Fibre is coming... hopefully!

So over the Easter weekend I saw a massive reel of thick cable (I think it was black with the yellow stripe) sitting outside the LCORT telephone exchange. Then on Tuesday - 3 BT openreach vans and a small lorry appear, and they start opening up the manholes on the side of the road from the exchange to Tebay village! As I went past in the car I noticed them feeding in the main black cable (which I presume is the fibre), but also they had about 4 or 5 small reels of thin blue cable. Does anyone have any idea what this could be??

The black stuff is tubing that the fibre is then blown through
The blue may have been pull rope that is fed through to help pull the heavy tubing later.

Same here i saw the black cable on a roll and man holes being opened, i thought it was the fibre but just seen the post by MrS We've had a lot of action past couple of days too

I do find the lack of info from openreach a bit frustrating, the local exchange as already been fibre enabled, but when i check when we will get it in our village on FTTC checkers they all say not part of a phase or under evaluation we have already been told under connecting cheshire that we are due from end of March 2014 and most of the work as been done.

From what ive seen, individual cabs dont get an enabled date but just seem to go live overnight

Individual cabs under the commercial scheme got a date on the BT Wholesale checker

For the BDUK projects, it varies some councils seem not to release dates for checkers until a cabinet is actually live.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Individual cabs under the commercial scheme got a date on the BT Wholesale checker

For the BDUK projects, it varies some councils seem not to release dates for checkers until a cabinet is actually live.

Thanks for that, i've already asked connecting cheshire and they say they don't know anything until openreach tell them it's live. Because they don't want to give dates that are likely to slip due to any blocked ducts

In reply to a post by Kimi:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Individual cabs under the commercial scheme got a date on the BT Wholesale checker

For the BDUK projects, it varies some councils seem not to release dates for checkers until a cabinet is actually live.

Thanks for that, i've already asked connecting cheshire and they say they don't know anything until openreach tell them it's live. Because they don't want to give dates that are likely to slip due to any blocked ducts

That's good to know, it seems Connecting Cumbria also do not provide information down to cabinet level (apart from a list of already enabled cabs), it would definately be nice to have some more information apart from "Exchange [x] is due to be enabled by the end of [month/year]" as many exchanges serve various villages and hamlets so it's unclear which areas will benefit and which will miss out - and also there's no detailed phase info - i.e. whether they plan to return to an area or not. Last year they did mention something about giving information down to postcode level but there's no sign of that yet :/

And unfortunately roadworks.org does not cover Cumbria, although I'm told they are trialling it on their internal systems.

Edited by deleted (Wed 23-Apr-14 16:33:36)

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6419-poll-results...

Has a wider view from a poll, 63% said they'd rather wait until such time as the estimated date was a 100% certainty.

I suspect a lot depends on what complaints a council has had in the past and during the project, i.e. all it takes is one or two people moaning constantly to make a council decide to stop posting more information. I've seen it often enough where I've heard presentations on broadband roll-outs that months down the line are interpreted as some official promising coverage by a certain date, when they had used words like estimate, i.e. people see estimate and ASSUME it is 100%.

I can tell you from experience that Connecting Cheshire are useless and they couldn't give out useful information if their lives depended on it. The only way to know if your cabinet is live is to keep checking the DSL checker, and if you really want to setup one of the free webpage monitoring services to check on your behalf regularly.

Connecting Cheshire told me to wait until a sticker was on the outside of the new cab to tell me when FTTC was available, I've had it for a month now and there is still no sticker, that's how useful they are

In reply to a post by fig:

Connecting Cheshire told me to wait until a sticker was on the outside of the new cab to tell me when FTTC was available, I've had it for a month now and there is still no sticker, that's how useful they are

Yep thats what they told me as well, they said i would probably know before them

I understand what your saying and what the poll suggests.

But i would like some info no dates or estimates are needed, but maybe a check list of what as been done and what is left to be done on a cab