The route to getting Fibre Broadband
This would be three years in the making for myself, so it couldn’t have come soon enough! There are already a couple of blogs that cover off Openreach’s process for installing Full Fibre Broadband, but most are three or four years old and there were a couple of differences that I noted between my install experience and those posted elsewhere – including a couple of pitfalls to avoid – hopefully this will be useful for anyone planning, or waiting, to get Fibre broadband. (Did you know that you can also save yourself £££s if you order via Quidco?).
Update: 01/08/2020 – TalkTalk and Sky have now launched their full FTTH offerings (Covid slowed things down as it should have been in Q2). In March 2020, Openreach and BT launched new FTTP service speeds (up to 1000 Mbps), with lower pricing, but these higher speeds are still only available from BT. Sky, TalkTalk, EE etc are only offering download speeds of up to 150Mbps.
In this article:
- How to check if fibre broadband is available to you
- Ordering Fibre broadband
- Keeping your existing number
- FTTH Install types
- Fibre installation day
- Get cashback on your order
Is Fibre Broadband available for you?
First-off, it used to be possible to tell if you can order Fibre-To-The-Premises (FTTP) broadband (or Fibre-To-The-Home, FTTH- as it is also called) solely by checking the BT website. If Infinity 3 and 4 were offered to your address then that had to be a fibre product requiring a new fibre line. Now it could also be Openreach’s G.FAST product, which is an upgraded version of the VDSL FTTC service and, at the time of writing, offers similar speeds to fibre. But, as G.FAST is delivered via the cabinet, it is still prone to signal degradation over the copper wires – it isn’t true fibre broadband.
Did you know fibre doesn’t go via the cabinet? Find out about some of the infrastructure differences between FTTH and vdsl/adsl here.
To check Fibre availability, use the Openreach ADSL checker here. This will tell you if you can get ADSL, ADSL 2+, FTTC, FTTP, FTTPoD (a commercial product) or the newer G.Fast service. It’s the ‘WBC FTTP’ entry that you need to see, such as in this screen grab of the ADSL checker results page:
Ordering Fibre Broadband
If it is available, you can order via BT and a small number of niche providers like Zen internet (but at a price premium). The main BT competitors seem to only be offering VDSL/G.Fast connections. It’s worth mentioning that you can often get at least £100 cash back when ordering BT infinity products via Quidco, and that is on top of any of BT’s own cash incentives (my order earned me £220 of cash back from both BT and Quidco).
Not able to order yet?
If you can’t order Fibre Broadband but you think you should be able to then take a look at my blog on resolving Fibre Broadband availability and ordering issues with Openreach.
Be Warned: Keeping your existing number could be a problem…
I wanted to warn others that BT still have some big process issues when trying to port a number from a different telecoms provider to their FTTH service. With FTTH the phone line is handled by a VOIP service – so it comes down the Fibre line. I had two orders cancelled by BT – the first because they couldn’t move my Sky number on to a VOIP fibre line. For the second they attempted to move my number over to a BT copper line, which I would then run in combination with the Fibre service, at no extra cost. They failed to do this too. So after two weeks of waiting for BT to get their **** together I placed a new order and opted for a new telephone number. This order went ahead fine. At risk of ranting, this was a really frustrating customer experience.
One or Two stage Fibre Broadband install?
The process issues don’t end at number porting. BT and Openreach seemed constantly confused about how many appointments it would require to install my fibre line. Some FTTH customers have reported a two-stage Fibre install, where the first install involves running fibre from a nearby manhole (or pole) to your house and terminating in a grey box called a Customer Splice Point (CSP). The second part is to then connect the CSP to the internal customer equipment.
According to others you don’t need to be at home when the first install stage happens. However, I wanted to be present for this because I needed to ensure that the engineer would would run the cable around to the back of our house (we have no space and no power at the front of the house at the existing entry point of our copper phone line, and we didn’t particularly want a black fibre cable running from the front door and through the hall). In the end everything was done on one day (a one stage install), but I waited in on a couple of other days when I was led to believe that the first of two install stages would occur.
Installation day (My #FibreFriday)
The Openreach engineer arrived at 8.30 and it quickly became clear that he himself had expected the job to be two-stage install, with him just doing the second, internal part. No problem, apparently – he had a reel of fibre and could pull the fibre from the manhole, through the duct and to the house. Of course the reel of fibre he had wasn’t long enough and there was a two and a half hour delay whilst a suitable length of fibre was brought up from Swindon by another engineer…
With the cable on route the OR engineer installed the Optical Network Terminator (ONT) and battery backup. The battery backup will power your ONT and allow your phone line to work in the event of a power cut (unless your cordless phones require a separate power supply).
The ONT and backup installation used to be in the form of two small boxes on the wall with lots of wires hanging down. It was good to see that Openreach have thought about this a bit and now install everything within a single plastic housing. It’s not a small box, but it makes everything a bit neater:
Note: Apparently BT have now stopped providing the battery backup for FTTH installs, which means that in the event of a power cut your phone line will not work. However, if your phone is a wireless DECT handset that requires a separate power supply, then in a power cut you wouldn’t have been able to use your phone anyway.
The cable arrived and they (there’s now two engineers on site) pull it through to the house and route it around the perimeter, through a hole in a garden wall, and along and in to the back of the house where we have power available for the ONT and the router. The fibre cable is easily routed around corners without looking too untidy:
Worth noting that there was no external or internal Customer Splice Point (CSP) attached to the outside wall in my install. Other customers have reported having a CSP in logs of they have made about their own FTTH installs. Now, this could be because mine was a one stage install. You may still end up with a grey CSP on the outside of your house if you require a two stage install. As a result the back of my house wasn’t looking too untidy (in the pic below the right-hand cable is the Openreach fibre, the left hand is Cat 5e network cable and nothing to do with the FTTH install):
The equipment
I won’t wax lyrical, but in my testing the BT Smart Hub WiFi has a small speed advantage over the Sky Q Hub. The biggest difference is that the signal, which does reach further into our house. We now have no dead or weak spots with the BT Smart Hub, where some existed before with the Sky-Q Router
IMPORTANT: get cash back on new broadband orders!
You can currently get at least £100 extra cash back via Quidco if you are a new customer – and that’s on top of any of the reward card offers from BT. So you could typically get in the region of £200 when placing an order. There are also decent cash back offers from other ISPs too. Try it, what have you got to loose?
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