Alternative to openreach

[GaryM]

I've had an overhead electricity power supply cable put under ground, free of charge. On the same pole is my phone cable, I've have already head openreach do a survey, £336 for 5 minutes of work. They now want £1500 to do the actual work, disconnecting the existing line, routing down the telegraph pole, through an existing trench and connecting to house.  £72 for material and the rest for 8 hours labour.  As the timings have all been round up to the nearest hour my guess is in reality it will be less then 4 hours of work. (electricity guys  did there side in 3 hours).

 

So is there any alternative to openreach i can use to connect the line? On principle I just don't want to use them, there customer service just seems to suck and they want £500 an hour.

 

Thanks

 

 

[ProDave]

I believe someone else here dealt with this by laying the underground cable, then "accidentally" breaking the overhead cable, and when the team arrived to repair it, they "understood"

[joe90]

It must be an electricity pole then and BT use it to feed off to you, as @ProDave says, get the cable in yourself and if necessary connect it up yourself, no one will notice ?

[Bozza]

Is the pole an electricity pole Owned by the electricity company, that also carries a phone line.
Is the pole on your property.  

Does the pole carry a line to anyone other than yourself.  

Do you have a good 4g signal.
Are you trying to avoid having an overhead line into your house

 

I ask because I may have specific experience/ solution depending on answers.  Yes Openreach are crap ironically very difficult to contact by phone.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Bozza

[Temp]

We got a quote for an overhead connection but our builder said the engineers would probably be happy to hook up an underground cable if we ran one. So we didn't tell them we wanted an underground connection, we just laid our own cable from house to bottom of the pole and left a coil long enough to reach the top with several meters spare.

 

We had some issues because tit turned out there weren't any spare wires on the pole. Once they fixed that they forgot to actually connect us. Took while to sort out but eventually they sent a cherry picker and the engineer connected the wire we had provided instead of running an overhead.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Temp

[Gone West]

We had Openreach disconnect and remove their cable from our house. It was FREE. They said it was their only free service. We never had it replaced and use WiiMax which is both a lot faster and cheaper in this area.

[GaryM]

9 hours ago, Bozza said:

Is the pole an electricity pole Owned by the electricity company, that also carries a phone line.
Is the pole on your property.  

Does the pole carry a line to anyone other than yourself.  

Do you have a good 4g signal.
Are you trying to avoid having an overhead line into your house

 

I ask because I may have specific experience/ solution depending on answers.  Yes Openreach are crap ironically very difficult to contact by phone.

Hi,

I believe the pole is owned by the electricity company and it has the phone line on

 

The pole is not on my land, it's a yard away.

 

We are the only house on the pole

 

Yes we have good 4 g

 

Yes we are trying to get rid of the overhead cables and put them underground

 

 

[joe90]

As far as I remember BT are allowed to put phone wires on electricity poles (below power wires) but not the other way around. Just run your Underground cable up to the pole then accidentally break you overhead cable!

[Bozza]

3 hours ago, GaryM said:

Hi,

I believe the pole is owned by the electricity company and it has the phone line on

 

The pole is not on my land, it's a yard away.

 

We are the only house on the pole

 

Yes we have good 4 g

 

Yes we are trying to get rid of the overhead cables and put them underground

 

 

Ok so I had an electricity pole on my land carrying my elect supply and third party phone line that I wanted to have removed, so not relevant to you because it’s not on your land.  What is relevant is that openreach were awful to deal with and due to the poor quality of the line In my rural area would have resulted in me paying a lot of money to have a landline that was next to useless for internet speeds.

 

So I have gone down the route of buying & testing a 4g router with unlimited data SIM card and external antenna at my new build.  I got fantastic speeds on 4g and 5g is coming. Less than £200 for kit and £34 per month for unlimited data. Our mobiles will be on separate networks as we won’t have a landline (in case one network goes down). 

 

Have you considered doing away with landline entirely.  Old technology.  Can go into further details if that’s an option.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[GaryM]

@Bozza Our 4g is pretty good and I could set up a router, however our aged parents still like phoning the landline.  So I rather not get rid of it yet, worst case I will leave the overhead line in.

 

 

 

 

[GaryM]

5 hours ago, joe90 said:

As far as I remember BT are allowed to put phone wires on electricity poles (below power wires) but not the other way around. Just run your Underground cable up to the pole then accidentally break you overhead cable!

I might well do that, I shall have a conversation with the builders.

[Bozza]

12 minutes ago, GaryM said:

@Bozza Our 4g is pretty good and I could set up a router, however our aged parents still like phoning the landline.  So I rather not get rid of it yet, worst case I will leave the overhead line in.

 

 

 

 

Understood. Horses for courses and all that.  Someone once told me that some telephone lines carry some (low) voltage so just make sure you know that before you cut them if that’s your intention.

 

 

[joe90]

11 minutes ago, Bozza said:

Someone once told me that some telephone lines carry some (low) voltage

the most voltage on BT lines is 50volt dc or 80volts ac (ringing). I worked fir years on BT lines, never got a kick. You can’t even short it out as all that will do is trigger dial tone!!!!

Edited August 24, 2020 by joe90

[Bozza]

20 minutes ago, joe90 said:

the most voltage on BT lines is 50volt dc or 80volts ac (ringing). I worked fir years on BT lines, never got a kick. You can’t even short it out as all that will do is trigger dial tone!!!!

So Joe90 is confirming you won’t end up like this guy

 

[Gone West]

1 hour ago, Bozza said:

Someone once told me that some telephone lines carry some (low) voltage so just make sure you know that before you cut them if that’s your intention.

The Openreach engineer that removed my line just cut it with a pair of side cutters and coiled it up on the side of the pole.

 

1 hour ago, GaryM said:

Our 4g is pretty good and I could set up a router, however our aged parents still like phoning the landline.

With our system we use VoIP for our landline telephone.