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Sat in the home office trying to work whilst someone is cutting a trench outside the house to install fibre along the street. Now we just upgraded to BT Fibre from the telegraph pole across the road into our house (all just for TNT/Eurosport), which delivers phone lines and internet to every house in this Victorian road. Is it normal to have multiple infrastructure providers for broadband?
We only have one water main, one gas main, one electricity supply (which was replaced last year due to a water leak) and one sewer in the street. So why multiple broadband options? Genuinely interested in the business model and policy here. And how fast Amazon can deliver noise cancelling headphones for this afternoon's meetings!Â
Competition means lower prices. Doesn't work for water (only one pipe), but why not for broadband? CityFibre etc are much much cheaper than any Openreach provider, and could you imagine how outrageous the prices would be if BT were the only source for broadband?
hah we were lucky to get one! And no one was digging trenches- poles all the way. After Gigaclear reneged on their contract to install a service, we were left in the rural broadband desert. Media Poverty as my kids called it. Only a co-ordinated effort from a few of the villages secured the last of the broadband grant (mostly EU money... ho hum) and we had exactly one bidder to do the work even with lots of subsidy.
It's just about a year since we had fibre installed. Made such a massive difference when compared to running on a ratty old 4km long phone cable, or via hilltop cell transmitter. Or Starlink.Â
It'd be great to have a trenched fibre as we've had quite a few outages due to tree/cable interactions. Never going to happen. I did used to think it was a bit alarmist to call internet access the 'fourth' utility*, but since Covid absolutely agree it is and would struggle to go back to non fibre speeds/latency/reliability
*or in our case 3. No gas đŸ™‚Â
To be fair, when they installed fibre in our old village, they routed it down the bypass as there was deemed insufficient demand! I was surprised we could access fibre from the telegraph pole to the house (was copper before). Speed is better, but it wasn't slow before.
It's a utility which I presume is regulated by OFCOM. Noise has stopped (for now)
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/access-to-decent-broadband/
Still waiting to get onto fibre and away from the janky copper supply which will randomly drop for no obvious of given reason other than BT according to any provider you use, including BT. They dug up the pavements last week, so hopefully in a couple of months we can have stable broadband, maybe.Â
We have only one true fibre provider in our area and that's Virgin. Zero plans from anyone else to do anything different at the moment.Â
Nice problem to have. Here in rural Shropshire there is no fibre broadband of any description and zero prospect of getting it in the foreseeable future.
We have precisely one option and that's courtesy of Elon Musk.Â
But then we wouldn't be able to hear it if anyone was digging up the main road either, so it's trade-offs I guess.
Its an utter nonsense to have multiple sets of infrastructure.  What a waste of resources
Been in my house 30 years. It was all constructed for conduit etc. Virgin did all the other houses on the street but wouldn't dig up a small section to our 12 houses. None of us locally have full fibre. And we aren't in the stix. The council estate has had it some years.
How many?
as many as can fit!
Our only choice for fast broadband used to be Virgin and its cable predecessors. Then BRSK turned up. Much better.Â
openreach-based suppliers are still <100Mbps here it seems. Shame given our city setting.Â
I guess it's a different model from copper, where many could provide the service over the same bit of wire.
In our village, we have BT and AirBand with fibre. They have separate infrastructure. BT seems to be on the telegraph poles, while AirBand is mostly underground in conduits. The engineer who connected us said they weren't allowed to use the BT poles.
In our village we have Openreach and Gigaclear. Openreach wouldn't provide a service to any of the houses in our little close because their underground duct (which presumably was put in when the houses were built in the 1960s) was blocked. Gigaclear hand dug a trench by the hedge on one side of the drive so we've got fibre.
2 sounds about right to me.
I guess it's a different model from copper, where many could provide the service over the same bit of wire.
In our village, we have BT and AirBand with fibre. They have separate infrastructure. BT seems to be on the telegraph poles, while AirBand is mostly underground in conduits. The engineer who connected us said they weren't allowed to use the BT poles.
That's interesting. As FullFibre who did ours absolutely were allowed to use them. Without which no way it would have been commercially viable. They did have to add a few poles- one of the highlights of my week this time last year was watching the pole installation machine in action. Yes, i probably need to get out more đŸ™‚Â
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It may have been our parish council who convinced AirBand not to use the poles thinking about it. Their original plan was poles, and they had to put up another ten or so around the village in addition to the BT ones, and many locals complained. So they replanned with it all underground.
There were a few people unhappy about new poles but honestly small price to pay for proper internet in my view. And FF were very clear about where poles were going. One is kind of outside our house and our cable comes off it. I'm very happy with the trade off.
Digging here would be hilarious. Either instantly fill with water or hit solid rock at 6 inches đŸ™‚Â
Wasn't the business model of trench digging fibre companies to provide physical infrastructure then go bust - I remember comtel digging up our streets & then ntl buying them out a short time later....
Didn't seem to need too much digging around here. Lots of taking up manhole covers at each end of a street and feeding fibre through the conduit that already existed. Was quite impressed. Luckily the end of our house is right on the road, so it pops out of the ground straight through the wall.
Competition means lower prices
Isnt that what they told us about public transport/water/gas/everything privatized 😆Â
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Yep, and the usual suspects to blame: https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
Ofcom regulate the market and required that the market leader, Openreach, allow other providers access to the physical network infrastructure (PIA) to give them a realistic chance of being able to compete, which would stimulate and speed up the FTTP rollout.
This has resulted in a load of investment for FTTP build by smaller companies, and a race to build. If a company claims they are unable to use Openreach infrastructure, this would normally be a business decision to not apply for a PIA license, rather than not being allowed to.
It has definitely stimulated the build programs, its basically a land grab as there is only so much duct and pole space, and once its full, the company building would have to fund their own infrastructure which is very expensive. Unfortunately sometimes you end up with two or three companies all trying to build in the same area, I've surveyed an area where there are 3 operators building overhead on Openreach poles, and a cable company already with their own network underground. When this happens you sometimes get extra poles alongside existing ones simply as the original pole cannot physically fit any more equipment on them even with various extension brackets (think a handlebar extension for the rider with every gadget!)
There are other downsides, duplicate networks 'waste' physical space in the network, employees working for each company are not that sympathetic to each others networks (varying from mistakes to being deliberately negligent) so cables get snapped during winching, burnt through by ropes, or trodden on, or just dropped, which causes a lot of faults. The overhead network can look really unsightly with the volume of equipment and wires.
Some providers concentrate on newbuild sites or retrofitting large blocks of flats, they don't normally use PIA but normally order a business grade fibre line on the Openreach fibre network to their address, and then resell it to their customers via their own network within the newbuild or flat complex.
There are a couple of providers that look to be going wholesale, i.e. will allow other ISPs access to their fibre network (like Openreach) This is good as it still means you have competition but long term it will probably limit the number of small companies overbuilding each other. I suspect most small providers will end up being swallowed up by the larger emerging competitors to Openreach.
At the moment it feels a bit like the railway boom where loads of companies were building duplicate lines, tunnels and bridges, and we know how that turned out!
I was surprised we could access fibre from the telegraph pole to the house
We've had fibre to the telegraph pole outside our house since 2023 (possibly 2022). Still no news on when it will go from the pole to the house though and in the meantime it's just hanging there, neatly wrapped up, taunting us...
I was surprised we could access fibre from the telegraph pole to the house
We've had fibre to the telegraph pole outside our house since 2023 (possibly 2022). Still no news on when it will go from the pole to the house though and in the meantime it's just hanging there, neatly wrapped up, taunting us...
Similar story here. Openreach put in fibre infrastructure throughout the local area including the ducting a few feet from my house in September 2022. I finally got the email to say it was available to order between Christmas and new year 2024, I ordered promptly and they've done the digging this week and in three weeks I should get the internal installation done.
Combine the desire for faster broadband to work from home and advertising about getting ready for the switchoff of analogue lines and how we should be preparing, it's not surprising that there's a demand for fibre sooner than 2 1/2 years on, and that businesses are emerging to serve that need. We've had a local fibre supplier for some time doing ad-hoc fibre installation via ducting and poles in place.
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I was surprised we could access fibre from the telegraph pole to the house
We've had fibre to the telegraph pole outside our house since 2023 (possibly 2022). Still no news on when it will go from the pole to the house though and in the meantime it's just hanging there, neatly wrapped up, taunting us...
Similar story here. Openreach put in fibre infrastructure throughout the local area including the ducting a few feet from my house in September 2022. I finally got the email to say it was available to order between Christmas and new year 2024, I ordered promptly and they've done the digging this week and in three weeks I should get the internal installation done.
Combine the desire for faster broadband to work from home and advertising about getting ready for the switchoff of analogue lines and how we should be preparing, it's not surprising that there's a demand for fibre sooner than 2 1/2 years on, and that businesses are emerging to serve that need. We've had a local fibre supplier for some time doing ad-hoc fibre installation via ducting and poles in place.
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Very similar experience here on the very edge of Leicester (so not exactly the back of beyond). Got email from BT I think it was in November saying that FTTP was available. "Ah tremendous" I thought "faster internet for Christmas"
Place order on the 4th Dec.
They send some kit out.
We wait.
Called EE twice and they weren't a great deal of help as they didn't seem to know what was going on.
We wait a bit more.
Turns out it wasn't available, yet.
Plenty of Openreach vans flying about the place in the last few weeks, putting new poles up, hanging new fibre cables, digging holes here and there.
Got sent permit to work thing to sign as they will have to dig a trench in my lawn (95% moss) last week.
Looked like we were going to get it installed 6th of March, but it's now been push back by a month. :sigh: I'd wager it gets pushed back again.
TLDR: They said it was available, it wasn't. Comms from BT/EE/Openreach have been crap.
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We only have one water main, one gas main, one electricity supply (which was replaced last year due to a water leak) and one sewer in the street. So why multiple broadband options?
I would have thought that was patently obvious. All of the first items required major infrastructure work to install - telecommunications only require either cables set into a small trench, in the case of old-school analogue telephones, or now fibre, or from existing poles, as is the case with mine.
With the first providers, the infrastructure stays the same, but it’s easy to change the actual provider - the actual water or electricity is still the same stuff.