Fibre To The Property

[Sum1Ls]

My blood pressure rose as I read this account. I’m surprised you’re still here not having exploded with rage. The incompetence and appalling management of private companies and utilities is almost unbelievable.

I hope you are all planning a champagne party when it’s finally resolved. In 2030.

[Daisy]

Sum1, after 8 years of delays and setbacks, nothing surprises me any more.

Apparently when a utility company digs a hole in a road or pavement they have to get a permit from the Council for that area. There is a huge amount of red tape, some of which relates to sensible signage and guards round the hole etc, but it seems no other agency or utility can operate on that site without a whole load more red tape. One neighbour has been connected since the hole debacle and his connection is working, so we hope that means the actual fibre cable is undamaged.

The FTTP installation is being funded by a now defunct Government initiative to enable rural areas to access the broadband facilities most people take for granted. It's further complicated by the fact that we live in a National Park and are subject to all sorts of restrictions designed to protect the environment. However, our particular road is like a horseshoe shape, it's not on open Forest land - we have cattle grids at each end so livestock don't graze here. But the BT cabinets are on open Forest at the end of the road, and even to cross 2 or 3 feet of pathway requires all the various environmental quangos' and agencies' permission. So in some ways, it's a wonder we've got as far as we have.

When the main ring of cabling had been laid under the pavements individual householders had to do a deal with the broadband provider of their choice for ultra fast BB with a minimum of a 12 month contract. This was laid down at the outset as a condition of the cable being laid. Fair enough, we're only too pleased to get UF broad band. But the providers didn't all pick the information up and open our area for the fast service - which restricted the choice of providers.

I was talking to one of the OP workmen last week and he was saying he's never been involved in such a huge, long job before.

In contrast - the Government focus is now on providing ultra fast BB to urban areas which have not so far been well provided for. This included my DS1's road, in a Berkshire town. DS1 volunteered to be the co-ordinator, as he's tech savvy and had the time. The only complication was that their road (which is adopted) is accessed through a private road. So he had to get the agreement of all the home-owners in that road for the cable to be laid. They could be connected at the same time. One owner was living abroad and he took a bit of tracking down, but otherwise it was quite painless. The private company who had agreed to be the provider came along, did their surveys and within a couple of months it was all installed up and running!

Please all keep your fingers crossed for us on 7 March when we are due to be connected!

[Gemini]

Fingers crossed!!!!

[Oma]

Oh my giddy aunt, I would need to have a long lie down in a darkened room .
Its all unnecessary Red tape , the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Plus no common sense.
I have everything crossed for you even my eyes 😁🤪

[Daisy]

Thank you Oma. I'm almost allowing myself to get excited!

[Plantaholic]

I AM GETTING EXCITED TOO DAISY.

Like you we have waited nearly two years to be connected, the rest of the road are connected but bringing it up the track was holding things up. A man turned up about a year ago to dig but nobody turned up to tell him where to dig and we haven’t heard anything since then today two men in hi viz jackets arrived to dig up the track, no warning, so we had to move cars. We already have quite a good connection so have not been as inconvenienced as you Daisy but that connection will go so we had no choice in being connected or not.

[Daisy]

Plant, I'm excited for you as well! We won't know ourselves with new high speed internet. I do hope you have a smoother ride to being connected than we've had. I've just run a speed check and we've currently got 25.75 download and 4.27 upload, which is very good for us. Often we get less than 20 download and less than 1 upload.

[Lizzie48]

Daisy, my test says download 70.1 (6png) and upload is 78.9 (2png) whatever that all means.

[Daisy]

Lizzie, those speeds are fine, although usually download is faster than upload. Download speed means how many bits per second (ie how fast) information is downloaded from the internet/streaming platform etc to your computer or other device. Upload is the speed when you are sending something to the internet, eg loading photos on to FaceBook. Png (called ping) is the time it takes in milliseconds for your computer to 'connect' to the internet. My Png this morning was 15.

If you want to say, stream a film, and your connection is too slow you will get 'buffering' meaning that the picture freezes and you get that annoying little circle spinning round.

[Plantaholic]

I must go out and look to see if they have finished digging up the track so I can get my car out.

[Daisy]

When they were digging up our estate they put ramps over the tranches so people could get in and out of their drives. Hope you can get out ok.

[Daisy]

I said on another thread I was going to moan! Here we go - please don't feel you have to read what follows, but I need to let off steam, big time.

Yesterday morning we were all ready for our Big Connect Day. The OR engineer arrived, nice and smiley and we said "have you got the new router?". Smile vanished. "No, you should have had it in the post".

It seems when the installation date was brought forward the vital internal message at BT wasn't - they should have arranged for the modem and other equipment to be delivered a couple of days before. This would be bad enough but OH had actually phoned BT to check that the delivery had been re-arranged. They said, don't worry it will be there, but if it isn't the engineer will bring it with him.

We decided the engineer could go ahead and install the connection into the house and we rang BT to find out what had happened to our router. Lots of apologies, but they had no idea, couldn't get us one there and then - and they would try and courier one out today. "Don't worry about having an engineer", they said. "You only have to just plug it in." It's not quite that simple, devices need to be set up, it should all be tested, new digital phones installed, our number ported over, and, and, and ... By this time both OH and I were out of patience!

Anyway, we've now got the connection into the house but can't use it. So far no message from the courier to say it will be delivered today either!

We've still got the copper/aluminium connection. "Grrrr" doesn't really express my feelings at this stage.

So I decided to sort out some admin jobs sitting on my desk. The first one was a refund from the supermarket which they hadn't given me. Literally after an hour-long and incredibly frustrating conversation with an 'agent' who couldn't speak understandable English and couldn't do simple maths I gave up. I did resort to putting a comment on their FB page, which when I last looked was awaiting moderation!

Next job was to set up a password for me for a new joint account OH and I had opened. The usual thing - 8-20 characters, including upper and lower case, at least one extra character and one number. No problem. My first attempt was scored "fair", so I changed it and scored "good". But apparently not good enough as the password failed some other test I wasn't aware of. I eventually found the well-hidden list of extra characters that were acceptable. Mine weren't!!

Then, being a glutton for punishment, I made a phone call for OH to check on another refund, only to be told that it was only 6 days since the parcel had been returned and it took 7-14 days for refunds to be made! The irony was that we had cancelled this item a good 2 weeks before it was delivered.

I was truly fed up with the world in general and big, anonymous businesses in particular. So I decided to take Eva for a good, long walk in the Forest. She would be happy, I'd walk my bad temper off and enjoy the peace of walking among lovely old trees. It was quiet, so I let Eva off lead and she had a good sniff round without any distractions. She kept coming back for treats and really enjoyed herself. I could feel myself relaxing and getting things back into perspective. Bliss.

We stopped to chat to a lovely couple with two beautiful lab/retriever crosses, litter mates. Eva was back on the lead by then. We walked a bit further up the path, almost to open Forest with no trees, when I heard a noise. There was a stampede of ponies heading past us about 50 yards ahead. Luckily we were slightly shielded by bushes and they thundered past safely. It's always spectacular but a bit scary to be in the path of a stampede, but Eva was great. She glanced at the pounding hooves and flying manes and carried on sniffing with her nose to the ground. I waited about 5 minutes in case of stragglers and carried on towards home. I'd just got to a very exposed area when another herd of stampeding ponies came up behind us. We took cover behind a large oak tree and Eva sat patiently while the ground shook as they passed by.

We've lived here nearly 40 years and I've seen stampedes occasionally, but never 2 in one day! It summed the day up, in a way!

[Plantaholic]

Daisy, I can see the steam from here. I can understand you needing a walk but not so exciting.

[Daisy]

Thank you Plant! You're right, I didn't need extra excitement yesterday!

[Gemini]

Oh when will this all get sorted for you Daisy!!??

What a day

I feel your frustration!!