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Eyebrows were recently raised after UK network operator Openreach (BT) quoted one home in Scotland over £73,000 to have an FTTP on Demand (FTTPoD) broadband service installed. The high cost of FTTPoD is not a new issue, but in this case a nearby neighbour already had the service and the operator’s fibre even ran directly outside the house.
Just for some context. It’s important not to confuse the normal / native Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service with FTTPoD (or FoD) – the latter is a premium product aimed more at smaller businesses. In a normal native FTTP rollout, Openreach foots the bill to install the optical fibre down your street, but with FTTPoD it’s the customer who chooses to pay for the extremely expensive civil engineering side of that build (desktop quotes for this often run into the tens of thousands).
The advantage of FoD is that it can enable you to get a gigabit FTTP line built right to your property, even if full fibre wasn’t previously planned to be natively deployed into your area. All of this sounds great, except for the high cost of building such infrastructure and the long lead times involved, which make it far too expensive for most ordinary people. Not to mention that it’s awkwardly positioned in an area of the market that is also inhabited by Leased Lines.
Suffice to say that, in recent years, FTTPoD – now somewhat legendary for the high asking price of its desktop quotes – has taken a bit of a backseat. However, a proper engineering survey is usually conducted later, once an order has been formally placed (at cost), in order to find out the correct build cost – this of course may end up being either more or less expensive than the initial desktop quote.
How Much!?
Despite this, we recently came across a particularly unusual situation, even for FTTPoD, with a house (cottage) in the rural Scottish village of Farnell. Openreach had quoted the owner of this property £73,108 via UK ISP Converged to have FTTPoD installed, which is extremely high, albeit perhaps not too unusual for such a location (the high cost of building FTTP in a previously unserved area is often reflected in such estimates).
The problem is that the area was NOT previously unserved. In fact, the neighbouring house, which sat less than 30 metres away on the same road (both were also right next to the road), had previously had the same FTTPoD service installed just 3 years earlier (2022) and for “only” around £14,000. Better yet, the fibre used to reach that property ran right in front of the target house for the £73k install (along the same road).
The Google Streeview screenshot on this article shows the same road setting and, on the left of the road, you can just make out Openreach’s chamber with their fibre in, which runs up to connect the two properties in the background.
Suffice to say that we can see no reason why it would cost £73k to hook up a nearby house and, strictly speaking, Ofcom’s rules do appear to forbid double charging for the majority of such an installation (in this case, it’s also a lot more than ‘double’). Naturally we asked Openreach for some pearls of their wisdom and, although it took a bit of time before they recognised the issue, we did finally get a reply.
A spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:
“We completely understand how frustrating delays like this can be, and want to get this resolved as quickly as possible. We’re arranging for a specialist fibre engineer to conduct a detailed assessment of the local network to establish exactly which existing fibre routes already run close to [the cottages].
This review will help us determine if the original quote accurately reflects the work required and, depending on the findings, may allow us to identify a more straightforward and cost-effective solution.”
The likelihood is of course that most of this erroneous costing will end up being ironed out in the engineering survey. But the catch is that many customers would balk so hard at the first quote that they almost certainly wouldn’t even think to proceed further and place an order. Mind you, it’s not as if FTTPoD was ever particularly popular, especially now that FTTP is already available to the majority of UK premises and rising.
In any case, we’re now waiting to hear back from Openreach’s engineer to see what the actual cost of delivery might be and plan to update this post again. At the same time, it remains unclear why Openreach’s existing map of the area seems to have been unable to “establish exactly which existing fibre routes already run close to” the property concerned. Particularly since the previous FTTPoD build in the area was so recent.