Does anyone know when I am trying to estimate my distance to the cabinet do I go:
house to telephone cabinet to fibre cabinet
Yes
and add a bit for up and down the telegraph pole
Yes
(there is quite a big distance between telephone cabinet and fibre cabinet for some reason do I need to include this distance twice)?
Once. BT prefer the cabinet to be within 50m, and require it to be within 100m. If it is further than 10m away, there is probably a really good reason.
Do telephone cables generally follow the most obvious road from the pole to the house to the cabinet? Can they double back on themselves?
No, they don't always follow the most obvious road, but they don't usually double back on themselves on the way back to the cabinet.
However the lines out of the cabinet *could* double back on the line from cabinet back to exchange. Perhaps not much, but it is possible.
Some clues to follow:
- If the roads/houses were built at different times, then the lines in the newer part probably branch off the old route in 1 location, so work out where that might be.
- Overhead lines ought to be easy to follow
- Underground lines probably follow a route with manhole covers. The cabling from a cabinet will go to a number of distribution points, and these must be *somewhere*...
Do all lines on a pole go to the same cabinet?
I don't know. You'd think so, and they probably start that way, but cabinets filling, and people asking for extra lines might change that over time.
Do you know *which* cabinet your on yet? And what speeds are predicted?