Underground Fibre install

Only BT and virgin here (BT is ducted in path, but not under individual driveways, both ducts are likely f***ed thanks to transco pipe replacement a couple of years ago)

Next door neighbour had problems with copper a month or so ago, they came a dug his drive installed duct for him between house and path, neat job.

fttp has been lit-up on some streets a week or so go, nearest pole that's live is about 300 yards away, the next closest one still has its blue pull-rope waiting. Obviously we're not on poles, but I don't expect us to be able to order until all the poles have gone live first.

They'll make the money back over the next 100 years, not 2 years ...

Of course not. who would take repsonibility?

If Openreach are going to be supplying the deal, why are sky involved? Anyway underground fibre is a zero/low maintenance investment that will pay off over 100 years probly..

Presumably Sky were the customer's choice of ISP, and the service is reselling an openreach product. Openreach themselves can't sell direct to end users.

For this single install, it will likely take a very long time to pay back. However that will be offset by a large number of other installs that were trivial and cheap to complete. So as a supplier, they take the rough with the smooth, and plan their pricing and service model to win the war rather than every battle.

Even if you cancel your sky contract after two years, Openreach will still be the infrastructure suppler to subsequent ISPs.

Correct John Sky are my ISP they have simply contracted out fibre provision to Openreach. According to the workmen laying the duct work Openreach specify that each property is individually supplied with a 50mm duct in the street from the manhole to the boundary of the property with a small rectangular box at the end from there the duct narrows to a flexible duct I estimate about 16mm diameter going across the garden. During the excavation they exposed the Zoom ducts which appeared a bunch of 16mm tubes each going to an individual property. With 7 properties on the close if anyone else needs an Openreach installation things are going to get a bit crowded under the pathway. Somewhere in the pathway are the original copper telecom cables and Virgin media ducts and cables.

Richard

Quite the opposite. A few years ago I got FTTP through an overhead cable. Then last year my neighbour got FTTP (also provided by Openreach), but somehow from an underground conduit that must have been magically installed without the street being dug up.

-- Richard

Well I might say similar if I hadn't seen the armies of trucks and diggers laying the conduit in the first place. The final pole installation was trivial

Our road appeared to be done by one bloke working alone (he knocked and asked if it was ok to park his van on the drive - naturally I agreed and furnished tea as required since it was a handy way to get some info on when it was going to be possible to order it!).

He climbed each pole in turn and fixed the fibre bundle to it, then unwound it from the spool to the next. Rinse and repeat. When he was near houses, added a drop down the pole to a junction "box" (a tubular enclosure capped by a dome at one end, and with a cable entry gland at the other).

A few months later when it went live, a pair of openreach installers came and ran a drop cable from the nearest pole to the house.