Acheivement unlocked! FTTC Über delay - 1 whole year.

It really is getting ridiculous now. The first scheduled date for my cab to get fibred up was 31st Dec 2010. Since then, like clockwork, it has been delayed by 3 months at a time and recently changed from 30th Sep to 31st Dec 2011! There's clearly no real intention to hit these dates, they just keep bumping them with no explanation. The exchange has it and other people in the local area (Leamington Spa) are working fine. In fact, a friend of mine who lives 700m from me has been upgraded for some time now, and he lives further from the town exchange than I do!

What can possibly be going wrong? Is it lack of demand? Planning consent? Something technical? I wouldn't mind so much but my DSL is flaky as hell, last year I had the local copper replaced and it did no good so I'm really hoping to eliminate the run from my local cab to the exchange.

I match your delay sir and raise you 1 month

I know the feeling mate, Basicly there can be a few reasons why its delayed, the most common around here is getting Power, and or blocked ducts for the fibre blows.

I live in hope each day i check that it will start taking orders soon

Maybe BT can deliver as a Christmas present

Maybe we ought to get a trophy sent in for the Openreach bods. In low resolution of course.

Worryingly for me, there's no trace of a planning application for the new cab in the last 2 years. Plenty for other areas near here though. I'm starting to think that living in a conservation area means that my internet bandwidth will be "conserved" as well.

What's strange is that I got hold of a copy of the "PCP to postcode" BT report from April this year which says that my postcode already has FTTC via cab p43!

That file just says the cabinet is "planned" - not that the service is actually ready for service

I've been delayed 18 months overall. My exchange was one of the initial 66 exchanges announced for FTTC way back in 2009. Work was due to be completed in March of 2010 on Northolt and Greenford.... Greenford became enabled in July 0f 2010, but Northolt got deferred by 6 months. Then, like you, we were subject to delay after delay. December 2010, March, June, July, August, September, December, September again and now December 31st.

The only upside is that my exchange went live last month, and there are active cabinets a few hundred meters away. My cabinet has been in since May, and is humming away, but still isn't accepting orders according to BT. I don't know what they're up to, but I have my fingers crossed that I'll be live before December.

Hopefully they'll get their skates on and we'll all be active before December

In conservation areas I suspect OR have a discussion with the officers before putting the application in and in some cases walk the cab positions with the officers. I suspect that during those discussion the officer in charge has indicated planning would be rejected. In that case survey officers need to identify another viable location.