Now that the fibre cables are being strung along the telegraph poles by OpenReach (the wholesale provider), it won’t be long before residents will be approached by the retail service providers about upgrading their broadband.
Recap
Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) connects customers by copper cable to the cabinet in Queen’s Road.
Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) connects customers to the Yeovil exchange by fibre optic cable.
FTTC connections give Bradford Abbas residents a typical download speed of 20Mbps. FTTP broadband products can typically download at much higher bandwidths - typically products are offered from 145Mbps to nearly 1,000Mbps and the connections are very much more reliable.
Questions
A number of residents have either contacted OpenReach or me to ask questions whose answers you may find useful.
- Supposing a customer has an existing FTTC connection and they wish to go to FTTP, will their retail provider treat this as an upgrade or a completely new service … with attendant retail installation charges?
OpenReach answered: I can confirm that the services providers will treat this as an upgrade if there is already a working FTTC service in place at the moment and there shouldn’t be any installation charges raised by the service providers for FTTP connection to be made.
- Many residents applied for a voucher for government funding for the Ultrafast Community Project. Some are reporting that they did not receive further communications either from OpenReach or .gov.uk
Are these residents still eligible? Will they incur additional costs?
OpenReach’s answer is: The voucher team have … advised me that we have reached the maximum capacity of vouchers that are required for this project … .
This does not mean that you cannot participate in the project to upgrade your broadband to FTTP this just means that we have enough funding on the project already so we do not require any further vouchers to cover the cost.