I'm not surprised that Haywards Heath 53 is viable.
It is only a couple of hundred metres of good duct space away from 1 which it used to be a pillar of. It has plenty of space in the shell. It is close to power.
It feeds a lot of ground including an industrial estate.
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In my view, plucking a cabinet in Yorkshire and trying to do some DIY planning comparing it with one plucked out of Sussex is unlikely to generate anything useful.
Had Openreach said that the story wouldn't have happened. Unfortunately the Commercial Modelling Unit Head said this:
HAYWARDS HEATH (SDHYWRD)
- This exchange is part deployed,. There will potential be more coming in future phases.
- However Cab 53 is not in the footprint as has a low total homes passed and is not commercial.
In determining the most commercially viable cabs to deploy to we take into account the costs of deployment and the likely take-up. The likely take-up percentage figures are good for these cabs, but they are both quite small, so the costs of deployment are not being outweighed by sufficient revenue.
This would be confirmed by that the MSAN going in is the smallest in terms of capacity that Openreach have available.
Openreach informed me that each cabinet is required to be judged as an entirely separate entity, so the presence of a fibre enabled cabinet nearby is allegedly irrelevant.
It's a 35.8 metre run from PCP to DSLAM, it's a 22.8 metre run from cabinet to power.
It does indeed feed a lot of ground unfortunately that ground passes about 160 premises, residential and commercial.
The cabinet mentioned in Leeds passes more premises, has a clear duct run to the fibre spine via both a cabinet being enabled 300m to its south and a community centre which is served by BT fibre 200m to its north, and has access to power within 15 metres. It has plenty of space in its shell also. That the HH 53 has so much space in its shell despite being a physically smaller shell than the cabinet in Leeds kinda implies that it doesn't have many lines connected.
If it were as easy as you'd mentioned I'm sure that someone in Openreach would've been able to tell either me or one of the journalists that asked questions those pretty simple explanations both for its viability and for the cause of delays rather than saying that it doesn't pass enough premises.
EDIT: In the name of open disclosure I'm the Carl Thomas in the story. If it were really that simple I suspect I would've been shot down pretty rapidly rather than being greeted by initial panic, followed by confusion, followed by silence, followed by denial.
Edited by Ignitionnet (Sat 03-Nov-12 19:01:50)