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Reasonable timescale for pole replacement

RKCC

Member
Hi All,

I placed an order for FTTP via Sky in June 2022; within 2 weeks I was told by the OR engineer that the distribution pole (DP) was decayed and another engineer would need a lift rather than climb it. Then, by the next visit that changed to "no extra equipment could be attached to it" and the pole would need to be replaced. The DP is on the other side of the road and I am the only house for a few hundred metres on this side. Virgin do not supply the road so I am reliant on OR, I'm in a black spot for mobile signal and the copper network has already been replaced so I cannot rely on that either.

Last week Openreach (OR) accidently cancelled a few hundred orders, mine being one of them. I had to resubmit an order through Sky and was given a new order reference. No one can confirm but I assume the timeline has restarted? What is a normal amount of time to wait for a pole to be replaced?

I also asked Sky about my compensation that a few of their staff spoke to me about in previous telephone conversations. This time, they told me I was not due any as OR had only acknowledged the order and not accepted it. I'm dealing with this as another complaint as I have relied on what was said to me by Sky.

Is there anyone I can speak to to expedite this jounrey?
 
Short answer: It depends, in general there isn't a "reasonable timescale" as Openreach are not reasonable.

I was in the same boat like. Openreach upgraded all the streets and houses around me, but not my telegraph pole as it was marked as "defective". Through some Googling I learnt that there any many different types of pole defects and not all will require the pole to be immediately replaced. If there is no immediate safety issue it can take years for Openreach to replace decayed poles.

Visit your pole and take a picture of it so we can see the labels. The most common one is a red D and a A1024 notice. This would indicate to the engineer that it can't be climbed and needs a cherry picker but it is safe to install new equipment as it was in my case. My guess on my case is that Openreach didn't have a cherry picker on the day nor it wanted to come another day with a cherry picker as the 15 houses served by my pole had good FTTC G.Fast (up to 300mb) speeds due to close proximity to the FTTC cabinet. So they moved on to the next area...

A year and a half passed and then Community Fibre came and installed their services in my whole street, including my pole using a cherry picker of course. Two weeks later Openreach came with a cherry picker and did our pole as well. Now it will be harder to replace the pole as it has all the old copper drop lines, already 4x CF fibre drops and a couple of new Openreach FTTP drop lines too. Clearly Openreach don't think things through, but good to see that CF put them in panic mode!
 
Does the OpenSignal app confirm all four mobile networks are bad in the area?

Typically at least one mobile network is viable in any area where FTTP is being installed because the coverage of a cell tower is huge compared to how quickly FTTP can be rolled out.
 
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IMG_26651-min (1).webp
 
Short answer: It depends, in general there isn't a "reasonable timescale" as Openreach are not reasonable....

Visit your pole and take a picture of it so we can see the labels. The most common one is a red D and a A1024 notice. This would indicate to the engineer that it can't be climbed and needs a cherry picker but it is safe to install new equipment as it was in my case. My guess on my case is that Openreach didn't have a cherry picker on the day nor it wanted to come another day with a cherry picker as the 15 houses served by my pole had good FTTC G.Fast (up to 300mb) speeds due to close proximity to the FTTC cabinet. So they moved on to the next area...
The crazy thing about my install is that I've had multiple engineer visits including ones with a cherry picker and they've all said it can't be done then proceeded to sit in their van for the next hour.
 
Last edited:
Does the OpenSignal app confirm all four mobile networks are bad in the area?

Typically at least one mobile network is viable in any area where FTTP is being installed because the coverage of a cell tower is huge compared to how quickly FTTP can be rolled out.
I'm supposed to get some signal with O2 but in practice this is intermittent at best - certainly not good enough to stream/make wi-fi calls.
 
then proceeded to sit in their van for the next hour.
See this is why poor BTOR workers are going on strike, they are just over worked, poor chaps.

Much like our gritters in N. Ireland are going on strike because the mild winter has been so stressful doing nothing and now the snow/ice has come they might actually have to do something!
 
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Even with a picker available they may have deemed it to not able to stand any more pole load. Hence replacement rather than getting a bloke up in a picker. Can be rather subjective though…

It is very frustrating; I was in a similar position recently and after 3 months of delays waiting to get the pole replaced, another engineer looked at it and deemed it was ok to fit more furniture to the pole. Go figure. So a needless delay.

I would try and find a smaller, niche and possibly business-oriented ISP that will chase Openreach on your behalf, rather than one of the bread and butter big boys that will kick the order into the long grass. It may cost slightly more per month but could be the nudge needed.

Good luck.
 
Openreach should be forced to replace these poles within 3 months of them being marked defective, specially for these cases where FTTP can not be installed and the pole doesn't have any fibre yet. The sooner they get replaced the lower the cost to do it, specially now that PIA means Altnets may install infrastructure in the pole and will need to be involved in a pole replacement.
 
And then you have Openreach lack of data quality on their systems. Openreach came yesterday to install FTTP on my neighbour. The system didn't say it was a "D pole" so Openreach engineer had to wait a couple of hours for a cherry picker to come. He actually said he didn't see anything wrong with the pole, it looked new to him and he would be happy to climb it if it wasn't marked as defective. He said he had climbed poles that were not marked as defective and looked really bad. So despite numerous visits by Openreach to my pole it is still nor marked as defective in their system. Crazy really...
 
Similar boat here. The pole is Community fibre ready now but the engineer couldn't install because of a decayed pole - any idea what DP631 is?
 
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DP usually means Distribution Point from your local PCP or Primary Connection Point. This relates to the distribution of old skool copper pair circuits. The DP is the plastic box towards the top of the pole. 631 might be the 631st DP or it might be the 31st off a sub-spine 6, or some other random made up number.
 
Similar boat here. The pole is Community fibre ready now but the engineer couldn't install because of a decayed pole - any idea what DP631 is?
I had the same issue. You need to chase Community Fibre as they have crews with cherry pickers to do installs on poles that can’t be climbed. Just keep pushing them because there is a big disconnect between installers in the ground and customer services.
 
That makes sense. The pole has a “D” red tin attached too, I thought the DP361 was some sort of decayed pole code…
 
DP poles are the point at which the customer drop cable joins the main spine cable back to the PCP and the DPs are numbered incrementally across the entire exchange area. So DP631 is the 631st DP in your exchange area.

You will also see poles labelled with just numbers on them - these are carrier poles and are used to support a drop cable between the DP and the customer premises and are generally numbered sequentially from the DP to the customer.
 
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