I’m still waiting for YouFibre/Netomnia to get their fibre network two streets further - i.e. to the street with my house on it - but meanwhile, I have the chance to live out my FTTP dreams vicariously via a relative. They live in a town served by an “FTTP priority” exchange, and their street has had FTTP available for about 18 months. The street in question was built in the early 1990s and each house has an underground phone line which is run through a duct, so in theory, it’s not that hard to pull the fibre the last few metres from the street man-holes to where it needs to be.

The main reason this order wasn’t placed 18 months ago is that, at that point, none of the ISPs offering fibre service via the BT/OpenReach infrastructure were offering to port the phone number from the old copper service onto VoIP.

Which is a problem if you want to keep the phone number you’ve had for longer than I’ve been alive.

Thankfully, one more 18 month VDSL contract later, this has all been sorted out.

We ended up picking Zen Internet, not the cheapest, but pretty reasonably priced (especially the “digital voice” option, compared to the outrageous rates some ISPs are charging by the minute for phone calls). And crucially, they have good customer service and a good reputation.

The order was placed just before Christmas, and sadly I didn’t get to witness it being delivered before I had to get back to reality after the break.

However, the latest update is - order placed, December 22nd; OpenReach pulled the fibre through the duct (no major problems, took 90 minutes) and installed the outside box on 3 January … and the second appointment to install the ONT and make it all live is on 22 January.

In retrospect, we should have placed the order a month before the end of the previous contract given the lead times involved, but hopefully part two goes smoothly when it comes around.

(Side note - this relative wasn’t able to answer the door to the BT guys the first time round as their Ring doorbell didn’t work with the internet cut off. A reason to prefer products like my Eufy doorbell where the ringer still works even if the network is down. I assume the copper line was briefly disconnected in order to attach a tone tracer at the house end to aid locating the line in the street distribution point.)