Fibre broadband in Honor Oak (Lessing Street)

Hi everyone. I realise previous conversations have been had but I couldn’t find any recent posts about this so thought I’d start a new thread. I moved to Lessing Street in Honor Oak in the summer and, like most of us, am working from home for the foreseeable. I was fairly horrified to see what my broadband options were when I bought my flat - I am with NowTV on their basic broadband package, which was about the best I could get. However, the service is pretty awful, meaning I can’t easily do video calls for work or with friends, uploading content for work takes an insane amount of time, and my connection is often cutting out.

I have had some initial chats with other providers but no one seems to be able to offer anything better.

Has anyone had recent conversations with Sky or Virgin about installing fibre in the area? I didn’t want to start a new chat with them if someone else was already on the case or has been told it’s simply not an option at the moment!

Massive thanks for any insight and advice. Jen

Welcome to the forum!

There’s some discussion in the following topic: Broadband providers Forest Hill

Note @bolgerp reported that Virgin are rolling out fibre and have a postcode checker online. Looks like that was last month - would be interesting to hear if his install and hub upgrade went well and if it has improved the service as there seem to have been quite a few reliability issues over the last months with Virgin…

Welcome to Honor Oak! We also had some trouble with this when we moved here, so the below might help in case you’re in the same situation. We’re in a house split in to two flats, and found using Openreach’s postcode checker that some neighbours (inc downstairs flat) had superfast fibre through BT, whilst others didn’t have anything except standard broadband - you could probably put in some of your neighbour’s addresses to see if this is the same for you. We hassled openreach about this quite a bit as it seemed to be as much about their postcode checker than anything else and eventually they enabled us to have Fibre to the Premises installed, which BT did a month or two later. It’s a bit of hassle but worth it, FTTP is better than most other types connections so you end up with super fast, reliable internet. The customer service address we emailled was this one: Sifibreenquiriesmop@openreach.co.uk but this was a few years back so you may just need to work through the openreach help site. Good luck!

Thanks so much for this. I have registered with the Virgin notification service - my postcode is still marked as nothing available through them, but hopefully they’ll continue to roll out across the surrounding area and reach me soon! I’d take Virgin’s dodgy reliability over it taking me 5 minutes to upload a 2MB file to an email, as it does at the moment!

Thanks so much! This is promising…I’ll give Openreach a call and see what they say. An Openreach engineer came to the flat a few weeks ago to check my line as my connection was so poor (the line was fine…) and pointed out that there is a fibre box on the telegraph pole down the road. I’ve struggled to determine who has installed it but I’ll give Openreach a try in case they can shed some light. Let the pleading commence!

Note that Openreach are the broadband wholesaler who run the infrastructure used by most other broadband providers like BT, Talk Talk, Sky etc… In fact it is only really Virgin and Hyperoptic that don’t use the Openreach infrastructure.

So while Openreach engineers may do fault finding, installs and repairs, you need to phone someone like BT or Sky to ask about their broadband (or use online checkers etc). I think BT have some Black Friday deals about to expire which give 3 months free for new customers.

Hope that helps!

PS: Sorry if you already knew that and just typed Openreach by mistake!

Thanks again! No providers offer anything other than a basic broadband package for my flat at the moment (I contacted EVERYONE when I was planning my move! haha!) but I’ll contact BT again to see what they say too. I’ve dropped Openreach a line to enquire about how their allocations of fibre work too, just in case they can shed some light.

I’ll post an update as and when I have one…

Aside from fixed line broadband, maybe look into one of the 4G MiFi routers and get it over the air until they sort out proper connectivity. I’m not sure 5g is quite here but I often get as good if not better 4G speed than I do broadband. You could try it with one device using your phone as a hotspot. It’s not great for latency but unless you’re playing games online or trying to watch 4k movies it’s not a big deal. Maybe a bit ££ but worth a try?

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I’ve done lots of research today and have a wifi hotspot arriving tomorrow from Vodafone. That’ll hopefully be a massive improvement and keep me going until better broadband options are available in the area.

Huge thanks again everyone…it’s nice to know I’m not alone with my wifi woes!

Research is good! Please update us on how it goes.

Hi everyone, i thought this might be helpful. I’ve been hounding openreach for 6 months and finally managed to speak with someone who was helpful and understanding as i had been given different reasons as to why we couldn’t get fibre whilst our neighbour in the same house could.

Turns out, our flat had just been missed off a list by accident and we should have had fibre at the same time. I knew it was a bureaucratic error because i’ve spoken with a fair few engineers on the road as well (i’m not nuts i promise).

So, worth letting them know this when you speak to them. We’re on Devonshire road. I managed to speak to someone via their chat services online and then via twitter. It was painful but we got there in the end. Fibre being installed next month.