FTTC cabinet installed on the opposite side of the road?

Cabinet 46 on the Gloucester exchange is due to have Fibre available at the end of September. Here is a picture of the cabinet showing how much space it has next to it for a nice shiny new cabinet:

http://i.imgur.com/0FrpP.jpg

However for some reason BT have dug across two lanes of a road to install what appears to be the fibre the cabinet on the opposite side of the road:

http://i.imgur.com/J1cK1.jpg

As I understand it this means that whenever someone on this cabinet upgrades to fibre the engineer is going to have to get their phone line to the other side of the road...

I'm sure that there's a sensible explanation for this, does anyone know what it might be?

The fibre comes into the FTTC cab and the FTTC cab connects to the phone cab. All phone connections are to the phone cap.

I've no idea why they will have done that, but there will be at least one good reason.

Don't worry about people getting connected to FTTC. The fibre cab has the fibre supply and mains power to drive the DSLAM in it. The trench has ducting with copper cable connecting the DSLAM to a new patch panel inside the phone cabinet. Or at least it will have once the job is completed.

The engineer installing FTTC for a customer doesn't have access to the fibre cabinet. He just connects the phone exchange feed (e-side) to the patch panel, instead of to your d-side line. That allows the DSLAM across the road to combine the two signals and feed that back to the panel, where your d-side line is then connected to the panel connector corresponding to the e-side one.

Either, that its cheaper than paying the power company to provide a supply across the carriageway, or there are other underground services in the way.

We have a few like that around our way to.

We have one that's maybe as much as 80M from the PCP, due to the PCP being in the centre of a roundabout.

Round my way there's afibre cabinet about 60m down a side road on the opposite side of the road to the PCP. It was the nearest they could get power to it plus it would have been right on the edge of the main road opening onto the road if it was next to the PCP.

They did the same in my road - there was no room to put anything new where the PCP cabinet is, so the FTTC cabinet is on the verge on the other side of the road. It all works fine !

Mine's about 20-30 cable metres from the PCP. The PCP is on a busy "B" road, the fibre cab up a side street across the road, opposite the PCP.
_{Edit - there aren't any mines there I don't think.}

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 01-Sep-12 00:14:21)