Small weird things

Some of you may have seen my map. In the process of collating something like that I read a whole bunch of forum posts, official documents, etc. and so most of what I've seen makes sense. Some things though, I still don't understand. Of course they might not make any sense to anyone, the world is not a tidy easily understood place, but just in case:

1. A pair of cabinets, a short walk apart (say, 200 metres, across a major road bridge though) with the same exact cabinet number, apparently in the same exchange and both recently (re)built. One has an FTTC cab a few metres away, the other is sat on its own. What's that all about? Do some of those premises get FTTC and the others not?

2. A road has about half a dozen cabinets in fairly rapid succession (maybe 2-5 minutes walk apart), each serving a long street off that road. Makes sense so far, but just one of these cabinets, in the middle has no adjacent FTTC. The fibre logically must run right past it, surely? And there's a nice long street full of potential customers, so ...?

3. Openreach says a particular house should get 75+Mbit FTTC from a particular cabinet. So that cabinet ought to be fairly nearby. I've wandered all around, can't find the corresponding cabinet. Best candidate is a weird old busted-up cabinet with no number and no FTTC cabinet nearby. Is there some way it could get FTTC without an extra cabinet? Are Openreach just sometimes wrong or predicting values for a build they've not even begun?

4. BT cabinets of a particular era have an adjacent blank for another lock next to each of the standard BT locks. If you've spent any time staring at cabinets you know the ones I mean. Near to the motorway I found a cabinet with no labels and instead of blanks the other set of locks were present too. It may or may not be a coincidence that there was a huge cell phone transceiver stack a few paces away on the other side of a fence. Does the presence of the BT-style locks indicate this cabinet was to be opened by BT? Do the other locks mean somebody else's keys are needed too, or that either can open it?

Postcodes, cab numbers and photos would help.

Per Batboy's request:

Cabinet numbers below are as shown on:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://home.tlrmx.org...

1. Both labelled cabinet 19 (one of them has what might be vandalism or might be a half-arsed attempt to scrawl /3 after the number, so I've called it 19/3 on my map).

2. I'm thinking of the Portswood Road cabinets, 11, 29, 65, 13, 19 and 31 get fibre cabs, 66 in the middle does not.

3. The house I'm thinking of is on Daisy Road, the best candidate cabinet is outside Bassett Green primary school, a few metres away.

4. This was on the road to Stoneham Golf Club (which crosses the motorway by bridge).

I will dig up photos tonight if I can, 1 and 2 are definitely in photos, I have a blurry image of 3 and not sure about 4 because I don't always take photographs of weird things I find that might not be BT cabinets.

3. Isn't it FTTP not FTTC over there?

If a Cab is labelled 19/3 then it is normally a secondary cabinet run off of 19, so 19/3 would suggest there are two secondary cabinets

Daisy Rd is severed by cab 48, no FTTC or FTTP in the estimates.

Cab 66 was scheduled for FTTP in the 2011 spreadsheet, but nothing on the wholesale checker for it.

You seem to have 19 and 31 in the same place. 19/3 might be an extension cabinet installed at the time Wessex lane halls were expanded ~20 years ago. The BT network in the area around high road is a bit of a mess IIRC with several long running problems for businesses in that area in recent years. I expect there's a hell of a rats nest under the road around there! Other secondary cabs might be within the Wessex lane hall grounds. A dim and distant memory tells me there's a cabinet near the bottom of south stoneham tower

no...

4) probably a CCTV cabinet for the motorway camera's

The ones labelled D aren't anything to do with BT. They all look like cable tv cabinets to me.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

3. Openreach says a particular house should get 75+Mbit FTTC from a particular cabinet. So that cabinet ought to be fairly nearby. I've wandered all around, can't find the corresponding cabinet. Best candidate is a weird old busted-up cabinet with no number and no FTTC cabinet nearby. Is there some way it could get FTTC without an extra cabinet?

Yes absolutely, if the old busted up one is a secondary cabinet (SCP) it won't have a fibre cabinet next to it. Its parent cabinet (the PCP) will have a fibre cabinet next to it. The SCP will be connected to its PCP by a copper cable.

That's what 19/3 is, it is the 3rd SCP for cabinet 19 and if cabinet 19 has FTTC then most or all of its SCPs will accept customers also.

Edited by Icaras (Mon 28-Apr-14 16:50:54)

2. A road has about half a dozen cabinets in fairly rapid succession (maybe 2-5 minutes walk apart), each serving a long street off that road. Makes sense so far, but just one of these cabinets, in the middle has no adjacent FTTC. The fibre logically must run right past it, surely? And there's a nice long street full of potential customers, so ...?

It is more than just the fibre though. Perhaps it is difficult to get power to it for some reason. Perhaps there are other services near to it that make digging impossible. Maybe for some reason they can't get permission to install in that location. Probably any number of reasons that could make one cabinet more difficult than others.