Street cabinet electricity supply

A question which few (or none?) of us will have to worry about directly, relating to the power supply of FTTC VDSL street cabinets:

I assume BT are somehow billed for the electricity consumption? I feel a bit silly asking this, because the answer might be obvious, but how? Is there simply an average figure that's been calculated per cabinet, as it'll be so similar, so the electricity supplier simply bills BT for X cabinets in an area? Again, just curious.

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Apr-12 10:33:26)

Before retiring, I used to work for a company providing traffic monitoring equipment at around 3000 sites across the UK. We had an arrangement where we had what is known as 'Unmetered Supply' and provided each of the 13 Regional electricity supply companies a monthly audit of all equipment together with the predicted kW/H figures.

All pretty simple as it was an Excel spreadsheet derived from the equipment database.

Hope this helps.

There is a smart meter in the power compartment of each cabinet is which remotely accessible.

Cheers for the replies. Heh, I knew it would be monitored somehow, just wondering how - interesting about the remotely accessible meters. I first wondered about it when a couple of cabinets in my town got wired into the cable which supplies the street lights nearby, I was thinking what a nightmare it must be to separate the power demands of BT's cabinets, cable cabinets, street lights, and whatever else that cable/circuit supplies, wherever it goes.

...And that's why someone else does that job

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Apr-12 17:17:02)

On a side note, using the UK Roadworks website to monitor for cabinet power is a good way of tracking progress of FTTC on your local cabinet. They have an email alert service you can configure down to street level. It also shows BT work as well.

Here's an example

In reply to a post by gazzyk1ns:

Cheers for the replies. Heh, I knew it would be monitored somehow, just wondering how - interesting about the remotely accessible meters. I first wondered about it when a couple of cabinets in my town got wired into the cable which supplies the street lights nearby, I was thinking what a nightmare it must be to separate the power demands of BT's cabinets, cable cabinets, street lights, and whatever else that cable/circuit supplies, wherever it goes.

...And that's why someone else does that job

I used to work for a company that makes the type of electric meters fitted to FTTC cabinets. There's two types, one uses an RF system to transmit the data to a handheld terminal and the other is a "phone home" system which "phones" the data out at predetermined times.

In reply to a post by gazzyk1ns:

A question which few (or none?) of us will have to worry about directly, relating to the power supply of FTTC VDSL street cabinets:

I assume BT are somehow billed for the electricity consumption? I feel a bit silly asking this, because the answer might be obvious, but how? Is there simply an average figure that's been calculated per cabinet, as it'll be so similar, so the electricity supplier simply bills BT for X cabinets in an area? Again, just curious.

The Huawei DSLAMs (SmartAX MA5616) are using the H831PDIA power board.

Blighty Telecom developed its own UPS solution, and consequently plumped for the PDIA 48v DC-only board, with battery backup, to power the MA5616 DSLAM. The PDIA is rated at 7.8A and provides three rails-48VDC,+12VDC,+3.3VDC. The current drawn depends on configuration: the number of line cards installed, the utilised ports, the transmit powers, the active cooling, etc..

Maxed out, the MA5616 DSLAM consumes around 400 watts.. There are some PCB photos of the PDIA power board at [1]

cheers, a

[1] http://bbs.mydigit.cn/read.php?tid=189512