Re: 18 months?
No, it sounds like Openreach spent 18 months doing everything they could think of, including replacing all the existing cabling in the village. Hardly ignoring things, in fact quite an expensive way of ignoring things.
Now, if they could just replace all the rusty old barbed wire fencing that is used to transmit the phone signal in some rural areas with Fibre, then we'd all be happy.
Having said that, I got FTTP in rural Ceredigion a couple of years ago, and I see that I can now upgrade to the 900Mbps service for an extra £10/month on top of my what I'm paying for 300Mbps (which is £50). It's very uneven provision!