Exchange Accepting Orders but I can't place an order?

Hey all, long time reader first time poster.

I'm in rather a frustrating situation. I've been sitting in somewhat of a internet black hole for some time. I live in an area called Leasowe which at the end of two different exchanges- One is connected to ARROWEBROOK (my cab is cabinet 45) and one is connected to WALLASEY. Now Wallasey has been FTTC enabled for little over a year now and I am quite literally about 200 yards from having fibre. Yesterday, finally, my exchange was enabled and 'accepting orders' now as I've been walking to work I've noticed since July that BT have installed a cab and put down black cabling. So eager to finally get off 3mbs I went to order only to be informed it's still not enabled.

Seriously, what deity do I need to worship to have a reasonable internet connection? Am I going to be waiting till 2014? It's almost the largest release window for games and pre-loading them only gets me so far so I need a faster internet connection if I don't wish to have my PC on for 48 hours! Bar moving it feels like I'm always going to have subpar internet speeds.

Does anyone have any idea on when BT get round to enabling cabs? Does it take days, weeks or months? Any information anyone could provide would be great!

Typically about 3 months+, problem cabs can take much longer.

As Ribble says, it depends on the reason why the cabinet has not been enabled yet. It could be a few weeks, it may well be a few months, and it might be longer. In my area, the cabinets were on the ground for around a year before the exchange was enabled, so either there was a problem bringing in the backhaul (this exchange is an island of FTTC surrounded by exchanges that are not in the commercial roll-out), or the engineers were redirected to another area where they could make more of a difference at that time.

BT's FTTx deployment is a complex nationwide project, with numerous external dependencies and issues arising that affect anything from a single cabinet to the allocation of resources across a wider area.


thespookeh - if you e-mail [email protected] giving your e-mail, address and postcode and asking for an update, they may be able to give you some more information.

Well that's frustrating. So I've gone from not knowing the date of the exchange being turned on to not knowing the date of my cab being turned on! :/

Well I've e-mailed nga.enquiries but they have quoted a 15 day turn around. I guess I better prepare my self for further bad news.

Thanks all for the help.

That's BT for you. BT will never rushing into this. They always keeping us in the dark. I had a friend who live in Wolverhampton as his exchange already enabled for FTTC but his cabinet (FTTC) stood there for 11 months (even he hear the fan is on) and cannot accepting order until 11 months! It a joke really,

Edited by adslmax (Wed 02-Oct-13 12:10:02)

I live on an estate with two pcp cabinets half the houses on each cabs 10 & 15 a fibre cabinet is connected to 10 so if you are lucky you can get fibre if on 10 but on 15 then tough luck; this has been the situation since February ; I have spoken to openreach and they will NEVER connect cab 15 great!!!

Where abouts is your estate, as it may be covered by one of the counties BDUK projects and cab 15 may be covered by the BDUK project if you have one.

Edited by ccxo (Sat 05-Oct-13 19:46:09)