Fiber from a different cabinet

Hi,

This week a new FTTC cabinet has been installed along Broad Oak Road Canterbury, opposite what I believe may be PCP1, the exact location is here. What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to some how order FTTC via this cabinet instead of my current one, when the cabinet actual goes live.

Currently I'm on PCP73, which is on Stonebridge Road in a new housing development in Canterbury. From what I have been told by [email protected] and nga.enquiries my PCP73 will not be receiving fiber, however it does fall into Kent's BDUK funding and MAY receive fiber after a review, however this looks to be months away from what they are suggesting.

Now when I check the distance from this new FTTC cabinet along Broad Oak Road to my house on Stonebridge Road the distance is about 300m, which I believe would allow me to get almost if not the full 80Mbps down speed FTTC offers. (I may be wrong on this?) Would it be possible to somehow order FTTC but from this new cabinet or maybe change cabinet? Though I'm not completely sure on this, it would appear that the phone lines running to PCP73 run past PCP1 on Broad Oak Road.

Also wondering if anyone can help me with the following: BT surveyed the estate in 2010, when it had just started, and there were only about 10 properties on the development. currently the development has just been completed and comprises of about 330 - 350 properties (Houses & Apartments). Also BT cabinets on this side of Canterbury have only NOW started to be installed. When asking nga.enquiries why the development was not included in BT's own roll-out they state it is simply not economically viable. But what does "economically viable" mean as the development does not appear to be not economically viable at all, just how many properties does an area served by a single cabinet require for BT to consider it economically viable to install an FTTC cabinet? And also considering that all phone lines are underground in brand new ducting and the apartment blocks are high density would there be any way to suggest BT seriously consider doing a full FTTP installation rather than FTTC, currently I've heard of almost no FTTP in or around canterbury, this seems like a pretty good place to start.

Thanks for any assistance

In reply to a post by Fugitive_Legacy:

This week a new FTTC cabinet has been installed along Broad Oak Road Canterbury, opposite what I believe may be PCP1, the exact location is here. What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible to some how order FTTC via this cabinet instead of my current one, when the cabinet actual goes live.

No, sorry.

To expand on the no, if you are willing to spend many thousands on a custom build you might connect to the other cabinet.

As for FTTP why should they do this estate, when many others have not? Even where ducting is in place, the sub ducting, splitters and fibres themselves for the GPON would need to be installed.

As for why not do the cabs before? A lot of the commercial planning is pretty old, so they would have picked the cabinets where they knew the most, so new estates would have been skipped as they were a big unknown, particularly given the state of the housing market.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

As for why not do the cabs before? A lot of the commercial planning is pretty old, so they would have picked the cabinets where they knew the most, so new estates would have been skipped as they were a big unknown, particularly given the state of the housing market.

This I can confirm from experience, and sadly it's almost certainly too late to try and persuade them to change their mind and add it to their commercial programme now.

A cabinet added to the commercial programme now would be delivered around July of 2014 - after the commercial programme is scheduled to complete.

But surely BT will not simply stop upgrading cab's, they may well wait until all the BDUK projects complete before doing any more, as that would make financial sense. As cabinets may become viable for whatever reasons in the meantime, surely they will eventually look at these?

The bduk projects will chase the low hanging fruit to try and hit coverage target quick. So the final 5% will be the most expensive ones left to do

Expanding even more on the 'no', I live in a pretty well populated area with loads of houses all around. The cab our BT line used to be connected to (we've been on cable for years) is 1.2km away yet there are at least 4 BT cabs closer. As such we get a low-ish estimate of speeds for FTTC.
It's not a new build, these are 1930's terraced houses. What I was told was that the original multi-pair line that comes all that way to the telegraph pole round the back of the houses here would have been installed many years ago, long before any talk of the Internet, let alone fibre.
All Openreach do is to connect a pair at the cab on their master list and that's you - even if there are other cabs nearer, as that is what you are down for on the database. To route a new bit of wire from another cab would cost them a lot of money, planning, installing and changing all those master tables to show the new cab.
It could well affect your neighbours lines too - they wouldn't just pull one pair through to your nearest pole or distribution point (DP boxes).
Our line would actually run past 2 newer cabs, installed to serve houses built in the 40s and 50s. Looking back to those times, not many people had a phone at home, let alone computers that were hungry for data. They are having to work with antiquated systems and overloaded cabinets that were simply not designed for the traffic they now take.
Better planning and (lots) more money might have seen FTTP being a more popular option, but that wasn't a consideration when the main roll-out started.
I'm not an engineer or anything, just passing on what was explained to me.

From there it would be too far to connect PCP73 to that fibre cabinet. I think the fibre cabinet is in that location as there is a cabinet at the roundabout (very old one here:- https://www.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.287017,1.082379&... and another just down the road towards the new development (here:- https://www.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.287259,1.08284&s... They will connect both to the same fibre cabinet (to save money). This has been done on Tower Way Canterbury also as there were two cabinets very close.

For the cabinet you connect to (PCP73) they will need another fibre cabinet. BT seem to be very slow with new developments. I live in The Old Tannery and we're still waiting for the cabinet to go in even though it's been over half a year since location was accepted by the council...

Have you checked if there has been notification to the council? Probably won't have to if it isn't conservation area though. Good luck finding the planning site though, it's really hard to find things since they 'up'dated the site.

Cabinets that are closest to being 'viable' under the formulae will be the first ones targeted by BT.

The contracts for the installs of cabinets have to run their course at some point. Going by the models in other countries BT simply stopping install of new cabinets is exactly what will happen. There will be targeted deployment of cabinets and FTTP, for example in new build areas, but given the planning going into BDUK the value to BT of doing another survey of many thousands of cabinets on the off-chance some have suddenly grown in population doesn't seem large.

Could be wrong of course!

After emailing nga.enquiries again to possibly find out a little more regarding exactly what is happening with our Cabinet PCP73. I received the following:

The exchange that your line is fed from Canterbury is enabled and accepting orders for cabinets that have already been deployed.

However the cabinet feeding your line PCP 73 is not due for deployment until Phase 12a BDUK Which is Q3 2013/14, (Dec 2013) the cabinet in question is current planned as FTTC.

Hopefully this means we'll see FTTC early next year, if all goes well. Checking the BT Wholesale checker still does not show any information regarding a date for FTTC on my phone line. However, the email does refer to Phase 12a BDUK and maybe the checker is outdated, not sure.