Further update, I had a phone call first thing this morning from a local Netomnia engineer (he's been with them for 3 years - ex Openreach) wanted to pop across and have a look himself today. Apparently when originally planning the network, the designs of existing infrastructure showed a duct route to my property from the main pavement outside. The engineer had a look in my existing entry point (an old joint redifusion/BT box recessed in the wall behind our garage). He could just about feel a duct in the cavity and there was an existing blue draw string but unfortunately the duct was full of the old coax cables feeding the tv system - my house was/is the main distribution point for the street. He tried pulling the existing draw string and then used his rods from my side and the public road side but was blocked. It appears the duct has collapsed on my drive somewhere so cant be used. He was half tempted to cut the old TV cables and use them to pull through but as they had BT on them didn't want to take the risk for obvious reasons. To be fair to him he tried his best to try and get the new fibre in today.
Anyway it looks they will be running a new duct across my from garden now only about 3 m in the grass with a couple of paviors to lift up by the house edge. Once the agreements are in place he said he can get the civil teams there to start the works.
I must admit he was so much better than the subcontractors G Force Telecoms they are using who didn't even try to pull the existing draw wires back in October or didn't even get out of their van yesterday! I also just had an phone call from You Fibres installs manager this evening very apologetic and noting it has been escalated to a higher level within theirs and Netomnia's teams.
I know I still haven't got fibre into the house yet but feel they have at least tried today to use the existing route, so are hopeful for the final bit of the works now. The big difference was see an actual Netomnia engineer rather than one of their subbies!
Lucky you!
So this, coupled with the fact that I now work for an altnet - And my sister recently having trouble getting FTTP installed to her new house has made me realise something, we had dial up in the 90's and very early 2000's - ADSL, ADSL Max, ADSL2/2+, then VDSL - I think we are all forgetting that these technologies all had one thing in common - Copper. We've been able to advance through all these technologies without massive change to the infrastructure between the house and the exchange. In fact, when you consider it, the distance was further out the earlier the technology - dial up meant you were probably calling in to some remote computer further than your local exchange, especially if you were calling a national ISP.
ADSL/Max/2/2+ all to your exchange, VDSL to the street cabinet, to the arguably inevitable point where we need fibre for the "last mile" from the street cabinet to each individual house - this is a humunogous undertaking when you consider we go from 10's of cabinets to thousands of houses in a town that need to get connected.
It's a massive challenge and I think sometimes we lose sight of that.
