r/openreach

Last month, my broadband suddenly went dead. Turns out, an Openreach engineer went to our local street cabinet, found it was completely full, and instead of sorting out the capacity issue properly, they literally disconnected my active Sky Broadband line and re-assigned it to someone else (classic "pair theft").

Because of the UK's copper "stop sell" (since Openreach is phasing out copper), getting a replacement copper line turned into a bureaucratic nightmare, do I have any hope of getting a new copper line or do I have to wait years for FTTP?

• The engineer admitted that because all the copper pairs were taken, they had to hook me up to an old legacy aluminum line instead.
• Aluminum lines have worse electrical resistance, fewer twists, and degrade over time. Because of this, my line speed has been permanently hard-capped at 40 Mbps, down from my previous 80 Mbps copper line.
• The engineer literally told me that out-of-area contractors pull this stunt all the time because it's the easiest way to close out a job, and Openreach simply doesn't want to invest in fixing the copper network anymore.

The Potential Next Step: Since Openreach won't fix the infrastructure I believe as they won't steal my line back from whoever has it now, I'm considering ditching them entirely and moving over to an EE 5G Home Broadband setup which pulls 150+ Mbps in my area, and leaving Openreach in the dust until full fibre finally reaches my flat. Sadly, I think this is going to be the only resolution as Sky technical support believe Openreach can come again and fix a new line out of nowhere for me.

Oh, to add I live in London SE8 area

Today I have called every fibre company with a presence in my county. Literally none of them will do FTTP On Demand. It's not a case of cost, they simply won't consider doing it. Most support agents answering phones have never heard of it and none of the companies were able to provide it.

For reference, I'm in a rural area, about 25m from the cabinet, no buildings between me and the cabinet. About 25% of properties in the village have FTTP.

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Installation day looms for my FTTP. Let's have the tips and pitfalls please: how does an ordinary domestic customer best navigate the Openreach odyssey as it unfolds? The goal being to have the new setup confirmed as functional before they leave, while ensuring a neat look to it both outside and in.

It's a Plusnet upgrade from existing ADSL, so same provider. Three storey Georgian house that's heritage listed, in a conservation area, and has solid walls about 2ft thick.

Current copper supply comes in adjacent to a metal side window on the middle floor, part of a hallway/landing area, which has power on hand and for wifi coverage still seems preferable. Ladder access externally would be via a flat roof that sits above the front door, which is on that side.

One issue to start: what I don't want is any box mounted on the front of the house or visible at the entrance. Best if it sat at first floor level, where it'd be closest to the router and also wouldn't be seen from the street.

(I'm assuming the fibre feed will be via an aerial span rather than from the ground, as I'm unaware of the street outside having been dug up for any such purpose in recent years.)

How much say do I get in any of this, without aborting the process and incurring a cancellation fee? And what rough proportion of installations succeed on day one in any event?

If there's a Faq or similar pinned somewhere that covers this stuff I'd be happy to be pointed to it!

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.

My MDU became available for FTTP (my whole street have it, and they are all MDUs aswell) and two of us made an order through an ISP. then today I check and the ISP says openreach cancelled the order.

Only a few days ago, a few openreach guys in a van were looking at the building and planning the route for the cables (according to my neighbour who spoke with them).

I can see the current FTTC cable bundle goes up a wall, along a roof gulley between two buildings and down again so I imagine H&S would have a shit fit if the guys clambered over crumbly roof tiles to lay the fibre cable along the same route. But I find it hard to believe there are no other options.

Can openreach really just give up on a building? Any options?

I’m 31 and I’ve worked for Openreach for just shy of 7 years now, starting in late 2019 as part of one of their huge intakes. In that time I’ve had countless different managers, teams & work streams thanks to re-orgs and changes at the top.

I started as a fibre cabler on spines using subduct, blown-fibre, COF600. Then building pons with COF600/ULW/CBT’s. Life was good. We were left alone to crack on working in gangs of 2 with no real stress or pressure while keeping managers happy with our work output. This lasted up until last year Now after an another major re-org last year I’m currently FTTP installing fibre directly to customers’ properties.

It’s okay and I’m good at the job. I get on with pretty much everyone I work with. However the novelty of a new role wore off pretty fast and although each job is slightly different, it’s pretty much all the same and very monotonous with no real job satisfaction anymore.

Because of the constant moving round the business has done I’ve found it hard to progress from advanced engineer into something further, although I’m not even sure I’d fancy the constant phone calls on top of still being on the tools as a Patch Lead for the extra couple of grand a year.

As a lot will probably know early this year they offered redundancies - or as they like to call it ‘VPL’ (Voluntary Paid Leave). With this happening, middle management are having to re-interview for their own roles as they’re now merging copper managers over too due to their work stacks shrinking and their need to cut the workforce is growing. So obviously any progression for engineers is now basically a no-go.

Overall, I feel the company is no longer a safe place to work looking ahead to the future. From speaking to people there’s a lot with the same outlook and people are definitely starting to plan for life after OR.

What suggestions do you have for other roles I could pursue? Or has anyone made a similar switch? If so, what do you do now?

I have asked trusty ChatGPT and it always brings up data cabling centres etc but a lot of roles ask for qualifications/degrees specific to that field. The main struggle will be matching the pay straight off the bat. At the minute my salary with a guaranteed bonus paid each month is just under £40k without any overtime.

Any help is appreciated :).

Hi,

I am wondering what kind of routing Openreach Engineer will be willing to carry out for my FTTP installation at my house.

I current have copper ducting to the front of my house going up my driveway however my current 5C master socket is upstairs at the rear of my house in my home office where I have my router and Hive heating hub etc.

Without conduit I assume they wouldn’t route the fibre over this kind of distance or elevation change? Does this mean I need to just get the ONT terminal somewhere on the ground level near the front of the house and move the router as central as possible by running an Ethernet?

Until recently everyone on my cul-de-sac was mired with 36mbps FTTC, one of the few small areas in my entire town that isn't FTTP, despite being built in 2017. The Openreach fibre checker has been saying "We'll be building in this area in the next year" for well over a year at this point. I believe all cables are run in ducts in the ground. In 2024 some contractors came and pulled fibre cables through these ducts (I asked them what they were doing and this is what they told me).

I noticed an Openreach engineer outside of one of my neighbours houses recently and decided to plug their address into the Openreach FTTP checker only to see that they could order FTTP. Spurred on by this I decided to check all of the houses on the cul-de-sac and found that 5 of the 11 could get FTTP installed now.

The houses go from 1 to 11 clockwise and the strange thing is that it isn't something like 1 to 5 can get it and the others can't. Its just random ones so numbers 2, 3, 7, 10 and 11 can get it. All the houses bar number 3 are semi-detached as well so there are some, including myself, who's attached neighbour can get it.

I emailed Openreach and just got some generic nonsense about building in the area soon. Its incredibly frustrating as when we bought the house a few years ago we were able to order a community fibre who then delayed and delayed until telling us they were no longer going to build in our area.

What on earth could the rationale be for just peppering random houses with FTTP?

Hopefully someone here knows. My existing copper cable is from a telegraph pole outside the building. I'm getting upgraded to fibre in the coming weeks.

I've a two story house, a partially flat roof and an access hole for feeding external cables, it was originally used for coax but I've binned that off and I'm just using it for some external APs I have around the house.

Would there be any issues with asking them to route the cable through there? They'd need a ladder to take the cable up to the roof. The existing box is up there but it takes a spaghetti track through the house and I'd rather the easiest point of access

https://preview.redd.it/4b32bxvi6bjh1.jpg?width=2252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5e90529cd62b822aa062b726199c65de1bd28f17

https://preview.redd.it/91wgzwvi6bjh1.jpg?width=2252&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=118d4ac5acf16eca0911d1ba81e61e1fa466cc78

Now that there's a major push to get fibre installed, what will happen to all the old cables? I'm talking more about copper between poles rather then underground. Will engineers visiting homes just leave them up there or remove them?

Hey all, im just after some advice;

My neighbour had his roof done and the contractors cut the overhead cable.

Ive since been able to get OpenReach out, the engineer was great, installed a new line on the unobscured section of wall. However the now defunct cable is remaining behind the scaffolding.

Problem being this cable is quite long and will be hanging from our front wall, across our front door. With two kids id obviously like this removed. I have a feeling these guys are cowboy builders and will likely run before I can ask them to remove the cable.

Would OpenReach come out for loose cables?

Hi everyone, very keen to hear anyones exerpience on older houses with overhead cable installs?

The house we are buying does not have FTTP and Zen were the only company we spoke to who gave useful and sensible answers. They said we will definitely need openreach to install and it will be overhead cable as that is whats already there. I think the existing cable goes into the roof and down the inside, which presumably openreach would not do?

I have seen there is a virgin cable on the property, so there must be some method to go underground also...

I am worried that OR will just run the cable straight down the front of the house which would be very ugly? Is there anything I can do like prepare a route or will this just annoy the installer?

We had a contractor on behalf of OR come out today, our current copper cable is supplied via a telegraph pole in a field. Engineer said he couldn’t do the job due to not having any blue ladders.

Just seemed a bit odd to send someone out without whats required.