how fttc works

I've noticed a lot of OR activity of late in this part of essex where they were laying fibre cables to the green cabinets, but I wondered, how exactly does that work. Is there is a separate fibre cable from the exchange for every cabinet (obviously sharing the ducting) or is just one big one, and they are daisy-chained together? Does the fibre have to loop back to the exchange?

I've seen OR (and it's contractors) pulling fibre down my side of chafford but there are no green cabinets at all, so just wondered if they were looping back to the exchange or the next green cabinet in Lakeside.

its point to point fibre so there are dedicated fibres for each cabinet going back to the exchange. Fibre is used for other things so may have not been for FTTC

If you pull fibre you will break it, what you have seen is the fibre tubing. The fibre is blown through these tubes by a small compressor.

It does not loop back to the exchange as such, but there are multiple fibres offering GigE from each cabinet now, and that can be expanded to 10GigE in future, and then multiple waveforms when that proves too slow.

ukp

It is likely that they are putting the fibre back/from the exchange.

A fibre Spine will be pulled in, quite a thick black cable off a large spool which has some sort of metal core and a protective sheath so can be pulled without damage. This will be jointed closer to each Cab where they will then blow a small 4/8 pair fibre to the Cab.

This happens for each Cab so the fibres are dedicated for each Cab but the cable is shared. A cable can be 96 or 192 fibre pairs so could serve 24 or 48 Cabs if only used for FTTC. Often the spine cable exists as it has been laid for existing business customers.

Do you know if you are off a Cab or fed direct from the exchange ( EO), if there are no cabs near you and the spine cable is being pulled from /to the exchange this infers that you may be EO and may not get FTTC.

Thanks for the replies, makes much more sense now.

I am served off cabinet 12 (which is about 35 metres from cabinet 10) and both had telnet and some other contractors doing a lot of work on the double/treble manhole covers right next to the cabinets. Since then, I have seen them opening the manhole covers all along the main road and putting in black cabling (tubing?). As there are no other BT cabinets this side of chafford, this is why I wondered if they were simply directing the cabling back to the exchange. There are only 13 cabinets which serve Chafford, 1 - 9 have been enabled, and 13 is right next to the exchange so not close to my side of Chafford.

each slot in the cabinet has a 1 Gig fibre to the exchange, so 6 fibre pairs per 288 line cabinet if my memory is correct. The fibres are blown through a black tube with a yellow band on the outside (bit like a hosepipe).