FTTC - when available changes to not available grrr

I live in Oxford but out on the edge (OX3) and am close to the max distance to Central. Back in June FTTC was available by July 31st, then Sept 30th, then Dec 31st. New cabs appeared all over Oxford but not where I live (Marston village) and guess what? FTTC is not even available anymore!! Why is FTTC being rolled out to those who already have heaps of bandwidth but those that need the technology are stuck with 2Mbps and lines dropping. BT doesn't seem to give a damn and as far as I can see there is nothing more that can be done other than wait for the next big leap when somehow the have nots get the older system. I work from home and it is a real limit these days. Even more frustrating is that I watched Openreach bond fibre near the cab years ago but that was to feed a Vodafone mast out near the Ring Rd. so it is there in the road just not being hooked up to a FTTC cab.

Neil L

Because it is BT's money to spend as it sees fit, not how we would like. The only influence would be if you held millions of pounds of shares.

BTW fibre is all over the place, but it is rare to share the same fibre for things like masts and FTTC/P, because of issues of where it goes, e.g. the fibre to the mast may be point to point, i.e. not go to the exchange, and even if it did would not neatly fit into the FTTC product plan, and Vodafone are probably paying enough money to dedicate it to themselves.

Look at Metro Ethernet, it should be available in and around Oxford and can provide fibre, but at dedicated pricing.

There are delays... which are inevitable with there kind of works.

Parts of Headington went live in September (the general activation date), some cabinets have just come on line (earlier this month for me Mum).

My cabinet (Sandford on Thames connected to Cowley) has been pushed back to 31 March, cabinet went in last month.

The engineers are busy, you can see them in squatted in front of cabs most days.

Remember, FTTC/P works have only been going 2 and a bit years... rest of Europe has been going at it since early 2000s. Hence why we're so behind.

Part of the answer is economics - BT have to use their money to roll out FTTC, and have to choose the installations based on some idea of future income.

Unlike the initial rollout of ADSL, they do now have some idea of just how many people there are using DSL in a particular exchange & cabinet, and how much bandwidth is being used, so they probably can make some reasonable predictions - even if they are not perfect.

The problem for you, and for many rural areas, is that the real factor that determines conversion is population density. Followed by the wealth of that population. The factors that give a village slow ADSL speeds are the same factors that make it uneconomic to give it FTTC.

Once the economic factor is taken care of, the other thing affecting the rollout is time. BT's original plan meant a 6 year timescale - to get to cover 66% of the country. It just isn't possible to convert everywhere at the same time. The engineers need to be trained (and not just the cabinet installation engineers), and then they need to be in the right place at the right time.

That means us, as Joe Public, can't tell if the thing holding up our particular location is economics, or merely the planning sequence.

BTW - BT have announced that their checker went haywire last week, and both lost lots of fibre availability dates *and* wrongly made fibre available for order for some people. You might want to check again.

Linky plinky to that little snippet would be handy

It was contained as a quote "of BT" on a Plusnet forum, by a Plusnet employee, in a thread discussing the same kind of issue. Here's the quote in question.

HeHe!

Ignoring the multiple typos, I can't even think at the moment what word was intended here.

the necessary mitigation has been put in place

"measures have" perhaps? But there is the right word lurking somewhere at the back of my mind .

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 20-Dec-11 23:49:09)

"Mitigation" could be right here. If what they mean is "we can't stop the cock-up happening again, but when it does happen we've put in place some other measures that mean the cock-up won't take quite so much work to undo".

It could, for example, just mean that they take more regular backups, so that they can "unwind" a shoddy DB-update to a better position.

BT made some improvements a few month back switching in ADSL2 for our neck of the woods and we saw more than a doubling in speed (1.5 - 4, we're just outside Oxford's ringroad ~3km from the exchange as the crow flies). They may have made some other tweaks, as it was more than i expected... although I complained (a lot by phone and in writing) when we completely lost our connection during the upgrade, which required engineer visit to the exchange. The quality of the service improved drastically afterwards, as did attenuation.

So whilst a little annoying, the speed increase means things are bearable whilst we wait.

Just been spamming a variety of postcodes on BTs checker and all the FTTC cabs i've tried so far are showing 31-MAR-2012, including the ones in the city.

Edited by TheManStan (Wed 21-Dec-11 16:18:14)