On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 at 14:23, Tom Hill <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Generally, however, when anyone says 'it's all the fault of many other > individuals', it usually begs the question: "are you sure it isn't just > you?" In fairness, while BT were a bit glacial at this sort of thing (and have recently made strides to improve on this), freeholders and their solicitors really are often just clueless/deluded/slow bastards in equal measure because there's just not enough competition in their line of work to compel them not to be. Even getting a single leased line in to one commercial tenant can be hard enough, much less doing an entire estate, especially if you're going to have to drill/cut holes in communal areas. Many truly think that they can charge whatever they want for wayleaves (one wanted well north of £400 a month for <50 metres of fibre through existing trays in their carpark). Almost as many still don't seem to understand what a wayleave is, but are generally quite certain that it sounds like the sort of thing you should pay them a lot of money for, because of all the billions you are obviously going to make selling the internets and telephones to their tenants, because every internet company is worth a billion dollars now, it says so in the papers. Then you will inevitably get so far in a proposal and someone with a stereotypically adenoidal drone on the RA who has been comatose for the last twelve meetings will wait until the final approval meeting to suddenly go "but what about x from y?" and everyone has to fucking wait another six months to a year to figure out if y is even interested, if x is even feasible, or if y+x can result in "a deal" that satisfies everyone with skin in the game. Ultimately while hyperoptic has now built up some recognition for installing in MDUs, has a simple enough offering that consumers seem to grok, and has figured out for the most part how to satisfy/entice freeholders, managing agents, residents - whoever to get the deals done, and because there's only so many freeholders/managing agents to deal with I'm sure it's useful to be able to point at a list of their other buildings you've completed to (hopefully) everyone's satisfaction - I have absolutely no doubt it's still like pulling fucking teeth for their negotiating/wayleaves team though - it can easily take them 1-2 years from commencement of discussions to actually get into a site despite being "deal flexible".
