Delightful Dales
Village’s fibre nightmares
EXCELLENT article on Gigabit Broadband for Upper Mayfield in last week’s News Telegraph… but do they know what they’re in for?
We – 18 properties in Stanton Lane, Ellastone – have gone through the Voucher Scheme, with Openreach doing the installation and finally went “live” just over a month ago.
Yes, FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) now available to all of us! First In Ellastone?
But dealing with Openreach has been a nightmare!
Openreach are a communications company, but the last thing they can do is communicate.
It started in June 2020, when we completed the Openreach Enquiry Form and got a quote of £25k. Some properties had speeds of less than 8Mbps, so there was no problem in getting people to sign up. (No need for MP involvement!)
With six of the properties being businesses, we easily covered the cost with the DCMS Vouchers but it took Openreach until October 2020 to submit details to DCMS when we were asked to commit to the Vouchers.
The only means of communication with Openreach was via email to communityfibre@openreach.co.uk.; they refuse to provide any phone communication. This was clearly a call centre, which just passed on any enquiries to the installation side, and you are promised an answer in “10-14 days”.
Some 90% of the answers were templated excuses including such as “we are applying for road closure”.
Yet Stanton Lane barely sees one car an hour! And “civil works are awaiting contract”.
Civil works amounted to 50 metres of ducting, carried out in a couple of hours, and one telegraph pole installed.
Interestingly, there was no reference to Covid as an excuse but then all the work is out of doors.
Then nothing happened until March 2021 when the first “survey” was carried out, which was then followed by at least five “survey” visits from different Openreach personnel and staff from subcontractors CASS.
Clearly there was little exchange of information following the visits and queries to the call centre just promised that they were on schedule for October completion!
As we have the main fibre line to Stanton running close to all these properties, they finally realised they could “break” into it and install a “node” to serve us. This was done in late May.
Further, sporadic, visits from CASS saw fibre installed along existing ducting and poles, but not without two further “survey” visits by a team from Leicester. By late July, I assessed that 90% of the work had been carried out.
In August, nobody appeared, so in early September I emailed the call centre for an update but got no response.
I then realised that, by tracking the emails, they were being deleted! They refused to communicate.
This incensed me and I decided to complain to Clive Selley, the Openreach CEO.
This did provoke some action and engineers appeared.
Finally, on September 30, I received an email stating “the wait is now over and the full fibre network has been built in your community”, a full 15 months after our submission to Openreach.
To add insult to injury, we are now being “hassled” by Openreach to change ISP contracts.
If we don’t, they lose the voucher subsidy as the voucher scheme requires us to take out a new contract, which is “at least a doubling of existing speeds” within one year.
The vouchers were issued in October 2020; Openreach only made Gigabit Broadband available at the end of September 2021; i.e. a change must be made in less than one month.
Some properties have now been waiting more than a month for installation, sub-contracted by their chosen ISP to… Openreach!
Others have contracts which have penalties if terminated early. If they were organised to complete in a reasonable time there would be no problem… but 15 months!
I wish Upper Mayfield good luck with the project.
But tell them not to hold their breath for March delivery!
Paul Archer
Ellastone