With a little help from their friend

My friend wants to get FTTC. BT availability checker states not available, but I just had a chat session with BT and they say his area is being upgraded and to wait. I want to know which cabinet he is connected to.

His address is [removed[. He is connected to Drommore exchange. I have checked nibroadband.com and found 12 cabinets for his exchange. All but 2 of them have been enabled. Though the last two that are enabled are quite far from him so I doubt he is connected to those.

Now I believe I have a good idea which cabinet he is connected to, the one closest to him. It is about 2 miles from his property. Where does he go to order FTTC if say he only gets 5meg from the cabinet. At the moment he gets 1meg from ADSL.

Edited by MrSaffron (Fri 18-Nov-11 23:24:06)

I think Plus net take orders down to 5meg...try their website. Your friend will prob get much more than 5 meg anyways. The estimate on my folks line was 11.9 and they now get about 37 its way off!

BT do BT total broadband option 3 with fibre which is down to 5mbps or they used to.

Cabinet 8 serves all of that post code.

I advise removing the actual address. These forums get scanned by google.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 18-Nov-11 18:33:58)

Not according to my records updated in September. Looks like this postcode is split between 3 cabs, and 2 exchange areas making it even more difficult to work out...

40% are on cab 8 on NIDO
40% are on cab 31 on NIBB
20% are on cab 23 on NIBB

but all 3 have been enabled so that shouldn't be a problem either way - possibly an database issue on wholesale/openreach's side...

James

Edited by deleted (Fri 18-Nov-11 21:15:22)

That's bad !!!

I can understand the schedule changing in five months, but not the April one having cabinet >> postcode mapping so wrong.

Is it possible there has been lots of re-jigging between the cabs, because of, or, more so since been "enabled" for fttc?

Removed the address just in case someone does something nasty

Never heard it suggested, and I doubt it. More likely the original data the spreadsheet was created from was just wrong. It would be a major D-side rewiring/re-routing job.

Just rang BT there. They say nothing is available, but that work at the exchange is being carried out on the 31st of Janurary. They said they couldnt tell which cabinet he is connected to.

Would it even say on BT system if he is connected to a FTTC cabinet? Or does that only show if he can get above the 5meg speed?

One thing I did find out from BT is that he is connected to Dromore exchange. And I do believe its cabinet 8 as that is closest to him. Surely he can get FTTC from that cabinet if you look on the map its around 2 miles away.

So who do I turn to now if computer says no?

The datr of the 31st January seems to be the date BT are planning to upgrade the exchange to 21CN, so nothing to do with FTTC is that is the case.

Thanks

James

Maybe his cabinet is to be fed from the exchange and the ones that are enabled are not?

In reply to a post by Hellish:

It is about 2 miles from his property. Where does he go to order FTTC if say he only gets 5meg from the cabinet. At the moment he gets 1meg from ADSL.

Does the predictor (on the BT site, or any other ISP site) actually specify a 5Mbps value, or was this a guess on your part?

The key thing here is that VDSL2 isn't going to offer anything over a 2 mile connection. Over that distance, performace would drop back to ADSL2+ performance (so perhaps 10-12Mbps) or ADSL performance (so 7-8Mbps).

Of course, that is still better than running ADSL all the way back to the exchange, and then getting 1Mbps. However, I don't think we've yet seen BT/Openreach allow the cabinets to drop back into ADSL mode, no matter which ISP actually orders the service.

In reply to a post by Hellish:

Where does he go to order FTTC if say he only gets 5meg from the cabinet. At the moment he gets 1meg from ADSL.

There may be others now, but:-
http://www.robertos.me.uk/html/isps_offering_fttc.html