All the roads in our town have been dug up for fibre-optic cables to be installed from Openreach cabinets to people’s homes.

Broadband speeds are pretty decent through the pre-existing (Fibre to cabinet, copper to door) network – 50/70 Mbps. No-one’s been asked if they wanted 400/900Mbps, it’s just happened, and caused plenty of aggro with blocked access, mess and noise.

They’re using open reach fibre to the cabinets, and then the BT ducts and telegraph poles in the road – digging trenches in pavements for their own ducts to fill gaps.

How is all this working? They don’t seem to have established if there’s a market for it, or what the take-up is likely to be. Have they been awarded a patch for building out the UK fibre network, a grant for getting the physical work done and an exclusive use agreement for a number of years before it reverts to open access as part of the National broadband network for free competition, as per current broadband?

Future proofing innit, few years ago 2mb was fine, not much cop now.

Us in the sticks are being left behind though. Just as well 4g is available here, flaky 2mb over “fibre” was more than a bit frustrating.

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Future proofing innit, few years ago 2mb was fine, not much cop now.

Yeah, I’m all for it. We’re already miles behind almost all the major players.

Would it not be worth just skipping fibre upgrades and going to 5G – that’s just as fast isn’t it?
I assume less hassle to install.

Openreach are finally dragging your broadband into the 21st century and your first instinct is to complain about it?

We have fibre to the door in Stirling and it’s ace. Fantastic for WFH, no lag issues like my colleagues in Glasgow.

Also you don’t have to use it (yet)?

Virgin bumped my price one time too many and were just plain annoying when trying to get a better deal so I’m having Sky Ultrafast Plus installed next week. Estimated speeds 470-515Mbps, guaranteed 400Mbps. Openreach are doing the install, FibreToThePremises. Don’t know if they are using the CityFibre infrastructure that was dug in over the past year or some other way. 5G from where I’m sitting is 73Mb down/8 up, so not far from Virgin’s 100Mb.

Future proofing innit

Is it though? (and that is a genuine question, not an ‘I know better’ type!) Surely in the nearish future we’ll go 5G/6G/whatever wifi is at the time?.

I’m not complaining at all! Re-reading I can see how it seems a bit negative, though.

I’m just confused/intrigued about how it all works. The negative stuff was the background to the confusion.

I’d be interested to know how the arrangements with the providers and installers are working. Openreach have to provide open access for telecoms providers to their network. Swish have bolted their fibre onto Openreach’s network, becoming part of what’s becoming a national fibre network, but none else can use the fibre apart from Swish. How long for? How do Swish balance the cost of digging up a whole town with the apparently unestablished demand for the service over a decent available network?

I’m not complaining at all! Re-reading I can see how it seems a bit negative, though.

I’m just confused/intrigued about how it all works. The negative stuff was the background to the confusion.

I’d be interested to know how the arrangements with the providers and installers are working. Openreach have to provide open access for telecoms providers to their network. Swish have bolted their fibre onto Openreach’s network, becoming part of what’s becoming a national fibre network, but none else can use the fibre apart from Swish. How long for? How do Swish balance the cost of digging up a whole town with the apparently unestablished demand for the service over and above the decent pre-existing network?

There won’t be demand until it exists. Infrastructure has to be in place before people create things that need it. Streaming TV for example didn’t exist when were on dialup, now it’s huge. I upgraded to 450MBps so I could have the 70MBps upload (or whatever it is) because I often need to upload large files etc. If your town has decent broadband it will pull people in who might otherwise be put off by low speeds (copper broadband would put me off a long term house move) and they won’t bring their high paid WFH job money with them.

I’d also expect that full fibre networks are more reliable and cheaper to maintain.

I’ll take my 500Mbit FTTP over the GPRS mobile signal I can get holding my phone to the ceiling in some rooms. (Or the 2Mbit ADSL I got before).

Maybe we will look back on internet through cables/fibres as a strange blip in years to come but it’s certainly here now and seems reliable and fast.

I am not sure – but I expect it’s a lot more energy efficient to send data down fibres (or copper) than to put in the capacity and coverage in 5G. That may be a factor in the future.

Sky etc will be all on broadband fairly shortly, the infrastructure to support that is essential.

No there is no 1gb demand today but that’s because those services are not yet a factor.

You’ll be thankful shortly.

Blimey.

Faster internet is better. Great. More things we depend on will need faster speeds in the future. Great. No problem with that at all.

My question is: how does a company fund digging up swathes of the home counties when current demand for their (twice as expensive) service is unclear, and competition in the form of 5 and 6G is coming down the road?

Either they’ve got exceptionally deep pockets and understanding investors, or they’re being funded by government strategy and being given a period of guaranteed monopoly.

And I don’t have an issue with any of that, it seems necessary to a certain extent. I’m just curious as to how it actually works.

Currently we have 100mb fibre (Virgin) but it is capable of 600mb (I don’t need it), yet we have had the same as the OP – massive disruption including completely blocking our drive for about 6 hours on one day – I very nearly made them move so I could get out just to be bloody minded as I was so pissed off at their attitude and the slapdash way they did their work (I have had to jet wash a large area outside the property to get it looking decent again).

They did this with absolutely no warning (they said we should have had a letter / leaflet drop but we didn’t get one and neither did any of our neighbours). I questioned why they were doing it and they argued that their fibre would be much quicker (1gb) and I guess there may be a time in the future that could be the case but I am one of the heaviest users of it (young family, lots of devices, work from home in the digital business etc) and I find that my 100mb is ample for our needs and believe that any requirement to have 1gb as a minimum at a point in the future may well be superseded by advances in other technologies that don’t require the digging up of entire neighbourhoods (such as 5g mentioned above, satellite technology etc).

It’s a network modernisation program rather than just a push for faster speeds.

The copper network is creaking, most of it is many decades old, lots is not in proper conduits but just buried in the ground and it costs a fortune to maintain. Loads of past bodges that cause issues, like in my house where it comes through the front door frame – apparently that or window frames was common before battery drills made running through walls easier. The faster copper broadband options (FTTC, etc) mean bulky, noisy cabinets full of expensive networking kit to achieve that.

Accelerate doing proper fibre to the premises and it’s fewer copper circuits to maintain, keep the expensive kit in the exchange buildings, do it all in conduit that’s quick and easy to run new fibres if needed and you have a much better prospect for the future, and quicker speeds if people need it as a bonus. A big chunk of funding for this is also getting proper speeds to the parts of the country that don’t have it yet, one-off run of fibre to more remote properties and many decades of decent broadband rather than other interim solutions.

You can do phone lines over fibre, including battery backup if needed. Once there’s enough fibre coverage at an exchange they stop offering any new copper services. End of 2025 is supposed to be when the copper PSTN network disappears.

I’m not sure if 5/6G will be a replacement for fibre. The faster the speeds, the higher frequency you need so the shorter the range. It’ll get harder to actually provision a network I think. And having 30 million households with fibre is probably 300 million extra 5/6/7g connections you don’t need.

Meanwhile in the RS end of nowhere, village of 15 houses Northern end of DisUnited Kingdom. We get 2-3Mb that drops out consistently every day, we’ve been quoted 150K to connect to fibre, which unsurprisingly has generated little interest amongst mainly retired boomers (not me…). The other village 3miles up the road has full fibre, single farms in the middle of nowhere get a fibre green box outside. We’ve practically been told we’re unlikely to get it in the next decade. It’s like some weird form of discrimination…

As above, we get 13mb down, 1mb up on a good, and I mean very good, day, and we’re 15 miles from the centre of Manchester so hardly the middle of nowhere.

I’m just confused/intrigued about how it all works.

There are government and local council grants / funds available to improve the broadband infrastructure for areas that currently have the worst connectivity – they have a pot of cash, it goes out to tender, whoever wins the bid digs your road up. In some places it may be via wifi, in most it’s either supplementing existing copper BT/Openreach cabling with fibre, or it’s laying an entirely new network.

I’m in a fairly rural part of Wiltshire, which used to be limited to a couple of MBits max ADSL connection. Around 4 years ago, BT/Openreach won the initial tender and put in FTTP to half of the houses in the village. A year or so later, Gigaclear won the second round of the tender and put an entirely new fibre infrastructure into the other half of the village (and most of the surrounding villages), as well as all of the houses that BT had just upgraded…

Due to the monopolies commission splitting up BT from Openreach, it’s entirely possible that a third party could put their own fibre network in, connected back to a cabinet supplied with fibre by Openreach.

I’m a couple years off being able to afford a first time house purchase but presence of a fibre connection is going to be as important as the garden to me, and I suspect that is probably the case with a lot of people similar to me (small home biz or WFH or similar)

Rural Aberdeenshire here. Broadband via overhead copper phone cables from the village a mile away. Currently we get speeds up to 11Mbs at best, more often 2 or 3Mbs. I tried to get a Community Broadband scheme set up for 14 properties and was told that was not appropriate as we qualify for the Reach100% scheme. This was supposed to be completed by end 2021 but haggling over the award of the contract delayed that. Apparently, according to the website our postcode is “scoped for 2025”. What this seems to mean is that it might get completed by end 2027. I fully expect that that will inevitably be subject to further delays in the work due to unforeseen circumstances so perhaps we should expect something by 2030?

In some places it may be via wifi, in most it’s either supplementing existing copper BT/Openreach cabling with fibre, or it’s laying an entirely new network.

Where we live they have laid a whole new network alongside the relatively recently laid Virgin fibre network.

They don’t seem to have established if there’s a market for it, or what the take-up is likely to be.

They will have done. You tend to find that big corporations cant spend any of their investors money without first having it approved by the board where they have to demonstrate a market demand and how risks are being mitigated to protect the projected revenue’s. Investors (includes anyone on here with a pension) don’t take kindly when big companies spends their pensions and kids trust funs on white elephant ventures.

But I would have thought the future was 5G and wireless rather than hard wired infrastructure. Maybe fibre still has any foreseen potential from wireless licked for the next few decades. Maybe 5G isn’t all its cracked up to be just yet.

The benefits of fibre replacing copper aren’t just limited to broadband speeds either. Before the fibre rollout(s) there was a BT van in the village nearly every day as the lines were very temperamental – decades old brittle copper or aluminium wiring which caused crackly lines (to which BT/OR have a duty to fix, unlike poor BB speeds) every time it was damp, or broke when disturbed to fix someone else’s poor connection.

Now it’s very very rare to see a van having to fix things…

Meanwhile in the RS end of nowhere, village of 15 houses Northern end of DisUnited Kingdom. We get 2-3Mb that drops out consistently every day, we’ve been quoted 150K to connect to fibre

We managed to score a Welsh Government grant in our street when faced with the same problem. There may well be schemes – we had to get three businesses on our street to sign up then we got some kind of business grant. I’m so grateful for the focused and organised people who pushed it through!

Does anyone know much about Gigaclear?

Judging by the roadsigns they’ve just run fibre along the road outside my Dad’s extremely rural house (currently has 2 Mb max, very glitchy ADSL connection). Two questions;
– The house is about 150 meters down a private road from the public road where the fibre is. Do Gigagclear (or another ISP using their open network) really not charge to run the fibre to the premises?
Their FAQ says; “Will it cost me anything for Gigaclear to install equipment on my land? Not at all. Our construction partners do all the work to dig the trench and reinstate the ground as close as possible to its original condition.”
Seems too good to be true!
– Any guess how long after they put the fibre in till it becomes available to order? I found a comment in the Parish Magazine that it was expected to be available September 2022 – seems a long way off!

EDIT – Found a bit more info, looks as though 100 m is the max for a free install.
How much does installation cost?
Gigaclear offer a free standard installation to customers who order our service. A standard
installation means that the router in your property will be no more than 100m from the POT and
there are no specialist surfaces or features to navigate during the installation process.

Where we live they have laid a whole new network alongside the relatively recently laid Virgin fibre network.

Hmmm. This isn’t what I was hoping to read! Seems bonkers that Swish have dug up the town, and there’s no reason why we won’t have EE, Gigawhore, Sky, BT all digging up the same roads to put their own pipes in for the same service.

This is why I asked the question really. Was hoping someone would tell me build/dig grants are a one-time thing and it’s all going to revert to open access a la Openreach after 2 or 3 years.

Meh. Hey ho!

They don’t seem to have established if there’s a market for it, or what the take-up is likely to be.

As above, they will have done.

In short – you may be perfectly happy with your current copper wire.

Once you have tried FTTP, you’ll want it. I promise.

Its ace.

Hmmm. This isn’t what I was hoping to read! Seems bonkers that Swish have dug up the town, and there’s no reason why we won’t have EE, Gigawhore, Sky, BT all digging up the same roads to put their own pipes in for the same service.

In our case (which I accept might be an outlier) the Virgin Fibre is that bit too old to work with the new network CityFibre are laying – in our town we are fortunate to be one of the relatively few to have had fibre for the last eight or so years but it is not quite the same high specification as the new network that is being rolled out across the whole town. Then, once it is operational, it will be available to all operators who want to lease it (currently only TalkTalk I believe, but I am sure all the other operators will be on board soon). I certainly wouldn’t expect every single operator to be digging up another trench – that really would be madness.

Does anyone know much about Gigaclear?

I have gigaclear since moving house to a rural property in March. I’ve been very impressed – I can get 900 up and down, thought i’ve gone with 300, as that’s loads for now. Now I have it, it is very useful to be able to upload large files quickly to cloud storage (e.g. back up all your photos to google cloud).

It’s a result of the economics of the industry that they’re upgrading places that already have good internet. Most (excluding rural broadband) houses that have FTTC (copper last bit) have it because there was a business case (i.e. enough people close enough to a cabinet) to do it, the business case for FTTP (full fibre) is basically exactly the same – sufficient density of people in an area to justify it.

The exception to this is rural broadband which is subsidised – this is why gigaclear aren’t charging to run the fibre to your house. The contract they have is to run fibre to all the properties in a given area (e.g. west berkshire rural properties like mine) and connect the houses – someone is paying, it’s just not you. With rural houses it’s generally quite easy to connect houses to the box they’ve put in the ground outside your house anyway – normally gravel drives or a handy flower border.

Since i’m in the industry, i’ll address the 5G / 6G point. They mitigate the need to an extent, but the killer is capacity. Each provider has a certain amount of spectrum bandwidth (say 10MHz), and there is only so much data you can transfer per MHz, so as you add people, you either need to make the cells very small (and you need a fibre connection for each cell tower anyway… so the economics don’t work + you have cell seperacy issues as adjacent cells need different frequencies) or you have limited speeds available to all the people in the cell (the bandwidth available per person will decrease linearly with the number of people connected to the cell, as they’re all sharing the same fibre connection on the cell site – the back haul). So out in the sticks where the number of connections might be 10 people per sq km, it’s entirely viable to use 4G / 5G to provide broadband, but it becomes unworkable when you have high denisties of people such as towns.

Cityfibre, gigaclear, community fibre and many others are competing with Openreach for the physical connection. You might get some overlap (just like I can get Virgin as well as Openreach fibre), but mostly these are tendering for government money to roll out fibre to places that wouldn’t be viable without subsidies.

There will doubtless be consolidation in the years to come, a bit like how the cable TV market started.

I left Virgin for Toob. It is only available in some places, Southampton being one.

900 up and down with the fibre only stopping at the box by my feet under the desk.

Speed seems good but I don’t have anything fast enough to actually test it properly. The main thing is friendly and helpful people to talk to rather than Virgin brain deads.

5G is an alternative but not really a full replacement, for a few reasons. One, to cover a mid sized town like mine, you need around 5-6 20m monopoles. These get refused planning quite regularly. Once the FTTH work is done, there’s barely anything to see.

2nd, speed. Yes, 5G can give up to 1gbps, but you’ll only ever see that if you’re literally standing under the mast. More realistic speeds are 100-600mbps depending where you are in relation to the mast. FTTH can already provide 900mbps, all day, every day. Give it a year or 2 and you’ll see 1.5gbps FTTH being offered.

Don’t get me wrong, I love 5G. I’ve been using it for nearly a year and have been able to have 100-200mbps download speeds vs the 30mbps or 50mbps that I would have had on FTTC which is my only option at my last 2 houses. And I’ve just had a new 5G monopole go live yesterday which means I’m now seeing 500mbps+, up to 700mbps download!

The more 5G gets established, along with other alternatives like starlink, the more competition for places with only FTTC as an option.

Since i’m in the industry, i’ll address the 5G / 6G point. They mitigate the need to an extent, but the killer is capacity. Each provider has a certain amount of spectrum bandwidth (say 10MHz), and there is only so much data you can transfer per MHz, so as you add people, you either need to make the cells very small (and you need a fibre connection for each cell tower anyway… so the economics don’t work + you have cell seperacy issues as adjacent cells need different frequencies) or you have limited speeds available to all the people in the cell (the bandwidth available per person will decrease linearly with the number of people connected to the cell, as they’re all sharing the same fibre connection on the cell site – the back haul). So out in the sticks where the number of connections might be 10 people per sq km, it’s entirely viable to use 4G / 5G to provide broadband, but it becomes unworkable when you have high denisties of people such as towns.

This too. I can see a 50% increase in download speed from 5pm (loads of people commuting/in cars using data) to 1am, from 140mbps download to 210mbps. Plus the UK 5G still relies on a 4G ‘tether’ and so the upload (on 4G) is very poor compared to the download speeds. I’m looking at potentially 500-700mbps download but only 25-30mbps upload.

Would it not be worth just skipping fibre upgrades and going to 5G – that’s just as fast isn’t it?

Nope.

In theory, with enough bandwidth (US only) you can get 1 Gb/s over 5G, but that’s to one user and pretty much maxes out the base station. As the base station shares capacity amongst all users in the sector, you’ll get less than that per user. Plus in the UK, we have less spectrum allocated, so top speeds are less than 1 Gb/s.

Currently, so few mobile subscribers are using 5G, those that do see impressive speeds, but that’s mainly because there aren’t very many of them. It will eventually get busier and speeds will drop as a result eg I’m still using a 4G only iPhone.

With fibre to every house, you can in theory, deliver multiple Gb/s to every household at the same time (assuming enough backhaul capacity).

Personally we probably only need 20 Mb/s uncontended internet connection, two of us, bit of Spotify use, web browsing and occaisonally we both watch the same Netflix show at standard resolution. No need whatsoever for anything over 50 Mb/s.

Water bloke I know said that if mass ownership of cars had preceded development of sewerage systems a significant proportion of folk would prefer shitting in a bucket and throwing it out of the window rather than have the street dug up to install pipes to the house.

Personally we probably only need 20 Mb/s uncontended internet connection, two of us, bit of Spotify use, web browsing and occasionally we both watch the same Netflix show at standard resolution. No need whatsoever for anything over 50 Mb/s.

This is where we are. Two of us, bit of telly/Spotify, very occasionally watching different things in different rooms. 2 kiddies 3.5 and 1.5 y.o., not into their 4K, 120fps gaming just yet. biggest difference would be bulk /uploading of photos, which happens a couple of times a year, and occasionally up/downloading of work files. current 50Mbps is £22, Swish 400Mbps is £45. work aren’t going to pay for that, and I’m happy sitting back with a coffee for the extra 20 seconds it might take anyway. Biggest time waiting annoyance is waiting for iplayer app to load up on the Firestick. faster internet isn’t going to help that.

However, Swish are offering to waive the £50 install, give the first 6 months free and 10 days cancellation notice after that. No-brainer really. I’m tied in until August next year, but they said they’ll honour it until then.

No need whatsoever for anything over 50 Mb/s.

Not yet, anyway. And the people who move into your house next might want more.

Water bloke I know said that if mass ownership of cars had preceded development of sewerage systems a significant proportion of folk would prefer shitting in a bucket and throwing it out of the window rather than have the street dug up to install pipes to the house

Ha!

Not yet, anyway. And the people who move into your house next might want more.

Maybe, but that’s potentially a benefit he’ll get when he sells his house, not necessarily a return the fibre provider is going to get in the next 2, 3, 4, 10 years?