Full fibre up telegraph pole. How many connections from one point?

[jimseng]

hello. BT say there is no full fibre for my new build, except they installed fibre along the telegraph poles 3 years ago. Before I shout at them I want to ask if this connection point (pictured), which is next to my house can service more than 2 properties (which are already on full fibre). Is it a case of "computer says no" or is this connection point only capable of supplying two properties? I would be very surprised if that is the case but there are only two "round things" next to the vertical box. Does anybody know what goes on inside that thing?

(I posted this in boffin corner but I think this might be a better place for this post)

[jack]

35 minutes ago, jimseng said:

(I posted this in boffin corner but I think this might be a better place for this post)

 

I've hidden the Boffin's Corner one to avoid opening two discussions.

[elite]

I would guess at 4 or 8, more in a densley populated area

 

If you can get a clearer shot of the connections on the bottom you might be able to get a better idea

 

That said even if there is capacity at the pole, there might not be upstream

 

Good luck with BT / Openreach - very frustrating to deal with

[jimseng]

So there are 3 cables coming down the pole. 2 black flat ones and a round one with a yellow stripe. Does this picture make any more sense? This is a very rural area with only 5 houses along a 1 mile stretch. My step father's connection on the next pole along is up to 900mb so it would suggest there is bandwidth. I'm trying to establish if they simply counted the number of houses by each pole and allowed for that or whether they allowed for expansion. 
Do they run 1 fibre cable per house up to the pole or is all the data carried on 1 fibre channel up to the black box on the pole and distributed out from there?
I'm trying to find out if it is worth pursuing because no service provider is going to do anything other than say what's on the screen in front of them.

[Bancroft]

I'm not sure if it's readily apparent how many spare connections might be available - even the Openreach guy who came to survey our site couldn't be sure. 

 

Not sure if it helps in your situation but here's what's happening with us:

 

Although we already have fibre to the site, we want an additional fibre connection.  I went through the living hell which is Openreach's online system and Indian call centre.

 

Once I finally managed to register they came back to me and without any visits or other details, sent me a bill for £12k + vat.

 

Once I'd returned from my quick circuit around the solar system, I called them and said I wasn't going to sign up for a £12k bill with no details, and that I wanted to speak with a field engineer and have them visit.

 

After another round of inconclusive phone calls they finally explained that I could only have a field engineer allocated once I'd accepted their quote.  The key thing to know - after accepting their quote you have 30 days to pay it.  if you don't pay it then they cancel the whole process and you need to start again.  That's your get out clause.  (Stupid way to do it but we are dealing with Openreach/BT here, remember?)

 

However, by accepting the quote you now have a field engineer you can talk to and who can visit the site. 

 

Mine was in touch within days and on site 2 days later (and couldn't have been more helpful).  He agreed the whole system was stupid and has now gone in to bat on our behalf saying the £12k bill is stupid too.

 

Still waiting for the final outcome but I have a lot more confidence in a positive outcome now that I'm actually speaking to someone who knows what they're doing.

[IanR]

1 hour ago, jimseng said:

So there are 3 cables coming down the pole. 2 black flat ones and a round one with a yellow stripe. Does this picture make any more sense? This is a very rural area with only 5 houses along a 1 mile stretch. My step father's connection on the next pole along is up to 900mb so it would suggest there is bandwidth. I'm trying to establish if they simply counted the number of houses by each pole and allowed for that or whether they allowed for expansion. 
Do they run 1 fibre cable per house up to the pole or is all the data carried on 1 fibre channel up to the black box on the pole and distributed out from there?
I'm trying to find out if it is worth pursuing because no service provider is going to do anything other than say what's on the screen in front of them.

My understanding is that is an splice CBT enclosure that should be able to take at least 12 connections (3 are used already). The double cable is probably the network feed loop coming from and going back to the overhead public cable. The yellow stripe cable is a single private connection to a building.

It does mean it's more work for OpenReach to add an additional connection (since it is a splice enclosure, not pre-terminated), but should have capacity to add additional connections.

[jimseng]

OK. So this seems worth further pushing. If anybody has any tips on how to poke a hole in the BT/Openreach brick wall I am all ears. In the past I have found that the only way to get anywhere with BT is to write to the chairman with a complaint. Perhaps I will try that tactic first.

[BotusBuild]

Apply online for EE to supply you with fibre broadband. They seem to have a better "way in" to Openreach, maybe something to do with the historical BT(EE) / Openreach relationship, that seems to loosen the red tape.

 

My advice is do not engage with OR directly.

[jimseng]

1 hour ago, BotusBuild said:

My advice is do not engage with OR directly

Uh oh. I'm already down the rabbit hole. I'll try EE, in fact I'm like a dog with a bone so they will eventually have to capitulate.

[ProDave]

I have a very low opinion of the way full fibre is being rolled out.

 

For years, we only had copper ADSL.  I kept hoping OR would at least fit a fibre cabinet at the top of our road and give us all FTTC with copper just for the last bit.  No not interested.

 

Our saviour is a local wireless company now serving us, but it is a niche product only available in a particular area.

 

Just recently, Highland Broadband have been digging up our roads and verges laying fibre to every property.  Having seen their work I think it is abysmal, the fibre cables are imho buried way too shallow in the verges and under the road and not even in any conduit.  The first utility that needs to dig anywhere near them will likely sever them.

 

And as above they have only laid fibres to the existing houses.  No sign of any spare fibres to allow new builds.  And worse still there is a physically completed house but not finished internally so not signed of and no street address issued, and that has not been provided with a fibre to connect to.  So if he ever wants fibre broadband he will likely not be able to or face a ridiculous cost that could have been avoided with a little thought from the people building the network.

[jack]

7 hours ago, ProDave said:

and not even in any conduit.  The first utility that needs to dig anywhere near them will likely sever them.

 

FFS, that's ridiculous.

[ProDave]

2 hours ago, jack said:

 

FFS, that's ridiculous.

I really think the company is harvesting grant money to do a s**t install, knowing probably nobody will ever want to connect to it now we have a decent company supplying a wireless service so it is unlikely any of these fibres will be made live and tested.

[JohnMo]

The government knows how to setup schemes, that promote tax payers money being wasted.

 

If you have a 4G do that, with an external aerial, if needed, job done.

[Owain1602]

@jimseng

Are you dealing with BT or OpenReach? 

I’ve had a great experience dealing with OpenReach so far, for a new fibre connection in a rural area.
Virgin quoted £100k, as their closest network was 16 miles away. OpenReach quoted £3k. Our area is not on any of the official development maps, so no plan to roll out fibre to the area within the next 5 years. I put in an application for a new connection, expecting it to be ridiculous. Luckily, the water pumping station that’s half a mile away has a massive fibre connection, which OpenReach can tap in to for our house. 
 

I need to trench and install junction boxes every 60m down our 250m driveway, but they are supplying all the ducting and boxes within the £3k. 

[ProDave]

I recall in the early days it the internet, the dial up days, there were things called DACS boxes that split one telephone line to serve 2 properties.  It limited the dial up speed to 33K rather than 56K

 

I wonder after this initial fibre rollout, if they will introduce a similar fibre splitter?  it would potentially halve the speed to the 2 properties but I doubt many people would notice if they could only get 500MB rather than 1 GB.

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

it would potentially halve the speed to the 2 properties but I doubt many people would notice if they could only get 500MB rather than 1 GB

I think the max theoretical speed of a domestic fibre is probably limitless but exploiting all the light bands tera byte speeds would be easy. The limits are imposed by what is on the end of the fibre. So splitting is not a problem but it would result in active hardware being out in the field and that's a problem of power although PV and batteries might solve that one for remote locations. 

[MikeSharp01]

PS Just found a piece of research that shows a group at UCL pushing a domestic fibre to 450million times the domestic speed.

[MikeSharp01]

PPS that was published on the first of April which may or may not be significant 🤔 

[MikeSharp01]

PPPS

 

Nope that looks like a PR error with the date - they published the news on 1st April - not a good look but the research was presented in March so 450 million times stands!

[MikeSharp01]

Cricky there is more - a group in Japan build a .125mm glass fibre with 8 cores enclosed in its diameter they managed to crack the Peta bits per second barrier.

[ProDave]

Our equipment has just been upgraded by the provider so we now get 100mbps compared to 50mbps before.

 

The higher speed is free for a year but after that an extra £5 per month, or you can revert to 50mbps to keep the same price.

 

for normal browsing of streaming tv etc I really can't see any difference.  the only time it might make a difference is if you have a big download to do.

 

i suspect at the end of the year we will revert to 50mbps.  Both are far better than the max 3mbps and unreliable connection with frequent drop puts with ADSL.

[MikeSharp01]

1 minute ago, ProDave said:

the only time it might make a difference is if you have a big download to do.

The download speed is often throttled by the server supplying the data so it can serve many clients at once and not your network speed.

[jimseng]

So just to jump back on this thread. I read on line that the fibre is passively split (passive optical split) in the box up the pole so contention can be an issue but since I am the youngest in this area, and I am eligible for free prescriptions, I don't think it is an issue given that the fastest speed available for this area is 1600Mbps. But as it turns out I rang BT and spoke to a different call centre person who conceded that it was odd that my address was the only one without a fibre connection so he spoke to someone and came back and filled in a form to have the situation reviewed. It just takes speaking to someone who is prepared to think slightly rather than read from a script. So I await their response. I have also joined the Openreach developer portal but I think that might be a rather complicated and cumbersome route, with risks for such a simple change in a database column. (i.e. the column with the header "FullFibreAvailable" simply needs to be changed from False to True).

It's so frustrating that there is no way of communicating that the reason is simply that the house didn't exist when they set up the infrastructure and there is no link between the Royal Mail's database where my address is registered and the Openreach system. I am a persistent fellow though. There is practically no 4G here, nor gas or sewage. It is in the sticks so it is a miracle that my stepfather was able to get fibre as the ADSL line was 2Mbps on a good day.

[awk]

Yes, the mono-mode physical fibre cable standard has been around since the 1980s when the computer industry started using it. Today’s cables are better at minimum bend radius, etc, but are still the same basic 9 micron cable - G.652

 

as @MikeSharp01 says, it’s what you put at either end which changes - emitters and receivers - and not the physical cable.

 

people always confuse speed with bandwidth - throughput (xx mbs) is basically speed x bandwidth.

 

you can’t improve (much) on the speed of light, but bandwidth technology goes on leaps and bounds with little end in sight !