concerns over SKY and Openreach Installation
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Having bought a new build house on a brand new estate, we're encountering delays and issues getting the phone and internet connected. There are plenty of horror stories about Openreach but I'm trying to get a handle on what the actual issue is.
The estate is about 40-50 houses. Most have been bought, noone else has an issue connecting their phone.
We have cabling right up to our front door, coming out of pipes on the ground and a cable coming out of the house, and phone sockets already in the wall. The builders do this to each and every house to make installation simpler.
So far it seems straightforward. However through SKY , openreach are saying there are problems connecting us.
The problem is not between the house and the junction box which is on the side of the entrance road of the estate. Instead the problem is between the box and the exchange. Apparently a cable has to be run to the box on the estate.
This seems crazy because surely all of that infrastructure would have been put in right at the beginning, rather than having to go back and do each one individually. I would think its simply a case of a connection at the box and a connection at the exchange.
So I'm curious if anyone on here has actual knowledge of how openreach actually cables up a new estate and are they telling the truth about this or is purely an excuse to delay the installation.
Thamks
The estate is about 40-50 houses. Most have been bought, noone else has an issue connecting their phone.
We have cabling right up to our front door, coming out of pipes on the ground and a cable coming out of the house, and phone sockets already in the wall. The builders do this to each and every house to make installation simpler.
So far it seems straightforward. However through SKY , openreach are saying there are problems connecting us.
The problem is not between the house and the junction box which is on the side of the entrance road of the estate. Instead the problem is between the box and the exchange. Apparently a cable has to be run to the box on the estate.
This seems crazy because surely all of that infrastructure would have been put in right at the beginning, rather than having to go back and do each one individually. I would think its simply a case of a connection at the box and a connection at the exchange.
So I'm curious if anyone on here has actual knowledge of how openreach actually cables up a new estate and are they telling the truth about this or is purely an excuse to delay the installation.
Thamks
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Comments
But it is always possible that the cabinet pre-dates the estate and also serves neighbouring properties. So there is a possibility that the extra houses on this new build have taken demand over the capacity of the box.
If the cabinet was put in specifically for the new estate then you'd think it would be cabled up to suit. Unless it is cabled back to another cabinet rather than a direct run to the exchange. In that case it could be the next cabinet in the chain that has run out of capacity back to the exchange.
Trouble is you are very unlikely to ever find out. The guy who might turn up to your home to check the installation when it eventually happens won't be in the same department as the guys who cable up the roadside cabinets so he may not be able to tell you what the reason was no matter how many chocolate hob-nobs you bribe him with
If 'our' cabinet is piggybacked to another would that require any work that is visible? IE holes in the road etc? And how far the next cabinet likely to be?
So far the installation is 6 weeks late, (it was booked 4 weeks in advance of that too) and they've just delayed it by another 10 days with no guarantee that it'll be done then so I can see exactly where this is going. The more evidence I have to hit them witht the better...
The cabinet that is there now may be new but did it replace an existing one? There is no real way of anyone outside Openreach knowing how the cabinets are connected up. And I very much doubt they are going to tell you anything. They might tell Sky, who may or may not pass anything on to you. But Openreach only deal with service providers, they will probably tell you to contact Sky if you did try to ask them anything.
If the ducts underground have enough space then it is relatively easy to pull a new cable through without having to dig up the road. You'll just have a van one end feeding the cable into the duct and another at the other end pulling it through.
Then some other bloke comes along and terminates the cable each end.
All you can do is keep pushing Sky to give Openreach the hurry up. It will almost certainly be a waste of your time trying to contact Openreach directly. As I have said they will only point you at Sky, or ignore you completely!
the builder doesn't install sockets etc to make things easier for Openreach, they do it because OR pay them to install them on OR's behalf, they also build the foot way joint boxes and lay the ducting in the paths and roads to the boundary of the site, again they are paid for this work, it suits both sides, and it's easier to do this before paths and roads finished , and until the paths and roads are adopted by the council, it's the developers private property and OR have no automatic right to be allowed on site by the developer
if your individual line is thru to the new cabinet , the D side , then the problem must be the E side cable that goes directly or indirectly via another cabinet, back to the exchange
It's likely that this new cab is cabled back to another existing cabinet rather than directly to the exchange itself, as this is usually more cost effective, so if the adjacent cabinet only had say 40 spare pairs, and your development is 50 houses, then obviously that's a deficit of 10 pairs, or it could even be 50 spares but some are faulty
As already stated all you can do is keep on at your chosen provider (Sky), they are Openreaches customer, not you, and hope that on your behalf they keep pushing OR to provide more capacity as soon as possible
Every time a house was sold we would have an Openreach van come around to connect the phone line, only to find there was no equipment in the man-hole, and no cable between that and the nearest cabinet. Each engineer would duly log the issue and drive away, and thus this repeated for nine months.
Eventually the equipment was added and we all got phone lines.
If the gov't was serious about broadband access, the relevant lines (and cable equivalent if available within a certain distance) should be in place before new-build can be sold!