Phones Going Fibre

[prpr]

Flanders and Swan predicted the future!

Well, the (Cadent) gas men certainly cameth (and stayed for 4 months, with the road up and temporary traffic lights). Then they cut the gas off in the middle of December for two days, and again later in Jan. (having had 3 weeks of for Xmas/NY). Eventually they cleared off and the Customer Liaison Manager asking for feedback (new to the job she told me, so I told her my thoughts!) said someone would come along and fix the mess they made of the verge by digging it up and dumping all their gear and other crap there. Needless to say, nobody has been. Nor have they sent me the survey they said they would. Now they've sent me another letter saying they are coming back sometime in the next couple of months and need to turn the gas off again.
Oh it all makes work...
The electrician needs to come, once I've found one, as you know already. If he says re-wire then I'll certainly need a painter.
Oh it all makes work...
The glaziers have been already (twice), but there's still more work to do.
Oh it all makes work...
Opensore (or one of their contractors) are coming in a couple of weeks to do the fibre (*). The pole is across the road and the vegetation adjacent is near to the top. I hope they bring their gardening tools. They'll probably just drop the stuff on the aforementioned dried-up muddy verge which the council have attended this morning to cut the barely-grown grass.
Oh it all makes work...
No carpenter so far, and nobody uses nails any more. I've got lots of them.

(*) This is a very good alternative, by David Coleman (or is it David Colemen? Errr, no, not that one...), although slightly dated now:
My Disappointment with BT

 

[EEPhil]

Well, the (Cadent) gas men certainly cameth (and stayed for 4 months, with the road up and temporary traffic lights).

The bu##ers have been up my road and cut off my gas for half a day. Then they blocked an adjacent road for a couple of weeks. Now they've got parts of the A606 Melton Road up. I'm sure someone, and I thought it was gas, had been down the road already. They couldn't organise one in a brewery!
Fortunately, no one has painted over the gas tap - yet.

 

[prpr]

Opensore (or one of their contractors) are coming in a couple of weeks to do the fibre (*).

Turned out to be a Mr Kelly.

The pole is across the road and the vegetation adjacent is near to the top. I hope they bring their gardening tools.

He didn't and had to fight his way through it to get to the business end.
Old copper cable disconnected and mostly slung out of the way but still partially across the road - I tidied that up for him.
He attached the new fibre cable and then, having moved his ladder first, walked it across the road at a quiet moment and straight up to the hook on the house (with no hazard to traffic at all), then in to the loft where the old extension cabling had previously gone.
A lot of it was boarded (with a decent access ladder and fully lit), but not the bit where he needed to get the new cable, so I'd previously screwed a new panel down as a temp work platform.
CSP and ONT then installed next to each other half way along the woodwork and connected up to my pre-installed network cable and power.
Didn't work (no PON light, and LOS was red), so he had to go up the pole again as he hadn't plugged that end in properly but then OK as far as physical link went.
Still didn't work - no connection onward from ISP to the world, but PPPoE session up, so must be something ISP related.
He left at this point, having removed all the nasty old external cabling up/down the side of the house from the old master socket/linebox (in the hall) to the upstairs extension (where the ADSL modem and router was).
A quick call to the ISP and they had seemingly forgotten to configure something. Solved in <5 minutes and all now working after a PPPoE session down/up.

So no nasty cabling visible anywhere, no nasty boxes visible inside or outside anywhere (nor accessible to whatever nefarious types at ground level) and no new holes anywhere.
Contractors love to say no to working in lofts apparently (elfin safety, or something like that), but he couldn't really to this and it would have been considerably harder to do something I didn't want. Overall, that was a winner.

(I was idly playing about with one of those old fortune cookie widget type of things on the PC this morning, as part of looking at fixing something else, and it came up with "Everything will be just tickety-boo today". How apt!)

 

[Owen Smith]

Contractors love to say no to working in lofts apparently (elfin safety, or something like that), but he couldn't really to this and it would have been considerably harder to do something I didn't want. Overall, that was a winner.

You did well, and were lucky. At my parents they simply refused point blank to even look at what we'd prepared in the loft. A standard install is down the outside wall of the house, drill through the wall around mains socket height, and put all the gear on your nicely decorated wall inside next to the mains socket.

For ADSL (now on SOGEA VDSL) we moved all the gear afterwards, threading the OpenReach black cable through the loft and down plastic pipes embedded in the walls, under the floor, and back up through the floor where we wanted the master socket under dad's computer desk. I dread to think what it would take to get fibre done the same way.

 

[Black Hole]

How do they do it when your existing cable is underground and there are no telegraph poles? Not only is it underground, it's under block paving.

A standard install is down the outside wall of the house, drill through the wall around mains socket height, and put all the gear on your nicely decorated wall inside next to the mains socket.

My "supported user" has just gone FTTP, matching that pattern. In her case, that was actually OK.

 

[Black Hole]

The bu##ers have been up my road and cut off my gas for half a day. Then they blocked an adjacent road for a couple of weeks. Now they've got parts of the A606 Melton Road up. I'm sure someone, and I thought it was gas, had been down the road already.

I have the water board cutting me off – not cutting off my water, cutting off my access off the estate to main roads. I have to go all the way around the back on a country lane and come into the other end of the estate, and I've not managed to account for the extra time when leaving to go somewhere. It's been going on for months and is going on for months more.

Coming back, on autopilot, I forget I need to come in a different way and indicate for my usual turn off, then realise and have to rescind the indicator to go on half a mile past a no-right-turn, U-turn at the roundabout, forget I then need to turn left immediately, get up the road, think "bugger", find somewhere to turn, U-turn at the roundabout, miss the left turn again...

In the dead of night I ignore the no-right-turn!

 

[EEPhil]

In the dead of night I ignore the no-right-turn!

Tut-tut!

Unfortunately my hedge is too high* - I can hear some workmen outside setting up barriers etc. No idea what they are doing.
In the last two weeks I've had to put up with six days of someone cutting trees/hedges. Then a week of some clowns digging holes - possible fibre stuff. They've installed to large metal cases as well. That's on a busy junction as well. It's ruddy noisy around here!**

(* My upstairs neighbour grumbled about the hedge being too low and that the previous occupant had cut it down. A check on Google Street View shows that was bull . I don't want to argue with my neighbour, I'd like a quiet life, see **, so I've let it grow. There's an advantage that passing people can't see in - but I can't see what's happening!)

 

[Black Hole]

Tut-tut!

The no-right-turn is there for traffic flow management when there is traffic. It's not unsighted, so not a safety issue, and when there is no other traffic there is nobody to catch me doing it.

 

[Black Hole]

Unfortunately my hedge is too high... My upstairs neighbour grumbled about the hedge being too low

https://www.habitatlandscape.co.uk/how-high-can-a-hedge-be-in-front-garden-uk

Edit: I think there is an error in the above, a paragraph missing the word "not":

Under the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, you do not need planning permission to maintain a hedge up to 2 metres (approximately 6.5 feet) high if it is not in a front garden or along a boundary adjoining a highway (which includes footpaths).

 

[EEPhil]

The no-right-turn is there for traffic flow management when there is traffic. It's not unsighted, so not a safety issue, and when there is no other traffic there is nobody to catch me doing it.

People could argue the same about going through a red-light in the middle of the night when there's no other traffic.

My hedge is probably about 2m. Although I'm at a busy junction the building is at 45 degrees to the road in an area with wide pavements. It isn't blocking any view. The trees opposite that have been cut down (slightly) are blocking views - but so is a bus shelter.