So, another month on since Openreach failed to honour their appointment and I had an engineer turn up at the very limit of the time window (1300 attendance for an 0800-1300 window). The installation focused on drilling the wall first on the basis that's the part I have to be present for.
After that the engineer went to check the duct path to the CBT. He had no drawings and was speculating on the cable path. I had to point out which way the rope was routed to the first duct. I had learned this from the guys who rodded and roped it all months ago. He couldn't spot how to route between the last duct and the one with the CBT. He mentioned that he had to stop when it got dark (risk to the public of falling into open ducts). I offered to help to try and get the job done. Having seen them, I would agree that the duct placement and pipe orientations are not intuitive, but it seems utterly mental that the engineers are not given schematics, especially since the whole thing was surveyed and rodded and roped only a few months ago.
He decided to request help and another engineer arrived. Between them the two guys decided that there was no connectivity. As the light was fading I suggested they try rodding the only two exits from the duct containing the CBT (a simple logical approach) but one of the guys just overruled saying "listen mate I've been doing this for 30 years". They concluded, with no actual evidence since they didn't even try pulling ropes or rodding, that the road would need digging up and spray painted all over the brick paving in front of several of my neighbours' houses. They left, promising an escalation. They say this paint will wear off but I don't believe it, there's a six month old dotted line across the road that was sprayed under similar circumstances that has only slightly faded. The neighbours were immediately on WhatsApp, understandably concluding it was vandalism.
Next day I was away at work. No contact email nor SMS from Openreach. Another engineer arrived and fortunately my wife was in. It turns out the guys the previous day were wrong and he managed to get the fibre to my house and splice it. He had used the duct path I had asked the guys to try the previous day which they were adamant couldn't be correct. My wife had to leave, and so the engineer left without being able to confirm the ONT registration. The link was up but the ONT device wasn't correctly registered so the PON light was blinking. It should be solid.
On the third day I did get an SMS at about 8am telling me a guy had been assigned to the job. When he arrived he quickly registered the ONT and this allowed the router to connect successfully. However, I took a closer look at the exterior box. The engineer who mounted it had half driven the screws because he hadn't drilled pilot holes into the timber cladding on my house, so the box was wobbling about. I opened it to fix that, and discovered that the fibre was horribly kinked as it entered the box. The engineer present that day agreed it wasn't right and kindly fixed that and re-spliced. I ended up spending a significant part of two of the three days working with the engineers for this when I needed to be focused on my own job.
TLDR; The overall experience with Openreach is pretty awful. Two and a half days to do something which should by now be fairly routine, not to mention the no-show for the first appointment which they blamed on me (with no phone call on the day, nor a photo to prove where they had been, and yet I was in all day). So all told it took 2 months from order to install, with an actual implementation time of 3 days, and the communication to me was virtually non-existent.
My constructive feedback: issue duct schematics to the installers, and improve comms with the customer when repeat visits are scheduled. Only one of my two repeat visits had this.I will not be changing providers in future simply because I cannot run the risk of having to deal with Openreach again. Those risks are the quality of the work, communications issues and resulting confusion, and the cost is a big chunk of my own time, usually during working hours.
Sadly I had a fairly similar Openreach experience when I first got this house (new PSTN line provisioning, and then early FttC adopter), and as a result I had stayed with a single supplier for the last 8 years. For me this latest experience is the continuation of a trend.
Finally though I do now have 500Mb down and 70Mb up thank goodness, though my home seems to have shifted from London to Portsmouth!