality is rarely ever that simple 'Company Director', there's always more under the hood that needs doing and the other challenge is getting the different aspects of Openreach to recognise the obvious (we've seen a number of examples where Openreach doesn't take correct account of the reality on the ground).
 
The reality is rarely ever that simple 'Company Director', there's always more under the hood that needs doing and the other challenge is getting the different aspects of Openreach to recognise the obvious (we've seen a number of examples where Openreach doesn't take correct account of the reality on the ground).
Hang on here??

In June (the 6th to be accurate), a surveyor walked the lane and took pics of all the installed equipment (installed by OR a year before) and quoted the £10k to finish the job - which OR had known about since August last year as Herts CC had said we don't have £10k to finish the job (or whatever it was then).

I accept OR is a shambles but in the open goal analogy we are standing on the opposition goal line and all 11 players in the opposition team have been sent off (playing soccer here).

Apologies over my username, I did a 'fill fields' for the email address after choosing a less grandiose username and didn't notice that 'job title' had replaced username. And I wasn't going to wait another month to change it to post.
 
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