Rural FTTP with BDUK

Andrew,

Fancy doing some more magic mapping?

I just found an update from Superfast North Yorkshire, giving a couple of places where FTTP has been deployed: parts of Birstwith and Spofforth.

It'd be interesting to figure out how widespread, and to figure out whey those areas qualified!

http://www.bewerleypc.org.uk/news.php?template=2&id=217

But BT does not do FTTP as some lobbyists keep telling me

BIRSTWITH
----------------
For a start around 50% if done with pure cabinets are estimated at under superfast speeds. Around 150 on exchange only lines

8 cabinets and 7 were given a phase at 3 are live

Cab 1 FTTC available
Cab 2 FTTC available
Cab 3 FTTC available
Cab 5 no date but got phase
Cab 4 no date - no phase either and smallest cab
Cab 6 no date but got phase
Cab 7 7th May 2014 FTTC
Cab 8 no date but got phase

HG3 3AR one of a tight cluster of EO lines near exchange, would guess this is the FTTP ones. Nothing showing to confirm FTTP so a guess.

SPOFFORTH
------------------

Easy to see why FTTP, half are EO lines tightly packed around HG3 1BE

Cab E1 FTTC available
Cab E2 FTTC available
Cab E3 FTTC available

FTTC speeds are good as area is small, you either get superfast or the line is an EO one. Hence why sure that the EO will be the FTTP

Now do I get a piece of coffee cake as a reward?

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

It'd be interesting to figure out how widespread, and to figure out whey those areas qualified!

I'm not sure BT themselves know why areas would qualify. Any faith I may have had in their modelling has been comprehensively destroyed by personal experiences.

So FTTP isn't actually orderable yet? I'll postpone the trip out with the camera then...

You can still have the cake though

Now it may be I missed the first few properties that can order, but given the amount of checking I had done, I was getting bored of the BT Wholesale address checker.

For wider areas I have other private ways to calculate stuff but always do some sanity checking so I can see if model makes sense.

Surely someone has trained a robot to do the donkey work on the BTw checker by now, and if not, why not?
I especially love the tabular results which are a pain to work with.

I'm sure it's pretty easy to do with screen scrapping techniques which have been employed for years to scrape data from websites.

Should we crowd fund a private screen scraper because I sometimes see dsl checker results in my dreams.

You would need to run the robot every week for 27 million properties to keep it up to date.

There are robots watching at peoples request that others have done, but suspect an automated massed checker would get blocked in a short time.

I used changedetection.com for a while and I think it might have been blocked or at least attempts made to do so.
My issue with the checker is, I know it's designed for "single enquiries" however they obviously realise some of us run abnormally large amounts of checks, at what point would they consider blocking you?
In reality, they do not appear to "restrict" use unless I'm missing something so why not have something which lays all the info out there? Obviously BTw won't invest the money into it as they are fulfilling their obligation already I'm sure.

Because BT perceives the data to commercial value to its competitors and wants them to have to work at figuring things out, rather than hand it to them for free.

The rate you can hand check is nothing compared to what rate would be needed to build a 27 million phone line data base, 3600 seconds in an hour...

You wouldn't need to check every property, only one property per cabinet. It all depends on how much information was required. Gathering the information to feed the robot to start with would be a problem though.

There is bound to be an "outsourced" solution for this, question is, is it more or less boring than solving captchas?

I wonder do BTw customer providers get any more "bulk tools".

I think they do (or at least did) have a bulk tool.

There was an item in the ISP Forum a while back that BT was offering a discount on bulk lookups for fibre.

I've just created a little app that takes a house number and postcode and screen scrapes the results, at the moment I've only extracted the full address, exchange and cabinet number (for proof of concept as it was easier), but everything else is in the string returned

Takes about 3 to 7 seconds to retrieve the web page, which is the slow part.

I may well fully automate this to check the rest of our local cabinets on a regular basis, although I might build in a delay between checks so not to upset any systems, then it can run on my server and send me an email when something changes

Edited by R0NSKI (Mon 07-Apr-14 23:49:00)

Very nice indeed.
I personally would LOVE an app like this
Nice work R0NSKI though, nice to hear it is possible!

I did the same thing, back when I was moving house.

At the time, the postcode coverage lists existed, and the DSL checker worked with postcode lookups.

I managed to scrape all the results for the town, group them, and map them on the batchgeo.com website. Very handy...

Very very nice WWWombat, you see, Am I crazy or should something like this not be provided for all BDUK projects involving BT (infact any provider getting public money, oh wait, that pretty much is only BT).
I know "commercial" information like this is "protected", however I DO NOT agree that publicly funded deployment can be kept under the same level of secrecy not completely transparent availability information.
I think everything gets buried under these percentages, has anyone actually doubled checked that each and every premises in a deployment area can ACTUALLY get what is being promised?

Edited by deleted (Wed 09-Apr-14 09:22:38)

Well some businesses and home's have received it here in Malton i don't know if they can order it but its available.

http://i.gyazo.com/e188e817ba9c7d8fbe35c9d2eedb0012.png

To manually check each and every premise will cost a lot of money to assess likely cable routing.

I can do automated stuff and we are doing this in our news, there are caveats to it all, but generally things are in line with what is being said.

NOTE: No one is promising that every home on a cabinet will get faster than 24 Mbps.

The issue is one of time and money, to sanity check my own figures for an exchange can take me an hour, and that is after having spent a good chunk of time pulling data together into a meaningful system. The reward for doing all this is minimal beyond so far being able to say that published figures are close enough to our estimates to not be the total fabrications that some consider them to be.

I totally understand what your saying Andrew, and I'm personally not asking you to do the checking.
I think what I'm getting at is, should these figures really need to be checked? Should there not be something provided with the press release in order to substantiate the claims.
I'm also not expecting every single premises to be physically checked down to cable routing.
I think this is possibly the flaw in using a primarily commercial availability checker for publicly funded deployment.
I think there needs to be more transparency even if it's just for the BDUK deployments.(Obviously not ideal)

And given the verocity of some complainers, only releasing a CSV with all the postcodes and estimated speeds would might not suffice.

I can guarantee there would be mistakes in these too, or anomalies at the very least.

To be frank the biggest disparity has been in the claims made by those that oppose the BDUK process. I accept it has lots of flaws, but for the majority it will do the job.

Some councils are doing a much better job than others, but that is the same in many areas beyond broadband.

If we wanted to do the process correct, we should have started back in 1999, when there was time to plan coherently but remember the UK MUST try the commercial route and let that fail first and I don't see any party changing that basis.

Now all I need is funding to employ a couple of assistants full time to do more checking and corrections to raw data to improve data reliability.