Forcing BT to fibre a cabinet

In my local area BT have fibre enabled some cabinets. They are refusing to do the one I'm attached to for 'commercial reasons'. I'm assuming that is because VM cable is available for some of the houses.

I don't think this situation is fair as I don't think all the houses can get cable and that this puts VM into a monopoly position so you're stuck with their substandard offering if you want faster than 8mb or so or no fast broadband option at all. VM's cable is no longer fit for my purposes but neither is BT if they aren't offering fibre!

Is there a way of making BT provide the service or are there third party providers that can shove their fibre in the cabinets if there is sufficient demand?

Unfortunately the situation isn't fair; but the only ways of making it fair would be so expensive that almost everyone would lose out.

Commercial reasons includes likely number of customers (which is affected by VM presence) and cost, which depends on lots of details such as easy availability of power and ease of getting fibre to the cabinet.

There are a few third party providers (such as Hyperoptic), but they tend only to operate in niche areas.

The most likely way forward will be if it gets subsidized by the BDUK project (see lots of the headlines on the Thinkbroadband main page).

I think you will find that BT tend to deploy FTTC in VM cable areas, sometimes long before areas with no VM cable,
As for getting BT to instal FTTC at your cab, Unless you could come up with 100 /250 other people on the same cab who would be willing to take fttc you would stand no chance of changing their desision, even if you had 200 people, they still may say no

How do I find out how many people are on my cabinet and where they are?

I'm quite happy to start a campaign of some kind.

Well you need lots of people locally to put their phone numbers into the BT DSL/broadband line checker
This gives the cabinet number - and then for them to tell you the answer.
(or you to do yourself it if you know lots of your neighbour phone numbers!)
Then you can start to estimate out the service area of each cabinet. OK it will not be perfect at the boundaries but it will suffice.
Thee will propbably be some logic to its edges - street boundaries/junctions etc.
Then you simply count up the houses inside the boundary
How many of them have ADSL ? could be 80% to 90%
That will guestimate the number of houses/cabinet and the number of DSL lines/cabinet.

However I should tell you from my experience - that basically no one is interested.
Most people/families have more important worries in the lives.
Broadband is some way down their list of issues.
They know that faster broadband will come eventually - when that is they neither know nor care - except it will happen when it happens.
They will not be "demanding" action on faster broadband - much less offering to pay BT commercial rate for activating a cabinet.

I wish you best of luck.

That could be difficult to establish who is connected to the same PCP as you, especially when you take Sky / TT customers who more often than not will be FULL LLU, this can make finding out which pcp they are on more difficult as the BTwholesale cecker may not give a reliable result even if they entered their address ,
But unless there is another PCP nearby it's quite likely that most if not all those properies on your street are connected to the same PCP (unless you are very close to a BT exchange) but if they have a WBC or SMPF LLU (o2/be, c&w) based ADSL connection , or only a telephone service ,basically as long as its an active BTW line ,the checker should enable you to find out if they are on the same cab or not, (address search )
You could then draw up a petition and knock on the doors for support,
At least then they couldn't say not enough potential customers as an excuse,

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 23-May-13 13:13:25)

There's a much easier way than the last two replies, but it depends on if your postcode is in the leaked 2011 spreadsheet.

If you post you're postcode or exchange and cab number I or someone else will take a look.

If it is in there then we can pull out all the postcodes supplied by your cabinet, from that you can put the post codes into the BT wholesale address checker, this produce a list of address's in that postcode, then you can check each individual address and see what cabinet it's on.

Not a quick job, unless someone can automate it.

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/fibre/checker.php

Partially automated. Would have done more if there was newer data to make it worthwhile.

Andrew

Tried that one. Doesn't give out any information.

There are no results for the supplied postcode
This usually means this postcode is not currently scheduled to receive fibre from Openreach.
No information available for fibre services for the postcode yet from Openreach, check again in a few months.

Which is basically what BT said.

I'll try the free paper people first as they usually release something which goes to all residents every couple of months.

If the data is available in spreadsheet form then it can't be that hard to list out addresses for each cabinet and exchange.

In reply to a post by teabelly:

I don't think this situation is fair

Who says it should be? BT are a private company operating according to accepted business practice. It costs money to install an FTTC cabinet and if their research suggests they won't get enough sales to cover the cost they won't do it.

Fairness has nothing to do with it.