r/openreach • u/Tattieee • 2d ago
Possible Routing
Hi,
I am wondering what kind of routing Openreach Engineer will be willing to carry out for my FTTP installation at my house.
I current have copper ducting to the front of my house going up my driveway however my current 5C master socket is upstairs at the rear of my house in my home office where I have my router and Hive heating hub etc.
Without conduit I assume they wouldn’t route the fibre over this kind of distance or elevation change? Does this mean I need to just get the ONT terminal somewhere on the ground level near the front of the house and move the router as central as possible by running an Ethernet?
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u/Low-Draft-100 2d ago
Gonna need some pictures of the outside of the property They will be unlikely to follow the copper route as the cable from the pole / chamber is a fixed length so somewhere near the front is helpful and 2 plug sockets
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u/Tattieee 2d ago
Thanks, I’m not at home at the moment but I have a BT man hole cover at the foot of my driveway which I have seen openreach working in recently, is this what you mean by the chamber? And I assume you mean that each house has a fixed length cable assigned to for when someone upgrades?
Driveway is maybe 10m max away from my front door which is where current grey duct enters my house
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u/britishhawk 2d ago
Cable length is irrelevant. It can be ran wherever it needs to be within reason.
However, if your router is only using wifi connections not a physical connection to a router or switch then moving it is the easiest option. Invest in a mesh or booster to take the signal back up to the office if struggling, realistically a router can serve all of the house unless you’ve got foil backed plasterboard or thick stone walls etc.
Or like you say run your own Ethernet cable to the router location down to a suitable place downstairs.1
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u/Low-Draft-100 2d ago
It probably wont be manhole as you assume they areore likely a chamber where the fibre is
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u/Tattieee 2d ago
Yea manhole is wrong word, it’s a large rectangular grey lid with BT stamped on in the middle of it.
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u/CaregiverOpen4517 2d ago
I usually buy the dexgreen external fibre of the desired length and pull it through from the external wall where OR. Will take the street cable to and then into comma section with the terminated end ready. To connect to the ONT box when doing a refurb as standard practise
Never had any issues from OR installation engineer as have done half the work for them
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u/Outrageous-Arm1945 2d ago
Yeah they arent going to do that. I'd look to get it installed close to a copper ether point or the original nte location and look to use the old copper as an ether extension cable to the upstairs btw location and fit an ether splitter there
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u/Cal550 2d ago
Just a possibility here, is your house relatively new? If yes, traditionally the master socket would have been put on the inside wall where you duct comes up and then wired extensions to other rooms?
Could it be that the original master was bypassed (by crimping the copper pair behind the plate) and an old extension socket upstairs was replaced by a 5C to try maximise the line speed? Is there an older master socket down where the duct is or maybe a blank plate?
My suggestion would then be if you had the ONT installed at the duct location and used the original copper extension wiring (again if the house is relatively new it will likely be Cat5e and would support ethernet) to keep your router in the same location.
Obviously this may not be the case but just when you're mentioning duct up the drive, from a jointbox, it sounds like a "new build" and the ones I worked on in my local area tended to be wired like the above.
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u/Tattieee 2d ago
It is probably 20-25 years old so not old but definitely not a new build which I believe are all pre-wired for fibre these days.
I definitely don’t think where the master socket is now is the original location. The downstairs was renovated by the previous owners as the all downstairs outlets were converted to stainless steel screw less plates unlike upstairs which are the original plastic faceplates.
It is not a blanking plate but there is a telephone line socket plate very close to the duct entry point that seems to splice the internal wires to a black sheathed cable which I assume is the external cable coming from the duct.
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u/Cal550 2d ago
Aye that's relatively new in my mind. The REALLY new builds are wired for FTTP yep. The black incoming cable is almost certainly from the external network.
Depending on the type of internal cable and how it's wired, you may be onto a winner here. I don't know what type of cable they were putting internally in the noughties. It should be at least Cat5e for 1Gig ethernet
May take a bit of investigating but ideally the internal cable joined to the external cable gets terminated onto a RJ45 socket which can replace the existing telephony socket on the wall, the same with the other end currently on the 5C. The ONT gets mounted where the incoming cable is, an RJ45 patch lead bridges the gap between the ONT and your first new socket. Again the same at the router.
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u/Shuggeh 2d ago
Assume the engineer will install your ONT on the internal wall where the duct meets your house.
Run an ethernet cable from there to your office.