[damien c]

Originally Posted by 1andrew1

I wonder if someone from VM can enlighten us on why this might be so and if this type of situation will be reconsidered?

After working on quite abit of the "New Build" work, I can say now that whilst it may look like allot of the ducting and chambers are already in place, there could potentially be quite allot of it that isn't connected.

There are a few areas that I worked on where, everything looked like it would be a simple bit of construction work to connect the final leg of the network to bring close to, 3000 homes on to the network but then when I had it investigated more than what I could do myself it turned out that only 10 of those homes, could actually have been connected up and when it was costed up it was just to high a cost.

There are areas that have got pretty much everything in place but there is issues with people, complaining that we want to put a cabinet in a certain place or that the land owner will not allow us to dig through there land, simply because they may not like Virgin or they don't know yet what they want to do with the land and that, if they did let us go through there land and in the future they wanted us to move the ducting, cables and cabinets etc that it would cost them more than they would be willing to pay.

Until I started in the job I am in I never knew it could cost so much to do the work required but, after doing this job for the last 4 years I now understand why they struggle with the cost's because it is expensive.

The last area that I costed up I think was 300 homes and it came in around £15,000 and that is because, we were not doing allot of the digging but just providing the ducts, chambers and tees but if we had to dig the whole lot then that cost could, quite easily have been over £50,000.

Either way VM do want to get to more places but it's not always easy or cheap enough to just dig and lay the ducting etc.


Good interview though.