| HN Mirror

Openreach runs fibre to new build properties (it's literally free if you say "I'm a house builder, here's my plan for where these dozen new houses go" they'll turn up and run fibre just the way they'd have run copper cable to make telephones work forty years ago) or, where necessary or when paid to replace copper to old sites, and that would become available as the wholesale product. Last mile service is a natural monopoly, so outside of city centres you'd always expect there to be one provider, Openreach, which is regulated to provide wholesale service.

In a city yeah, it'll make sense for some startup to run a few miles of fibre to deliver Internet just to properties likely to want to pay extra for fast service, and they would own that fibre, but they'll have competitors so there's less threat of problems.

For Openreach there's a web site (and an API) to basically plug in an identifier for a telephone line and get out what wholesale products are available for that location. ISPs could in principle find that you have 300Mbps fibre available, and even though you purchased their cheap 1990s-style ADSL service they decide to pay Openreach to enable fibre, but then they just clamp the data flow to 10Mbps so you're not getting a better service. I don't think that would make any commercial sense, but they could do that if it makes sense to them.

A friend lives not very far from me on a weird little road near the university that just sort of runs down a hill to nowhere. That road isn't "adopted" (it is notionally owned by some of the people who live on it, and local government won't pay to fix it) and it turns out this meant they didn't get FTTC. So they just did a fundraiser to pay Openreach to run FTTP into their road. I was shocked somewhere like that doesn't have modern Internet so I donated a little money.

When the work finishes the residents don't magically get (better) Internet service, but they will have fibre, that'll appear in the API and so then they can buy fast services which they'd previously not be eligible for because the ISP does an API call and sees there's no fibre option.

If you're wealthy you could sidestep all this and pay Openreach to run FTTP specifically to your home, but I'd guess that as well as being expensive (not new Ferrari expensive, but a lot more than a new MacBook) this would put you in some huge queue of weird vanity projects for which Openreach has finite workers available. So maybe they don't dig a trench until 2022.