u/Grand_Delivery_9682

I moved into my new flat on 5 August. It’s a newly created/converted flat, and I’ve never rented somewhere where I had to arrange the broadband completely by myself before, so I’m honestly a complete beginner with all of this.

Before moving in, I asked my landlord whether there was an Openreach box/socket in the flat after AI suggested I check. He told me there wasn’t one. At the time, I didn’t realise how important that might be. I thought I could simply choose an internet provider, place an order, get a router and have WiFi.
Apparently not.

The first problem was that because the flat has a new address, most of the major broadband providers couldn’t even find it in their systems.
My landlord and I then spent ages contacting the council and Royal Mail trying to get the address recognised properly. Eventually, after about a week of waiting and chasing, the council basically told us that they had done everything they could do and didn’t know what else they could do.

So I went back to trying broadband providers.
I tried Virgin Media first. The customer service experience was awful. The person I spoke to seemed very dismissive and somehow placed the order against the WRONG address. Then they wouldn’t simply cancel it for me.

I had to call them repeatedly over the next two or three days just to get this incorrect order cancelled.
Eventually that was finally sorted, but I was still stuck with the original problem.

Later, some broadband providers finally started recognising my actual flat address, but then I discovered that they could only offer relatively slow broadband there and not Full Fibre.

What makes this even more confusing is that the original/main address of the building appears to have Full Fibre available.

So I tried ordering broadband using that original address.

Then I received a call saying they couldn’t provide my new service because there was apparently already a BUSINESS broadband service using that address.

I asked my landlord about it and he told me there is no business broadband being used there.

At this point I genuinely had no idea what was going on.

So the broadband provider changed the order back to my actual new flat address. They have now raised a case with Openreach because the situation seems contradictory: the original building address apparently has Full Fibre, my newly created flat address doesn’t, and there isn’t even an Openreach socket/ONT inside my flat.

Now I’m waiting for Openreach to investigate.
I don’t know whether they need to correct the address records, connect my flat to the existing fibre infrastructure, send an engineer, install a new ONT, drill through the wall, or something else entirely.

And that’s where I am now.
It’s been almost 20 days since I started dealing with this.

I just wanted internet.

I genuinely don’t understand why getting WiFi in one flat has required me to speak to my landlord, the council, Royal Mail, Virgin Media, another broadband provider and now Openreach.

I’m doing a PhD and I really need a reliable internet connection at home, and I’m honestly exhausted from constantly calling different people, waiting on hold, being told different things and never knowing what is actually happening.

Has anyone else had something like this happen with a newly created/converted flat?
Does anyone know what Openreach normally does in a situation like this, where the parent/original address has Full Fibre but the new flat address doesn’t, and there is no Openreach socket or ONT inside the flat?

At this point I would genuinely just like to understand what I’m supposed to do next. I just want internet in my flat.