Openreach announce 156 new FTTC locations

Hooray !! - My exchange has appeared on the latest roll-out list.

Wasn't expecting this so soon, as it was only upgraded to ADSL2+
about 6 months ago !

Probably not out of woods yet though, as there is no guarantee
that my particular street will be enabled !

Our exchange got ADSL2+ a week ago, about 5 months *after* FTTC went live.

Umm...I see that since the latest 156 FTTC exchanges have been announced, my exchange (LSEPSM) FTTC date on the BTO website has slipped from Sept 2011 to '2012'

In reply to a post by charles1:

Umm...I see that since the latest 156 FTTC exchanges have been announced, my exchange (LSEPSM) FTTC date on the BTO website has slipped from Sept 2011 to '2012'

Indeed. My own, LWTWI, has slipped again. It was originally scheduled for March 2011, which then became June 2011, then July 2011, and is now 30th September 2011.

Presumably in 3 months it will, also, join yours in the class of 2012.

Seems rather odd announcing new exchanges when they, clearly, are running months behind with the current ones.

Don't panic Mr Mannering! . It really is probably just a holding date.

My cabinet was moved from Dec 2010 to March 2011 then settled at Sept 30th in January.
It was literally driving me bonkers.

It went live today with no notice at all, just suddenly saying available on the checker!

There's a distinct lack of Openreach activity here to give any confidence of that.

Richmond Kew also, I think I may have seen some fibre being pulled but that had its date pushed back again also.

Regardless it makes them look rather foolish announcing new exchanges when unable to complete current ones within 6 months of original schedule - these exchanges were only added to the schedule 9 months before they were supposed to go live.

Agreed there. They definitely haven't been very clever with the information they have been giving out. There has been debate as to whether it has been a ploy to stop people coming towards the end of their contracts from signing new ones, in the hope they will hang on for infinity.

I dont normally do conspiracy theories, but where BT are concerned?

I see the trend of doing rural exchanges in the east midlands continues.

Why they can do greater manchester but no city ones in the east midlands I would like to know.

count the names that end in 'shire.

The three in Scotland are reasonably nice areas. Maybe that's the thing. Places with a bit of cash.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

... it makes them look rather foolish announcing new exchanges when unable to complete current ones within 6 months of original schedule

On the face of it, this is perfectly true - you have to ask why BT are adding new exchanges into the 2011 schedule, when the ones already in there keep being put back.

But you also have to consider that the roll-out has a variety of dependencies - and those could mean that the overall roll-out can move faster, with more exchanges in parallel, even if some of the current ones are seeing delays.

For example, having spare engineers sitting idle in Lancashire isn't going to help get London rolled out faster, so you might as well set them to work in the North-West. Or if the bottleneck is in training engineers, then you have to keeping feeding people in where you can, and have some exchange areas for them to work on as soon as they're ready.

Or perhaps they've learnt that ordering power connections in Birmingham takes 3 months instead of 1 month - so they choose to start some extra exchanges early to take account of this. Maybe they'd choose to install cabinets first, well before they start on the exchange & backhaul.

Perhaps they're anticipating more snow next winter, and need to start lots of exchanges now, doing outdoor work, to give them more indoor work in the winter.

Who knows, but its a complicated project to manage, even if the technology itself is now straightforward. The trick is getting all the people being as effective as they can, no matter what delays the outside world throws in the way.

BUT...

What I like is that they've now separated the list into a "coming soon" and a "bit further away" section. I think they're doing that in response to the frustration they've been causing, and they're trying to respond by being more accurate when they can, and more vague when they can't.