Openreach Infrastructure

In one of my many rambling thoughts I had recently, I wondered why BT wouldn't choose to migrate all the last mile equipment for a given area (POTS/VDSL2+ etc) to the local street cabinets. Obviously in the past this might not have been viable due to power/interconnectivity requirements but now we're at a time where active cabinets are being deployed around many towns and cities. Most villages/towns have an exchange building which is probably oversized for the area it is serving.

Sure enough the cabinets we see are designed to only carry VDSL2 services, but surely there could be a viable option for 'small telephone exchange in a box' cabinets too. And if exchange cabinets were a viable option couldn't BT start selling exchange buildings and the associated copper cabling to pay for further fibre deployments to otherwise non-viable areas? I imagine a cabinet would be cheaper to maintain in terms of electricity requirements and also insurance.

What am I missing?

The likelihood is that around 1,000 exchanges will be sold off in a few years time as size requirements diminish. For fibre services larger exchanges are already serving several exchange areas.

The 21CN VoIP project stalled, no big news information on why, but seems to be on hold for now.

By the way BT does not own the exchanges, they went under lease deal some years ago. So it would reduce costs, but they would not be a massive property windfall.

Another issue is the LLU market, which is reliant on the exchange buildings for providing unbundled voice.

3 reasons.
End users don't want it, CPs/ ISPs don't want it , and there isn't enough cabinet capacity to cater for all the lines.
BT need to give CPs advance notice of exchange closures, I believe it's 2 years.