Best way to get a new phone line installed

[AliG]

Hi,

 

I got Virgin to install broadband to the house before we moved in as I suspected that they would be a lot more responsive than Openreach. Indeed they were and it went reasonably smoothly.

 

We don't use the Virgin phone line, I have never connected a phone to it, we use mobiles and WiFi calling as the insulation and triple glazing kill the signal inside the house.

 

Later I did contact Openreach as I wanted a phone line into the property just in case. Also it makes it easier to play Virgin off against Sky.

 

So Openreach left us some cable and gave us a site reference. The builders ran conduit from the nearest pole to the plant room and the cable is in.

 

I contacted Openreach and asked if they could connect it, but they say I have to order phone service to get it connected.

 

Is the best way to do this to order phone/broadband via BT? It looks like to do this I would have to sign up to something I don't need for 12 months, but at least they would wave the cost of a new line if I do.

 

I just went through this farce at my parents's place and BT were catostrophic in their ability to get a new line installed. Despite their already being an Openreach modem in the flat it took 2 months and they mixed up properties etc.

 

Is there a cheaper way to do this or someone who may make a better job of it than BT?

 

BTW BT are now rolling out G.Lite, called Ultrafast. They are offering me a guaranteed 150MB in London and 125MB in Edinburgh with 100MB guaranteed. This means that Virgin cannot tell you that they offer a faster speed. When I called them last week to get a better price they told me that BT could not do more than 63Mbps. You can get even faster speeds if you have FTTP.

 

Thanks

 

 

[AliG]

Replying to my old thread.

 

A BT landline costs £20 a month for 12 months plus £70 upfront, so effectively £310 to get a line installed.

 

A Plusnet basic broadband line costs £210 for 12 months plus £50 upfront and has £70 cash back available on Quidco so £190.

 

TalkTalk and The Postoffice seem to be a similar price to this.

 

You could argue it is a waste, but I would like it to just be connected and the cabling sorted out.

 

On the bright side, I just called Sky and Virgin and cut my combined bill by £51 a month.

Edited June 27, 2019 by AliG

[ProDave]

The whole phone line thing is cheap, at least compared to a water or electricity connection.

 

Like you, Open Reach provided the cable and duct and identified where their phone cable was, it happened to be running parallel to and 6" from the electricity cable.

 

So the cable was laid, and left coiled up on the grass verge above the phone cable.

 

Then you have to order a new line from BT and pay their "connection charge" which was about £65

 

Then it turns to shambles. BT missed the connection date. Then when they did come, they did a bit of work, and then said they need access to another junction which was right on the edge of the road, so they need to order traffic lights, that was another 2 weeks.

 

And so it went on, the shambles that was trying to get a working pair from the cable in the road all the way to the exchange.

 

The delay meant we got the connection fee refunded and a discount for the first 12 months.

[AliG]

Ah, the Post Office will allow you to order just a phone line on a 12 month contract

 

So that's £11.50 a month, plus £60 up front less £40 cash back, so £158.

 

When I finished the order, it wasn't clear if there would actually be a 12 month contract. If not I will cancel after a month.

 

I will report back on how it goes.

[Temp]

Bit too late but Google found.. £11 a month..

 

https://freeola.com/line-rental/?gclid=CjwKCAjw0tHoBRBhEiwAvP1GFXs2dVIBXCkzqqI5MpfTqaEqLPQeB292OKKWkiYzeC57_OsDgz3s6hoCRZwQAvD_BwE

 

But I've no experience of them. Don't know if they can handle an installation.

 

Edited June 27, 2019 by Temp

[AliG]

Thanks, looks like £40.30 to install a line, but no cash back.

 

However they do not hold you to a contract, so I could use them to get the line installed then cancel after 30 days, giving me a cost of £51.

 

I am in the 14 day cooling off period so can cancel the Postoffice order.

 

Freeola are also offering an earlier appointment and its a d ay that I will be at home.

 

Reading how this has worked for other people it will almost certainly go wrong as someone will turn up and tell me that they cannot connect the line to the pole, then they will have to organise that and come back, luckily I do not actually need to get the service up and running.

 

 

Edited June 28, 2019 by AliG

[joth]

9 hours ago, AliG said:

BTW BT are now rolling out G.Lite, called Ultrafast. They are offering me a guaranteed 150MB in London and 125MB in Edinburgh with 100MB guaranteed. This means that Virgin cannot tell you that they offer a faster speed.

 

Virgin do 350 Mbit, so definitely faster than anything you'll get from a single openreach twisted pair.

 

Fwiw Plusnet did our install and it went tolerably well, once they actually placed the order with openreach (the system failed first time around). The openreach engineer was super helpful and Plusnet had it all working a few hours later. YMMV.

 

 

[AliG]

Virgin can certainly offer faster speeds, but at the moment they will try to tell you that their 100Mbps service is faster than anything that you can get on a copper line so it's harder to argue about the price. This is no longer true(assuming you are in a G.Lite area). If you want the faster Virgin speeds then they have more of an argument that you have to pay up as no one else is offering them, but they can no longer argue that you cannot get 100Mbps elsewhere.

 

When I called Virgin and Sky they both slagged off each other's broadband. Sky told me that Virgin lie and you won't get the speed that is promised - I have had 100Mbps Virgin for over a year and never seen the speed drop, it actually connects at around 106Mbps, similarly Virgin told me that it was not possible to get over 63Mbps broadband without using them whereas I can get a guaranteed 100Mbps connection now via BT(Sky are not yet doing Ultrafast), my parents have FTTP and can get 330Mbps from BT.

 

I can get all the way to 516Mbps from Virgin now, but the reality is that an hour long TV show takes less than 1 minute to download at 100Mbps so I decided that paying for a faster speed was just for boasting terms but of no practical use to me. They would discount the 100Mbps service more than the 200Mbps service, so it was £11 a month extra for little real benefit.

Edited June 28, 2019 by AliG

[AliG]

OK, called the Post Office and it is a 1 month rolling contract so I will stick with them.

 

Also they answered the phone quickly and seemed pretty efficient which may come in handy if problems arise.

[joth]

On 27/06/2019 at 21:58, AliG said:

I got Virgin to install broadband to the house before we moved in as I suspected that they would be a lot more responsive than Openreach. Indeed they were and it went reasonably smoothly.

 

 

Revisiting this old thread, can I ask when you placed the order and at what stage the installation happened? e.g. did you just complete the build them call them up to have it installed?

 

I'm reluctant to do this later on through their normal consumer ops  because their engineers will drill holes all over the exterior of the house destroying all the effort put into airtightness. But if they arrive too much before first fix I can't get them to put cable into the various points I'd like it.

Ideally I would do this very early on and just have them leave a big reel of spare cable that we can put into the various rooms ourselves during first fix, and likewise we can make the airtightness fixes needed to deal with their initial install. I'm just not sure the consumer-focused engineers will do this. But if they will, I'll probably just pay for a rolling contract for 1 month,  just to get the initial cable put in, which we can the bury)

 

(I've briefly explored their New Developments process, but that seems an impossible option; only interested in large MOU not a single house renovation)

[ProDave]

8 minutes ago, joth said:

I'm reluctant to do this later on through their normal consumer ops  because their engineers will drill holes all over the exterior of the house destroying all the effort put into airtightness. But if they arrive too much before first fix I can't get them to put cable into the various points I'd like it.

 

I coped with this by installing a hockey stick between my AV cupboard and outside so I have a route so pull in new cables like telecoms or whatever, and you just seal the ends of the hockey stick.

[Russdl]

@joth  I’ve just been around this particular buoy and it was interesting. As you say, the ‘new development’ route isn’t aimed at individual self builders. 

 

I ended up up calling the standard number to request a BT phone line, and explained it was a new build, he said he’d make an appointment for an engineer to visit. I explained that would be a waste of time but if they could supply me with their duct and cable I would bury the duct with the cable inside, leave a load at the base of the pole and a load inside the house for them to work their magic on. The chap on the phone didn’t really understand and booked me an engineer visit regardless. 

 

The engineer arrived at the appointed time and told me he couldn’t do anything because I need some duct and cable...

 

He arranged for delivery of said duct and cable, probably took 6 weeks in all to get everything I needed, all the while I was receiving groveling emails from BT because they hadn’t got me up and running when they said they would.

 

Anyway, I buried the duct with the cable (and a drawcord) inside. Then BT could do their magic and now I have broadband and a phone line. 

 

Plus compensation from BT for late delivery of the service (which I was in no massive hurry for). 

[joth]

45 minutes ago, Russdl said:

I ended up up calling the standard number to request a BT phone line

 

Thanks for this! Although for us there's actually no problem about BT line, we already have one of those ?  it's specifically the Virgin Media install that I'm struggling with as their two options seem to be unobtainable (New Developer Route) or unacceptable (consumer install, with a load of cables traipsed over and a holes cut into the outside of the house). 

 

58 minutes ago, ProDave said:

I coped with this by installing a hockey stick between my AV cupboard and outside so I have a route so pull in new cables like telecoms or whatever, and you just seal the ends of the hockey stick.

This is a good option, and I might well do this anyway as we're due (they say) to get FTTP in 2-3 years. The risk I see is VM (and Openreach for that matter) seem very particular about new installs only happening via an external termination box that must be hung on the side of the building an access through the wall so would be unlikely to allow use of it. 

 

Also, VM will only route the internal signal via their own specially endorsed RG6 cable, and so if we want TV outlets in various rooms I need to get my grubby hands of a good amount of this magic cable. But that said, this all gets much simpler if I accept we'll never put wire VM cable to multiple TV sets. (I've never even subscribed to cable or satellite TV in my life, so it seems very low likelihood I'd ever want it to multiple receivers around the house).

 

 

 

[Russdl]

3 hours ago, joth said:

Thanks for this! Although for us there's actually no problem about BT line,

 

Oops. Sorry, guess I didn’t read properly. Fatigue is what it is!

[AliG]

I just called Virgin Media said I wanted to subscribe and explained that I needed a new install.

 

Initially their system was confused as we knocked down a house that had VM and the cable had been broken during building. So despite telling them it would be a new install someone turned up thinking they just had to reconnect an existing connection and they then had to arrange someone to come back to connect a new cable to the pavement.

 

Looking back at the email chain it was installed just over two weeks after I called them. This was months before we moved in but at the time was only supposed to be the week before. 

 

I don’t have any kind of box on the outside of the house. I think we had installed conduit from out side into the plant room and they were happy to pull their cable through that. I’ll check exactly how it terminates when I get home. I wasn’t there when it was installed.

 

Usually it seems that a reasonable engineer will work with your builders if they are there at the time.

 

For what it’s worth I filled out the new development form for Openreach even though it doesn’t seem designed for one house, there was literally no other way to contact them. A guy turned up to survey the install. He gave us a reel of cable and asked us to put it into a conduit from the house to the nearest pole.

 

Then two years later we had to call a phone provider to ask for a line install to get the cable connected at both ends.

 

Again despite frequently telling them this would be the case the guy turned up thinking he just had to put the master box inside the house. Amazingly he was happy when that didn’t work to go to the other end of the canid and connect it to the pole. Other people have said they were told that a special team was required to come back to do this.

[joth]

Thanks @AliG and @Russdl

 

Sounds like if we put in the duct or grommet there's a reasonable chance they can use that if I leave the installation until late on. Snag is my electrical cupboard is not in a brilliant place to get an external duct to (in the middle of the house upstairs) so I either need to get my hands on some of their cable before/during first fix, or accept the box goes somewhere else. 

Either way the consumer rather than new development route sounds workable.