FTTC black hole?

[#1]

According to openreach, my road, and my road only, is the only road where FTTC is not available in the local area. Our houses were built in 96, sometime after the other properties nearby.

Openreach are famously difficult to get in touch with, so I tried asking my plusnet tech support about this. They could neither explain, nor ask openreach on my behalf.

I checked https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com. For my property, the cabinet number is not given, but other local roads (which have access to VSTL) have cabinet numbers listed.

There are just 30 properties in my road, so it seems unlikely we are on a different cabinet. We are 1.29 miles from our exchange. The connection between our properties should surely support VSTL, like the other properties?

I wonder if we are being told we can't get FTTC is simply an error with openreach's information? There doesn't seem to be a technical reason why we don't have it.

Does anyone have a bit more expertise in this area that could shed some light please?

[#2]

Hi leachdave,

It could be an Openreach database error.

What does the openreach availabilty checker report?

https://www.openreach.com/

However, if no cabinet number is reported on the  BTwholesale checker, BT may have installed Exchange Only lines.

These go directly to the exchange and not via a cabinet, so no possibility of connecting to a fibre cabinet.

I doubt BT would regard it as cost effective to introduce a new cabinet for 30 premises.

I would guess you may have to wait for Fibre to premise or maybe use 4G?

Regards

Richard

[#3]

@leachdave  the typical reason for FTTC not being available is that your line isn't routed through a cabinet i.e its an EO (Exchange only) line. These are usually lines which are close to the exchange so at 1.29 miles I wouldn't have though that would be the case. Another possibility is that you have FTTP instead, although that usually only applies to newish builds (or rural areas) and the checker would say that anyway!. The other possibility, which you allude to, is that the OR database is wrong. It's not unknown! but getting it corrected isn't easy.

NB you might try this site http://telecom-tariffs.co.uk/codelook.htm to see if you can glean any more information , but I suspect it gets data from the OR database anyway...

[#4]

It could be worth filling out the formwize Here to query this with Openreach’s fibre enquiries team. If there’s a database error, they’ll fix it. 

[#5]

Openreach says "We’re not quite there yet"

[#6]

Yes I thought the same about EOL regarding distance. However our houses are (relatively compared to others) new, so they could've done something different with ours...

[#7]

Thank you, I will try the formwize link and report back

(Also sorry for the multiple posts, I thought I was directly replying to each individual post, but that doesn't seem to be the case!)