CMSTE Enabled

Just noticed Stechford in Birmingham is now FTTC enabled

one of the few Birmingham exchanges with a September 13 date for enablement

hopefully Sheldon is next

Unfortunately my local cabinet -37 - will not be upgraded.

If your premise is connected to cabinet 37 (check by using the BT Broadband Availability Checker) please sign my petition.

http://www.petition.co.uk/upgrade-cabinet-on-cmste-3...

I'll notify BT Openreach of this petition once there is a significant number of signatures.

Thank you

Response from BT OpenReach

"Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband at Stechford exchange cabinet CM/STE 37. Our deployment is based on the commercial criteria for each cabinet and your cabinet fails to meet the commercial criteria. This is because the cabinet has too few premise connected to it, rendering it too small to provide a return on the investment based on the costs for the construction and on-going running costs of providing a new FTTC cabinet.

When calculating the commercial viability of cabinet areas we take many factors into account. These include ensuring that we locate the cabinets in accordance with all national and local planning laws, ensuring that the cabinet does not obstruct pedestrians or provide a danger to all road-users. We must ensure that the DSLAM is located within 100m of its associated telephony connection cabinet and that there is adequate access to power and existing telephony infrastructure. To further enable the location of the DSLAM, we must accurately survey for underground structure and obstacles etc.

We do look at the demographic nature of the potential customers within a cabinets working area, however, we focus on the amount of connected lines at the time - this is the most efficient way to deploy fibre broadband whilst keeping within our finite budget. As such we look at the potential return for our investment over quite a number of years, with the prospective number of take up of the service being a large percentage of households."

Is cab 37 one of the smaller type boxes? Cabs 49 and 50 on the stechford exchange are this type and we get the similar message (though not the bit about the DSLAM location).

Oh, welcome to the club. You could try to write to local councillors, I did drop an email to all 3 of my local (Lib) ones - none have bothered to reply yet. John Hemming (MP) did reply fast though, but his office got the same reply from BT. Might be worth reminding them there's an election next year!

Good luck with the petition. I plan to leaflet the area soon about our lack of upgrade.

*continues praying that Hyperoptic will come to the city centre considering Openreach don't seem interested*

I'm not sure if it is one of the smaller cabinets. I'm will write to my local MP once there are at least 100 signatures. I've already contacted Birmingham City Council as BT Openreach also said

"Your council may have taken steps to appropriate funding as part of the BDUK initiative to increase the broadband penetration beyond the Openreach commercial footprint. Can I suggest that you contact them to enquire if your cabinet has been included in their programme."


I have yet to receive a reply. I'll be leafleting all residents on my road today asking them to sign the petition, complete the BT Openreach Expression of interest form and contacting BT Openreach to ask if Cabinet 37 will be upgraded. Hopefully at least 100 people will sign.

What road are you on?, I might be able to find the cab on Google street view.

You could look to raise funding privately, rough cost is about £30,000 that needs to be raised before Openreach will match fund to deploy a FTTC cabinet.
Since its a urban area the cost could be less or more depending on the required works, you can talk to openreach via the ngb email to discuss funding.

BDUK funding is not available to city centres, their is the urban broadband fund but most of this is going on voucher schemes for business but it does vary per city.

i am on / near brays road and new cab installed last week

bout 220m from cab

sheldon exchange cab 2

Edited by Stanman_24 (Sat 24-Aug-13 20:19:26)

Generally driving around the two cabinets are on opposite ends of the road. Streetview images of the two cabinets:

http://goo.gl/maps/K4GYp

http://goo.gl/maps/Hsf07

In reply to a post by adslvsvdsl:

Generally driving around the two cabinets are on opposite ends of the road. Streetview images of the two cabinets:

http://goo.gl/maps/K4GYp

http://goo.gl/maps/Hsf07

that's not FTTC