City Fiber upgrade thing.

OK. as with most of Glasgow and due to the analogue to digital changeover, a team of workies came to the close a few weeks back to install the city fiber system in the close(tenement)

So the system is installed in the building, not into the individual houses, though at some point it will have to be installed.

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Now ive had a few calls from someone claiming to be connected with city fiber in affiliation with talk talk about making the actual fiber cable being run from the close, into the house and changing from talk talk analogue to talk talk fiber.

The agreement is ‘they’ will be coming to the house on monday 9th to do the installation.

Thing is though as im with talk talk, i would have expected someone from talk talk to contact me, not someone claiming to be from city fiber on behalf of talk talk.

The caller (Hashid) isnt really explaining too well his association with talk talk, and when i said i would call talk talk and city fiber he was keen i use his number, rather than googling city fiber and using the number that comes up there.

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Could be 100% legit, and ‘who called me’ is kind of saying the number he contacted me on is from city fiber, only I’d expect my service provider to be the one calling, not someone purporting to be from the company who installed the fiber optic cables. And these days scammers seem to be able to list any phone number they want. I’ve had calls with a Glasgow number which in reality are coming from India. So I want to be 100% sure of whats going on.

You see, while the concept is legit, I dont want to be signing up to what is a 3rd party who then goes to talk talk to say “we got you such and such business”

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Edit. since phoned city fiber who though this way of doing this was a bit strange so will check it all out and phone me back, but I know some here are Glasgow based and any info or confirmation this is legit would be appreciated.

I think I should also contact talk talk now but not knowing what contracts talk talk have with city fiber or how they’re expecting their customers to make the change over in that it would be something the customer would initiate or if it is indeed down to the caller Hashid calling each customer to make the arrangements or what is effectively forcing the customer to make the change now and not at a later date. I believe that actual date the change over is Jan 2027, so still a fair way off

So im kind of wondering is there is an actual association and this isnt someone from a 3rd party scouting for business.

Anyone any info ? or had this done can offer a bit of feedback

Sounds sus, I’d run a mile unless I knew it was legit. Which you seem to be doing so all good I guess.

As I understand it CF lay the cables then it’s up the individual if they want to sign up to a provider. The CF website has a list of these – it’s not exclusive to Talk Talk.

Fwiw when we had the fibre installed in our place in Inverness we made the arrangements with Zen but CityFibre engineers did the work.

An optimistic read of your description would be that your caller is just an overenthusiastic telemarketer trying to get people signed up. It does smell a bit scammy though.

If you’re not in a rush to get fibre then Id say give this a big swerve until you’re ready to make the switch.

Oh, and if it turns out that TalkTalk were actually behind this I’d be annoyed with this way of doing business and go looking for another provider.

I’d be minded to say no. You’re under no obligation to sign up with TalkTalk, even if you are with them at the moment, and it’s likely this is a (admittedly legit) reseller trying to get you to sign up to a multiyear contract through their company. Say ‘no’ and see what they say. There will likely be plenty of competing offers, all with the same basic access, and it’s worth shopping around.

Down south, and our street was fibred up a couple of years ago. We’ve had cable as long as I’ve lived here – the local office cabinet backs onto the wall in our front garden, but the fibre was all overhead from the OpenReacharound / BT poles.

We had a couple of ISPs leafletting / doorstepping, so my recommendation is to avoid taking the first offer you get (or getting locked into a TalkTalk contract renewal because some random is trying to sign you up.

FWIW, we ended up with a gigabit each way, fixed IP, a semi-decent router and mesh networking for £25 a month for two years from a local company called HeyBroadband. We switched to another competing local ISP –  Box – at the end of the term for a £24 a month contract, just before it was acquired by Community Fibre, which seems to be consolidating all the little ISPs that popped up.

I have been WFH almost exclusively for four years now (thanks, Pandemic) and nothing made me happier than cancelling my Virgin Media contract.

Back in the day when I had a pay-monthly mobile contract with O2, I used to get cold-call sales calls claiming to be from O2.  I’d ask “are you O2, or are you calling on behalf of O2?” and they’d confess that it was the latter, that they’re actually Honest Dave’s Used Mobiles and are reselling O2 services.  Which in and of itself is fine, but I’m not doing business with anyone who’s literal opening sentence is a lie.

This scenario smells an awful lot like that to me.  Is it a scam, probably not.  Are they being totally honest with you, probably not.

You’re supposed to be able to choose from a range of suppliers but when I run my post code through city fibres postcode checker, talk talk is the only option. Maybe they have some sort of exclusivity agreement for a period of time.

Since you don’t pay city fibre direct, my guess is that city fibre get paid by talk talk or other service provider, for every person that signs up and maybe an ongoing fee thereafter. City fibre therefore have an incentive to employ their own marketing teams to try and get people signed up on their network with talk talk.

But cityfibre probably don’t do that themselves. I think they would employ a separate sales and marketing company, who in turn get paid a commission for every signup. So in the end it’s probably legit, but the person you spoke to is not a direct employee of either talk talk or cityfibre, just someone working for a sales company who are given a list of people to call for whom the service has recently been made available. Despite ultimately working on behalf of talk talk, they might not know that talk talk are your current provider.