I would be interested to hear responses to this too. City fibre have been down our road recently so we have the option of going FTTP. There are a number of ISPs to choose from but our current provider (Plusnet) is not one of them.
A big issue for me is that I’d like a site survey before sign up, to agree how the fibre is going to be routed from the curtilage to the house. This doesn’t seem to be standard practice.
We have had Zen Internet for about a year. They use city fibre as their carrier. We’ve been very satisfied with the service and reliability. we signed up for broadband plus telephone service and I just plugged my existing dect phone base station into the back of the router. We retained our old number. We worried about not having service if we have a power cut but in practice power cuts are so rare and our use of the landline so infrequent, it really doesn’t matter. (it is also possible to buy uninterruptible power supplies for routers on Amazon which obviously would help).
The city fibre network here is on poles with unused fibre connections coiled up at the top of the pole. Installation was in two stages: the first when suddenly the cable became attached to the house whilst we were out! and second when it was taken around the guttering and through the wall into the place where we wanted the router. No survey was done in advance and there was enough spare fibre to reach the router location which was quite a way from the initial connection point.
We're in the CityFibre territory as well Trevor and as far as I can tell if they can get away with using overhead cables (often piggybacked on BT poles) they will, so I dont think you will have a choice. In our road it's all supplied by overhead cables. Some areas locally, eg parts of Canford Cliffs, they have gone underground with all the cabling and I guess they we forced to as it is a conservation area. It then continues underground right to your house. The routing into your house is all discussed when they arrive to do the install ie no site survey but if you are unhappy with what they propose you could always send them away!
The first team that came to us put the equipment in what proved to be an awful location, so I moaned at their head office and, to be fair to them, they quickly came back and did a much better job.
Thanks David. I must admit that I expected an overhead link ( although why then have they placed their connection point at the opposite end of our frontage from ‘our’ pole?!). The email from Zen does though say quite clearly that it will be an underground connection.
When I’m feeling strong enough I might just have to go for it and see what they want to do, being prepared to send them away if need be.
Lionel Ogden 