Re: Did I get this right?
"I think it's fair to say that by the end of this decade every property that can reasonably be connected to an FTTP network will be in a position for the owner to request it should they want it. Those that remain will be the true outliers - crofter's cottages in remote parts of the Yorkshire Dales or Bill and Jane's house that they built half way up Ben Nevis because they liked the views. There might also be a few small communities (hamlets perhaps) who don't have it by then but not many."
And I'm pretty damned sure you think wrong. Remember when the were promises from Openreach that every property would be served by fibre. There were doubters, lots of them. And the doubters were proved right when OR redefined "fibre" and said that included fibre to the cabinet. In other words DSL. You'd be amazed how many properties show as having FTTC available when the cable runs are so long and of such poor quality that the predicted speeds are no better than ADSL. I have a few properties where the "upgrade" to FTTC has resulted in a downgrade in performance.
Then there's my situation where there are two fibre enabled poles within reach of my house but Openreach have actively refused to connect me to either because their checker says FTTP is not available to my address.
Even if you offer to pay whatever it costs to be connected they're not interested. Instead you would need to order an EAD connection which is considerably more expensive than FTTP.
It's a crying shame that the government and Ofcom didn't open this up to tender on an area by area basis. And the way to do that would be to only grant the contract on the basis that every property would be covered. And you then defined the area so that each area includes low hanging fruit (ie densely populated areas that are easy to serve and therefore high profit) and more difficult to serve remote properties. And then you could impose nasty penalties should the job not be finished on time. Instead the whole damned job just got handed to Openreach. So much for this government's championing of a free market economy.