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Openreach full fibre

L

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We have had an email fixing a date for installation.
Has anyone had this done already?

I had assumed that they were going to replace the copper telephone wire through to the router.
The e Mail has a link to a u tube which suggests something far more complicated.
 
I tried to get on to Openreach's website just now to see if there's any update on full fibre supply to me in Tiverton, but their site seems to be down. We live on the edge of town, but still in town and not rural, but the box is four streets away, with no date to upgrade to full.
 
Yes open reach is down and I wanted to change the visit date.
Doesn’t bode well if they of all people can’t keep their website functioning.
 
Had this a while now. They will install a fibre optic cable through the wall to where your router is - install a small connection box inside and connect the router to that.
Outside depends on whether you have a services duct. I do, so they ran a fish wire through the duct to the road, pull the FO cable back to the house and then used a magic box of tricks to splice the fibre from the road to the one in the house. Once hooked up the speed and reliability have been awesome. I went for the 150mb connection and get that pretty much all the time. The main issue is that many services are not provided at that level - e.g. downloads are often limited at 10mb
 
As fezman has said plus you will need a mains socket where they bring the fibre in. That powers their little box which converts the fibre to a normal network signal. Your router can be in a different location you just need a normal Cat5 or 6 network cable to connect the two.
 
A slight aside but BT Fibre related; we are due to get changed over to Digital Voice in the near future which will involve a new Router to plug the household phone into, (hope we can just connect the house circuit into it which would give us a more flexible layout option).

The notification letter that came with all the bumf has a statement paragraph " We'll upgrade you to Fibre broadband - for free "

Now that will be interesting, as Fibre in this area is by Gigaclear (I have a Gigaclear node at the bottom of my drive).

I believe the BT 'exchange ' across the valley has fibre feed, but as far as I know the link node in adjacent village and onward to us is copper.
 
Can this cable be overhead like my copper wire?
I assumed that fibre doesn’t like the stress and strain.
I don’t want it at ground level as there’s no where to run it without a lot of hassle and damage.
Also my bt router is in the loft (we are in a bungalow ).
 
Were on an overhead supply, out in the sticks, its a common standard practice, unless your piped up, when they put ours in, a few years ago, the cable also had copper wire pairs in as well (I told them take the old copper cable down, which they weren't going to do) to keep the analogue phone line activated as they hadn't rolled out the digital voice at that time, but when the did they also sent me a new wireless phone FOC and we just plugged our old one into the router.
 
We are considering dumping the land line phone as almost nobody rings us on that anymore. After the conversion the phone won’t work without power so is pretty redundant.
 
What's a land line?
Despite being in the sticks, with lousy electricity supply, no mains sewerage and a dodgy water supply, we do have excellent fibre broadband. The cable comes in overhead from a nearby pylon.
The downside is that the village is covered in a cat's cradle of mains power, old phone lines, street light cables and now fibre. It's a bit of a mess, TBH.
S
 
Hope you have a better experience than us. BT offered a free Fibre update which we accepted and a date was booked for Openreach.
The Openreach engineer turned up on time, looking for a cable duct only to discover our copper came in a buried armour cable. "No problem", he said "I'll get the groundwork team in and we'll track up the pavement from the manhole 20 yds up the road and across your lawn". The groundwork team arrived, looked at the traffic on the road and said, can't do it today we'll need traffic lights".
So a second visit was booked, about ten days later the traffic lights were all set to go when the Openreach engineer (a different one from the first time) said we can't go ahead, the cable duct further up the road is flooded, we'll need to book a pump for next time plus another engineer, we need two engineers if one of us is going down a hole. I'll book a surveyor visit to detail all the requirements.
So an Openreach surveyor arrived for a third visit, I talked to him and explained the previous problems as described to me.
Then the fourth visit was booked, and of course as you've probably guessed the engineer arrived on his own, no traffic lights booked, no pump, no groundwork team. I was not terribly complementary about my Openreach experience to date. To be fair this engineer, yet again a different one, wasn't happy either. He made some calls and his supervisor turned up, eventually they sweet talked my neighbour into allowing them to access the fibre entering his property and connected from there to my house across the two lawns.
Four visits over a month with seemingly either no records being kept or not being reviewed beforehand.
Once connected the BT/EE fibre service has been fast and reliable, I'm just glad BT were paying for the connection.
 
Lurker said:
Yes open reach is down and I wanted to change the visit date.
Doesn’t bode well if they of all people can’t keep their website functioning.
Click to expand...
Website=server/cables-transport, little correlation, fear ye not.

Okay, potentially not true because it could be you can't reach the site because of cables being broken, but they will/should have multiple diverse routes, so more likely the website itself, or the hosting server are having issues.

Yes, I'm being pedantic and I knew what you meant, but the pedant (and network guy) in me ALWAYS defends the network!! ;)
 
When I try to open Openreach website, safari is warning me not to access it.
This is from my iPad so I may fire up the laptop and see what happens.
Any suggestions?
 
Lurker said:
We are considering dumping the land line phone as almost nobody rings us on that anymore. After the conversion the phone won’t work without power so is pretty redundant.
Click to expand...
We're with Zen who don't offer full FB yet in our area, but we had the option when we switched to Z from the utterly useless Virgin to bin the land line which we subsequently did. We both have iPhones so that's what we use at home and as a Brucie Bonus, we don't get scam calls either 'cos any number that's not in our Contacts doesn't ring - Rob
 
I had it done (FTTP - fibre to the property) this time last year. It was done in three stages, for whatever reason - ducting by the road, with buried splice box near the house. Second team dug my fibre cable to the house. Third team poked it through the wall and to the ONT (optical network terminal). This needs to be near a power socket.

We went from a very shaky 1-2 Mbps ADSL connection, which was always faulting, to a flawless 150 Mbps.

The very helpful Openreach bloke advised me to plan ahead where the ONT was to go, so that the splice box (first stage) can be placed appropriately.

One last thing that bugs me, and probably almost no-one else, is that there’s no such thing as ‘fibre broadband’. ‘Broad band’ refers to the ‘wide range’ of frequencies used by ADSL, ie copper phone line, signals. Fibre optic cables use single-frequency lasers.
 
Guineafowl21 said:
I had it done (FTTP - fibre to the property) this time last year. It was done in three stages, for whatever reason - ducting by the road, with buried splice box near the house. Second team dug my fibre cable to the house. Third team poked it through the wall and to the ONT (optical network terminal). This needs to be near a power socket.

We went from a very shaky 1-2 Mbps ADSL connection, which was always faulting, to a flawless 150 Mbps.

The very helpful Openreach bloke advised me to plan ahead where the ONT was to go, so that the splice box (first stage) can be placed appropriately.

One last thing that bugs me, and probably almost no-one else, is that there’s no such thing as ‘fibre broadband’. ‘Broad band’ refers to the ‘wide range’ of frequencies used by ADSL, ie copper phone line, signals. Fibre optic cables use single-frequency lasers.
Click to expand...
That’s almost exactly what I DON’T want.
By the way, I’ll be up your way third week in October.
 
Lurker said:
Can this cable be overhead like my copper wire?
I assumed that fibre doesn’t like the stress and strain.
I don’t want it at ground level as there’s no where to run it without a lot of hassle and damage.
Also my bt router is in the loft (we are in a bungalow ).
Click to expand...
Yes it can be run on telegraph poles. Though I doubt you get the choice. If there are underground ducts in the area it will be underground. If like me it is all telegraph poles then it will be overground.
 
They keep promising fibre for us - but never seem to deliver. We do actually have fibre all the way to the property but there is some problem with the exchange or an underground connection manhole (that floods). Internet is archaic in our lane.
 
Lurker said:
That’s almost exactly what I DON’T want.
By the way, I’ll be up your way third week in October.
Click to expand...
What is?

You’re welcome to pop in and inspect the workshops; if not, I’m happy to recommend stuff to do/see.
 
AJB Temple said:
They keep promising fibre for us - but never seem to deliver. We do actually have fibre all the way to the property but there is some problem with the exchange or an underground connection manhole (that floods). Internet is archaic in our lane.
Click to expand...
Does Airband cover your area?
 
Airband covers my area. Their big auger machine to bore the hole for the poles ripped up my copper cable. They never did a thing to put it right. Although my supplier is Vodafone, it was left to Openreach to identify the problem which was not accepted at the time by Airband, even though the time of signal drop coincided with the time the auger boring. Vodafone gave me and my wife both free unlimited data for our phones for 3 months to cover the time the landline was down and refunded me 3 months rental. When the Airband rep came round the street touting for business, I was extremely polite. Honest.
 
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