Advice on new fibre installation please.

Takedap

I would like some help & advice on broadband please.

I live in a very rural location & have for the last few years been using an ISP which provides a 10Mb/s connection via a mobile phone mast & costs approx £30/month. Until recently, this was the only option for a reasonably fast connection to the village.

Now, due to a recent upgrade in the village, we have the option of fibre broadband, and looking at some of the offers, it looks like I may be able to get a 50+Mb connection for a similar price to my current 10Mbs.

This however is where I need help.

I do not yet have fibre cabling installed. I believe this would be done by Openreach when I decide which service & supplier I am going to use.

BT’s broadband website tells me that at my address I can get anything from their 36Mb Fibre Essential package, right up to the Full Fibre 900 service. So, on to the questions (be gentle, I’ve never needed to know this stuff before so some might be a bit simplistic)

Firstly, are all the BT broadband packages FTTP or just the one’s that are actually called “Full Fibre”?

If for my first contract, I went for a the “lowest” of the Full Fibre deals, just to get a FTTP line into the house, would I subsequently be tied to operators that are FTTP suppliers? Or conversely, if I went for the Fibre Essential service, would I get a FTTC installation which would limit future upgrade options?

How long does Openreach fibre installation usually take? (I realise that it may not be possible to give an accurate answer at this time but maybe a ballpark figure?)

Would I need to contact my present ISP & will I be able to ensure continuity for service?

Is it easy or indeed necessary to change ISPs at the end of each contract? Does it involve changing routers etc? Do the “old” ISPs ask for their equipment to be sent back?

That’s all I can think of at the moment but any other advice, tips or tricks, including recommendations on who to trust & who to avoid would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Croft12

fttc won't stop you getting fttp later. fttp costs the same as all but the most basic fttc packages so just get fttp package at the speed you want.

You still have copper with fttp so you can revert to fttc but not reason why you should.

Not all ISPs do fttp but thats changing now and will be less and less of an issue.

If fttp is live in your village and you get copper over pole it should not be a big job. You will need a home install for fttp - with covid that might be a delay - but they still do them.

There is a switching process for BB.

matelodave

Full fibre (FTTP) is what it says - fibre right into your house. In a rural environment that probably means from the pole that your normal phone line comes from (have OpenReach been installing stuff on the poles that pass your house)

Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) is again  what it says - the optical fibre only goes as far as the cabinet and then the rest of the way is via copper wires.If they've installed FTTP you may find that FTTC is not available

We have full fibre as our nearest FTTC cabinet is two and a half miles away and the best we could manage was about 1.8mbit/s. There was no point in them installing cabinets as we live in a long linear hamlet of one road about 1.5 miles long. The fibre cable comes across from the pole and enters the house and is connected into a thing called an ONT which has to be plugged into the mains. It also has to be fixed to the wall as optical fibre has to be secured. There is then an ethernet cable between the ONT and your wifi router. So you'll need two mains sockets available

You dont have to have BT, there are other providers who can now offer FTTP and the situation regarding changing suppliers is getting better now that it's better understood - even SKY can offer it where we are now. Have a look at the Open Reach site for details - https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/fttp-providers. You might find that some of them are very slow in getting up to speed where you are - we've had FTTP for two and a half years and it's only in the past couple of months that some of the suppliers have become aware.
We are with BT but I'll probably swap when our contract ends - it wasn't ever so easy to do about a year ago but seems that some suppliers are actually getting their act together.

Regarding your question about reverting toe an FTTC connection that would only be possible if there is an FTTC cabinet within reach and if you get a copper line installed. Our installation has a copper pair and fibre in a single figure of eight cable and we do still have a land line. Openreach are slowly moving towards  Voice over IP and so you may find that later installations might not have the facility to revert.

Its all a moving target and what was installed a couple of years ago may not be the same as what's avaialble now, nor what might be the situation in the future and TBH the future is Fibre to the Premises rather than copper based systems. It's unlikely that OR will be installing old technology alongside the new stuff unless they have a very good reason to do it especially if it wasn't there in the first place.
FTTC is quite expensive as they've got to install cabinets, get power suppliers to them and they don't provide the services that FTTP is capable of.

JJ_Egan

OP needs to find out if its FTTP that has been cabled locally .

Talk Talk are another ISP stepping up FTTP services .

OR FTTP install to the home takes about half a day from connection at the pole .

Optical cable from pole to inside the house . Connects to ONT box that requires power supply . Router connected to ONT box and that needs a power supply .

macman

If you want around 50 megs then you don't need FTTP. Just upgrade to normal FTTC. No new wiring required, just a possible router upgrade if you don't already have a VDSL one. That should give you maybe 5 times your current speed.
Only the top end packages are FTTP, and I rather doubt if this is yet available to you in a very rural area, as it requires laying fibre up to the property. FTTC, by contrast, is already cabled up and ready to go.

Takedap

Thanks for all the replies so far.

BT's broadband website supposedly gives me a quote to my home address so I'm assuming that when they say I can get the Full Fibre 900 package, then they must be doing the FTTP installations.  I don't know if a cheaper package would use FTTC (or even if this is possible, as there is no physical "cabinet" in the village, just a modified pole next to a manhole cover!)

In order to make sure that my installation would be as "future proof" as possible, I was looking at their Full Fibre 100 which is advertised as giving 150Mb, with a guarantee of at least 100Mb.  At the moment this is on offer at £33 for a 24 month contract with the first 3 months free.  That would be a similar price to my current 10Mb service.

After the 24 months, I'm assuming that I would be able to decide whether or not it was worth paying for the extra speed & could downgrade if necessary?

On another point, at the moment, I do not have a landline connected & don't really want one.  I am using a VOIP setup with a normal digital phone plugged into a dedicated SIPP port in my ISP supplied modem.   Can anyone tell me if this would be supported by BT or any other ISP that I might choose?  Or would it need special equipment?

And finally (for now) do most people change suppliers at the end of each contract or do the haggle a personalised deal rather than change?

Thanks again.

matelodave

You need to see if fibre actually exists - depending how rural you might be have a look at the poles. Have Open Reach or anyone been working on them recently. It's pretty obvious if they've fitted additional stuff, like extra joints, termination boxes and where I am, even a yellow label on each and every pole that has an optical cable attached to it.

I guess that if there's no evidence of recent work then it may not be available. Unfortunately some of the broadband checkers that I've  tried are still offering me up to 60mbits on an FTTC connections which I know is not possible, likewise several aren't offering FTTP either. If I do a full post code/phone number search then some will limit their service offing to a max of 1mbit/s. and that is today after we've had it since April 2018. If you dont ahave a landline then the best you can do is a postcode search which isn't everso accurate (our post code covers over a mile and still get a wrong answer)

Even the SamKnows website took over a year before it showed that FTTP was available where I live and TBH most of the supplier's sale agents don't know whats available either. I had no end of trouble with BT when we got ours installed even though I was fully aware of what was going on. I lost service for nigh on six weeks (both phone & broadband) until I managed to speak to their dedicated FTTP desk (one bloke somewhere down in Exeter I think it was at the time)

Try the BT address checker https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL/AddressHome and the SamKnows exchange info pages - https://availability.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

JJ_Egan

Not sure if the downgrade is possible and you would need to check that for the future .

Croft12

macman said:

If you want around 50 megs then you don't need FTTP. Just upgrade to normal FTTC. No new wiring required, just a possible router upgrade if you don't already have a VDSL one. That should give you maybe 5 times your current speed.
Only the top end packages are FTTP, and I rather doubt if this is yet available to you in a very rural area, as it requires laying fibre up to the property. FTTC, by contrast, is already cabled up and ready to go.

You can certainly get fttp on lower packages. I've had 40/80 and 150 all on mine.

Croft12

Takedap said:

Thanks for all the replies so far.

BT's broadband website supposedly gives me a quote to my home address so I'm assuming that when they say I can get the Full Fibre 900 package, then they must be doing the FTTP installations.  I don't know if a cheaper package would use FTTC (or even if this is possible, as there is no physical "cabinet" in the village, just a modified pole next to a manhole cover!)

In order to make sure that my installation would be as "future proof" as possible, I was looking at their Full Fibre 100 which is advertised as giving 150Mb, with a guarantee of at least 100Mb.  At the moment this is on offer at £33 for a 24 month contract with the first 3 months free.  That would be a similar price to my current 10Mb service.

After the 24 months, I'm assuming that I would be able to decide whether or not it was worth paying for the extra speed & could downgrade if necessary?

On another point, at the moment, I do not have a landline connected & don't really want one.  I am using a VOIP setup with a normal digital phone plugged into a dedicated SIPP port in my ISP supplied modem.   Can anyone tell me if this would be supported by BT or any other ISP that I might choose?  Or would it need special equipment?

And finally (for now) do most people change suppliers at the end of each contract or do the haggle a personalised deal rather than change?

Thanks again.

900 has to be fttp no option otherwise. Same with any of the higher speeds. Unless you have G.fast (v unlikely rural) then fttc capped at 80mb.

Fttp at the present price of your service is a no brainer. Yes you can downgrade to 80 say or change providers to a cheaper one. But frankly in 24 months the 150 package will prob be the price of the 80!

You can get fttp now without copper service. The price is virtually the same.

If I have prices of a cheaper provider (same service) to hand to quote at them they usually offer to match it or close at renewal time.