Lifespan of Openreach FTTC installs may be 20 years

That's the title of this news article.

I'm certainly prepared to believe it.

A 20 year lifecycle for the cabinets themselves (not necessarily the electronics within) suggests that we should consider that the next rollout of the subsequent technology will take place in around 10-15 years. That'll leave around 5 years for migration from the FTTC-based products onto whatever-it-is.

I was going to respond by saying that in 20 years, a cabinet of similar size should be able to house all the storage and computing needs of the 288 households served by the current ones. However, that would be daft because a) you wouldn't want to store all your precious pictures and movies in a roadside box (no matter how weatherproof) and b) May's law [1] will apply, as ever.

From what I've read in threads here - and RobertoS' pictures [2] - it seems that a couple of vendors' equipment (Huawei and ECI) is used in the cabinets. Are the cabinets tied to these vendors? I would have expected to see some kind of standardisation of frames for anything that has to last that long.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_sci...
[2] http://www.robertos.me.uk/html/street_cabinets_etc.html

In reply to a post by DLS:

and b) May's law [1] will apply, as ever.

LOL. I'd not seen that before, but oh so true.

Are the cabinets tied to these vendors? I would have expected to see some kind of standardisation of frames for anything that has to last that long.

All different.

But that is no different from all the other kinds of street furniture, such as traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, or mobile phone transceivers. Every manufacturer has their own design of box.

I think I woud rephrase May's law as:

Software coder's laziness doubles every 18 months compensating Moore's law.

In reply to a post by wirelesspacman:

Software coder's laziness doubles every 18 months compensating Moore's law.

As a software engineer, I might object to that a little

Forgetting Windows (which gobbles far more power than this at each iteration), I can say that increased computing power lets you use language features that help you develop more code, faster. But not just more code - more robust & reliable code.

Windows & Office might add more glitz & feature bloat; real software tries to use the power to reduce bugs.