Very Confused!! FTTC Availability Withdrawn

Our village cabinet was enabled for FTTC at the end of June 2012.

I have been holding off upgrading to VDSL until I landed a new job, as I didn't want to commit to the additional expense in the short term.

Regular checks against my phone number, since July onwards, on various availability checkers (BT Wholesale included) indicated that my line should support around 50Mbps - My house is approx. 800m from the cabinet.

A poster recently appeared on the cabinet advertising superfast broadband availability and BT flyers have been received in the post.

HOWEVER - when I decided to take the plunge today and enquire about upgrading, my ISP (Zen) told me that the checker was indicating no availability at my location. Sure enough - in the past 2 days all of the checkers have removed any reference to FTTC availability for my phone line.

My location is ML3 7XA and I think the cabinet is No.37 off the Hamilton exchange - the only cabinet for our village.

Can anyone offer an opinion as to what has happened? Is it possible that maximum orders have now been fulfilled by BT for my location and I am too late to be connected?

In reply to a post by ToneDeaf:

Can anyone offer an opinion as to what has happened? Is it possible that maximum orders have now been fulfilled by BT for my location and I am too late to be connected?

That would be my guess - how big is the FTTC cabinet that got installed? As you're in a village, it may have been one of the small (96 connection) units.

The new fibre cabinet is half the width of the old double door cabinet.

Forward planning should have dictated to BT that a village which is 4 miles away from the exchange (and where the ADSL rate is an average of 1Mbps) is likely to have a higher than average demand for faster broadband, especially as there is no alternative supplier (cable, 3G, etc.) other than satellite.

How easy is it to add capacity to these small cabinets OR does it now require a larger cabinet to be installed?

Thanks

In reply to a post by Spasch:

That would be my guess - how big is the FTTC cabinet that got installed? As you're in a village, it may have been one of the small (96 connection) units.

Fortunately we got a big one in my village. I've no idea what the level of take-up has been, I know I was one of the first and I don't seem to have suffered massive degradation in service since then (well over a year ago now).

They have added extra cabinets in some areas, so it may already be under way. There is an NGA email address on the www.openreach.co.uk where and when website and explain as you did to us the situation.

If village has filled up a 96 line cab and you can show a reasonable level of demand another may appear

I doubt its total capacity has been reached . I would hazard a guess that the initial installed capacity has been reached and requires additional service cards and filters to be installed.
try again later next week.

It also used to be the case that the tie cable between the PSP and the FTTC cabinet hasn't been fully installed - and that the current one is full.

One surefire way to find out is to seek out an Openreach guy working in the village and ask them...

In reply to a post by ToneDeaf:

How easy is it to add capacity to these small cabinets OR does it now require a larger cabinet to be installed?

With the small ECI cabinets it's just a matter of adding two new cards to the MSAN to double the capacity to 256 ports as long as the cabinet has been configured to accept that number of connections. Usually Openreach only put in 100 pairs (or something like that) so once that's used up it means pulling more cable from the PCP to the fibre cabinet as well.

Many thanks to all who replied to my query.

FTTC availability for phone line has re-appeared on the BT Wholesale checker and I should have VDSL available to my home from 2nd Oct.

Therefore, as predicted by some, it must have been a capacity problem requiring some additional capacity to be enabled.

I think I will now apply for upgrade of service rather than wait and risk a future rejection.