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.

In reply to a post by teabelly:

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.

Wrong assumption.

It usually means that it is either too expensive to get the fibre to your cabinet (the least likely option), or that getting power for the cabinet is expensive (this charge is usually £1000, but can be a lot higher on occasion, forcing BT to stall), or the cabinet serves too few people (most likely), or insufficient people will take up the service (eg too many of the lines on the cabinet are too long to benefit).

I haven't come across a case where BT have failed to install a cabinet because Virgin are in the area.

Within the commercial rollout, we've seen that BT will install FTTC where a cabinet supplies more than 300 properties, but may not if there are fewer properties.

Take a look at this thread, particularly where I work out there are 240 homes connected.

I don't think this situation is fair

It is all business today. If you are profitable, BT will offer the service.

Unfortunately, you'll only be considered profitable if there are enough other people on the same cabinet - the fibre solutions for the mass market are only viable where there is actually a mass market.

Is there a way of making BT provide the service

Not directly, but your next hope is with the BDUK projects currently running.

With the additional subsidy to install FTTC, those cabinets that weren't profitable under normal circumstances suddenly become worthwhile.

We've recently seen some mention of a cabinet with 100 lines being done in a BUK project. Can't remember where though.

However...

There is indeed the possibility of paying to get BT to install a cabinet. An Oxfordshire village paid around £60k to get 2 cabinets installed, with donations from residents paid via the parish council.

or are there third party providers that can shove their fibre in the cabinets if there is sufficient demand?

There is that kind of possibility - after all, this is what Digital Region has done in South Yorkshire, and was done in Rutland.

Your local BDUK project will have determined what plans are for your area, so you should be able to see if any operator has told them anything.

I've investigated a few areas, back from when I was moving, but my current technique looks like this:

- Use Google Maps to identify a few streets - particularly those that lead off the main road where cabinets can be found
- Use Royal Mail's postcode finder to identify the postcodes on the street (and a snapshot of the address numbers or names)
- Use BT's Address Checker (not the postcode one!), into which I put the postcode alone
- The checker gives a list of addresses at the postcode, and I select one.
- The checker tells you the cabinet number and speed estimate for FTTC

In this case, where a cabinet is in an area of cabinets that are being converted, the likelihood is that it is a fill-in cabinet, added when previous ones ran out of capacity. It will probably have been added when a new housing development was built, so is likely to be restricted to the streets of that development.

Once the coverage area has been worked out, you can use either the checker's list of addresses, or use Royal Mail's postcode results to tell you the exact number of properties - and, if needed, a complete list of people to survey.

Alas don't have all cabinets on the spreadsheet.

The cabinet level data is a closely guarded list from Openreach

BT have apparently signed a thing today to do some sort of deal:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/05/bt-sign...

Hope may not be all gone. Seems daft not to finish all the cabinets in an area while they're there though.

If that means a team staying in an area idle for a week or two while the power company do their part does it make sense?

It is speculation that it is power related. It might not be at all.

They wouldn't leave anyone idle as there are plenty of other cabinets they could be installing locally anyway. It's not like I'm in a rural area. I'm on the edge of a massive housing estate!

So how do you know that is not what is happening?
Just because we don't see people installing a cabinet does not mean they are not busy doing that?

Or should Openreach do 100% of cabinets on an exchange before moving onto the next one?

Ah, Mr Saffron,
You have an impossible task if you are going to start trying to explain the theories and practices of large scale project management to the average forum contributor.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by teabelly:

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.

Not directly, but your next hope is with the BDUK projects currently running.

Nope, he's stuffed. His area would be considered grey due to the presence of VM, hence no BDUK as that can only cover white areas where there's no NGA presence.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Nope, he's stuffed. His area would be considered grey due to the presence of VM, hence no BDUK as that can only cover white areas where there's no NGA presence.

It depends whether there are houses that aren't covered by VM at all - as FTTC would be allowed for them. Then he'd be covered as collateral "damage".

True that BT may (should) only get subsidies for the white areas that such an upgrade covered, but it might be enough to tip the cabinet into viability.

The opening post states "that is because VM cable is available for some of the houses". Suggests that some are NGA white.

And I believe under EU rules BT can do a percentage via collateral damage because they can't just fibre up part of a cabinet (or at least it would be silly to do so). As long as that percentage doesn't go over a certain level then state aid rules will not block installation.

In reply to a post by ian72:

And I believe under EU rules BT can do a percentage via collateral damage because they can't just fibre up part of a cabinet (or at least it would be silly to do so). As long as that percentage doesn't go over a certain level then state aid rules will not block installation.

I've certainly seen it written into more than one of the county's public consultation documents, stating that installation of NGA cabinets is not just expected to provide SFBB speeds to its coverage "circle", but to also give "enhanced basic" speeds to areas outside this circle - and that such an enhancement was allowed, even if those areas weren't white areas (on the basic map). An example is East Yorkshire's document.