Guide to Phases?

So according to the "Dec 2011" spreadsheet flying around my cab is set for FTTC deployment in phase 6a. I read somewhere that this phase is already complete and 6b is now in progress to Mar 2012?

Does anyone have a guide to the phases and how best to interpret them? I'm anxiously waiting for my cabinet to be upgraded.

Thanks.

Like many many people

Someone may correct me, but i don't think the phases mean that much any more.. it was more a ''we will do it in this order'' kind of thing.

From users comments on the forum, it appears that while those phases are being implemented, so are many of the other phases.

Although people look on the openreach website and see that ''fibre due by march''.. ofc, all that means is when openreach are going to upgrade the exchange. They still have the much larger job of pulling all the fibre to all of the cabs in the area.
Which can take months and months.

Indeed, phases tend to support the initial works on an exchange or set of cabinets, but they've gone a bit by the wayside with regards to specific cabinets and full completion of an exchanges reach (also of course not all cabinets were even included in the first phase of each exchange). As ever, depends on the fibre, new cabinet install and power hook up coming together as well as the exchange being RFS.

Back when they first started the deployment, the exchanges would be announced as part of a phase, and then implemented in that phase. Everything was done in order, but rather slowly.

Now we get announcements of larger batches of exchanges. While the set of exchanges then all get labelled with the next phase identity, some exchanges will actually be done in the next 3 months, while some will be done in a year.

And of course, many of the older announcements have been delayed too. Some a little, but some by a lot. And they delays might happen to individual cabinets within an exchange.

In addition, some cabinets get deliberately delayed - possibly to be connected to a different exchange, which has a different schedule.

The result is that the phase number only really tells you when the exchange was announced, but not when deploymnent completes - at either exchange or cabinet level. It is not useful information to us, joe public.