Fibre Infrastrucure Cherry Picking

SteveLilley

Hello
Our house resides, along with 12 others, on a cul de sac in a semi-residential/rural area.
We are able to get ADSL, but over the years this has proved so unreliable (frequently disconnected for days at a time) that we personally and several others have now abandoned fixed lines altogether and just use a 4g router. When ADSL did work, it was a reasonable 18mbs. The 4g gives us about 23mbs, an improvement but the speed does vary significantly according to load and weather.
The crazy part is that all roads surrounding us are on fibre and have been for years.
The main BT exchange is less than 300m as the crow flies, but our lines go underground via a distribution pole that was condemed by BT/OpenReach 10 years ago.
I have requested via BT and tried to dialog with openreach directly, but we are being totally ignored. One of the OpenReach engineers who came to do one of the many repairs said that the number of houses didn't warrant the investment by them to install fibre. It appears that they're still cherry picking installations for maximum return.
So, in conclusion, the 4g option is still a little flaky, but the ADSL is even worse.
With the advent of working from home, can openreach be "forced" to install fibre?

Highland76

Since you easily meet the 10 Mbps USO, no operator is legally obliged to supply you with faster speeds. If you are desperate for faster speeds and don't want to move, then your only real option is to pay for this:

1) Take out a Community Fibre Partnership through Openreach with your neighbours. If, as you say, there is Openreach fibre close by (ie aggregation nodes), then a CFP should be relatively cheap.
https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/community-fibre-partnerships

2) Go for a leased line. Have a look here for quotes:
www.linebroker.co.uk

unforeseen

The main BT exchange is less than 300m as the crow flies, but our lines go underground via a distribution pole that was condemed by BT/OpenReach 10 years ago.

So it's a fair bet that you are on an exchange only line. The lines are at the bottom of the queue when it comes to provisioning and are normally done via the local initiatives such as the CFP as mentioned. In my case it was Connecting Cheshire. 

I am an EO line and because of this didn't get fibre until 2 years after the rest of the village. 

Browntoa

They will only upgrade if financially viable , spending tens of thousands to only supply 13 people is not viable

SteveLilley

Thanks for your ideas people,

Yikes:- I looked at linebroker and it seems grossly unfair that I should have to pay £2,500 up front and then £230 per month for what houses within 200m get for less than £25 per month. It's like our single drive has been forgotten about.
It seems wrong that they can cherry pick profits and yet the postal service has to delivery to every property, irrespective of how remote they are, for a flat price stamp. Morally it's wrong. 
A friend of mine lives in the middle of nowhere on a farm and they got connected for free too.
So, I tried gigabit vouchers, but that site just says that there are providers of 100mbit in our area (but none that will actually provide the service to our address).

I might as well go and shout at a wall for a while and hope decent 5g comes along soon instead...

EssexExile

Life isn't fair I'm afraid. The suppliers are private companies and do what is best for them, unless made to do otherwise. Oh for the days of the GPO, electricity boards and water boards...

littleboo

As mentioned, Openreach is a privately owned  organisation and it has to provide value to its parent company shareholders.  I don't really see the comparison with the postal service, they are two completely different beasts, but nobody expected Tesco's for example to build superstores in areas where they wont make money.

onomatopoeia99

SteveLilley said:

Thanks for your ideas people,

Yikes:- I looked at linebroker and it seems grossly unfair that I should have to pay £2,500 up front and then £230 per month for what houses within 200m get for less than £25 per month. It's like our single drive has been forgotten about.

A leased line is a very different thing to FTTC broadband over your phone line.  Comparing one with a domestic broadband product is meaningless.

matelodave

If you want faster broadband then you might find that a group of you getting together to make your wishes clear might help.

We live a long way from anywhere. About five miles from the exchange and in a linear hamlet of around 90 houses about 1.5 miles long. However a campaign from a concerted effort from many of us applying to both OpenReach and Cambridgeshire County Council managed to get FTTP installed and we are now enjoying between 76 and 300mbit/s (apparently even up to 960mbit/s).

It took a lot effort to get a good proportion of the householders to do it - many didn't care or didn't want higher speeds (we could only get 1.9mbit/s and it got worse further up the road)  This is the second place that I've run campaigns to get higher broadband speeds but you need to work at it rather than just whinge.