fillip15 wrote:Does anybody have access, please, to insider knowledge of Openreach's detailed plans for FTTP implementation? Their Build Programme dated January 2022 (link on the Openreach website) gives '21/22 - 23/24' as the date for FTTP at our exchange. This could be anything from next month to two years and ten months away. Any suggestions as to how get a more specific forecast would be greatly appreciated.
Despite OpenReach in theory not being an organisation that deals directly with retail customers I was able to file a support ticket with them last year regarding unavailability of FTTP at my address and had quite good service from the representative assigned to my support ticket. Frustratingly I have gone through the emails and can't find any record of the URL where the form is to file a support ticket. I've also just spent a bit of time on the OpenReach site and can't for the life of me find my way back to the page where you can file a support request.
I think that the way I got to the right place was to go to this page (
https://www.openreach.com/), go to Broadband/Ultra-Fast-Fibre and the click the green "Check your address for Ultrafast Full Fibre Broadband". Prior to opening my support ticket the result from the address checker for my address was a "sorry, not available yet" type of answer but I think that somehow from there I got to the required support page. I think there might have been some sort of link along the lines of "Do you think fibre is already available" or something like that. I'm sorry this is so horribly vague but I was doing all of this 9 or 10 months ago so this is from memory. I did try to recreate my steps just now by picking postcodes from friends I knew who lived in the remotest locations I could think of but surprisingly to me I couldn't find a single one that didn't come up with "congratulations, ultra-fast is available" response so that was no help but you do presumably have a post code that will give the "sorry, not available yet" response and might be able to get somewhere from there.
I filed my support ticket because the fact that my address showed as not having FTTP was so clearly an administrative error in OpenReaches system. I live in a block of flats and could clearly see the FTTP boxes at 3 places on the front of the building with adequate ports for all flats yet using the address checker only about 15 of the 25 flats showed "congratulations, it's available" and the others showed the "sorry, not yet" response. It seemed pretty clear to me that the issue was a data entry error where after running the fibre to our building OpenReach had set the flag on the database indicating "this address has access to FTTP" for some of the flats but not others. That did indeed turn out to be the case and as I said the support team took good ownership, informed when there was a delay due to them escalating the problem to another team, chased up the other team on my behalf and ultimately fixed the database. Since your request would be a simple "when will you implement FTTP in my area?" rather than a pretty obvious error in their systems you might not get as good a response as I did but you've nothing to lose so if you can find the same support request form as I did then personally I would file a ticket that way and they might be helpful and get more up to date info for you.
Sorry I couldn't point you to the exact support page, I did try, but maybe you can stumble upon it in the same way that I did.
- Julian