fttc-check.alc.im updated

I see http://fttc-check.alc.im/ has been updated with data for April 2014

I checked this out, and it identified my cabinet (there are 2 that serve the postcode) and it was nice to see the uplift, I hope it's true when fibre finally arrives!

The SamKnows link however goes to Leicester Central Exchange, which is nowhere near me...

Cheers,
AP

How does it decide which postcodes are "valid"? It rejects SO17 1ST even though Google and other sites seem content with that and so does the Openreach checker.

I put a few postcodes of properties that I know are served by a cabinet that's got a twin, but don't get FTTC yet (shown as blue on my map) and they all show as May 31st. Which is probably a placeholder but hey.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

How does it decide which postcodes are "valid"? It rejects SO17 1ST

You put a space in. Works fine without space.

Great to see it was updated by Adam. I checked my PCP which isn't part of the 66% deployment, but it has gave me an uplift of 19.76. Interesting for it to return that value when no work is scheduled for it.

My post code shows as follows:

Cabinet (PCP) No. Cabinet Vendor Probability Uplift Phase Deployment Date Status
24 99% 13.92 Not being deployed as part of the 66% Commercial Plan




What does 99% Probability means?

Thanks,

99% probability that the postcode you gave matches this cabinet, postcodes are often split between two cabinets

In reply to a post by Irby:

You put a space in. Works fine without space.

Now it works with or without a space. But when I wrote that neither worked. So either a coincidence or somebody is quietly fixing things based on feedback here.

In reply to a post by tialaramex:

In reply to a post by Irby:

You put a space in. Works fine without space.

Now it works with or without a space. But when I wrote that neither worked. So either a coincidence or somebody is quietly fixing things based on feedback here.

Possibly, but the site does say "Enter postcode (no spaces)"

Must get hold of that spreadsheet.

Uplift for this cabinet 117.61. Not too shabby and explains a bit...

Edited by deleted (Mon 19-May-14 20:04:43)

I get a similar response. The uplift is 5.11 which I find surprising as there is about 5km of cable between my house as the cabinet. The exchange is another 1km further on.

The response shows that the exchange is being upgraded in June 2014 which I know is being done with BDUK funding.

So, can I assume from the reply that the cabinet will not get FTTC despite the exchange being upgraded with BDUK funding?

Thanks mate,

Curious about the uplift as its 14.58 as I currently get 7-8meg

Thanks Andrew for clarifying what the Probability figure means, and thanks BatBoy for posting!

I've just noticed the description of the 'Uplift' figure too; ours is 99.22, (PCP 102 here); however another cabinet due to be implemented not far away has an uplift of 409.02 (PCP 92 here) which doesn't seem to make sense if it's the multiplier of the current speed?

Both cabinets are 'Part of the 66% Commercial Plan' and state Huawei as the cabinet type, the other cabinet states Phase 10a and has an expected date of later this year (though I understand this was delayed and was originally planned to be implemented by now). Does anyone have any more detail on the phase dates though please? Our cabinet states Phase 13a (and Openreach have previously provided the same phase no by email) - but all of their announcements which seemed to end last spring stopped at mentioning Phase 11!

I've also recently looked at how many properties connect to our cabinet - it's around 375, all on a new-build (2008-2013) estate, all properties within about 400m of the cabinet. With all the surrounding estates already supplied with FTTC, providing the backhaul to the exchange presumably shouldn't be a great drama and power is obviously available too - I assume the cost per property passed would therefore be around £80 - does anyone have a view on how this rates on the scale of commercial attractiveness to Openreach?

There are two further cabinets in our locality which have not yet been upgraded also, about which I knew little before:
- 34 - states part of commercial 66% plan, but no vendor, phase or date listed!
- 43 - states not part of plan, but has a vendor, but no phase or date!
The majority of the footprint of these two cabinets are however in a Virgin Media cabled area so can access Virgin superfast broadband.

Cabinet 88 has just been FTTC enabled with BDUK funding.

And the following eight cabinets were already enabled by the commercial rollout:
- 35 - phase 6a
- 39 - phase 2
- 40 - phase 2
- 42 - phase 2
- 44 - phase 2
- 45 - phase 2
- 101 - phase 9b
- 104 - phase 9b

Many thanks

Edited by deleted (Tue 20-May-14 01:11:20)

VDSL2 will bring you no benefit if 5km of cable involved,

Whether the cab will get enabled, depends on where everyone else on that cabinet is located, Rare for a cabinet to be 5km away from every user.

But I was trying to ascertain whether or not the cabinet will not be upgraded, not whether this would improve the broadband service I get.

I don't think the website shows cabinet upgrades planned with BDUK funding.

I think the not part of commercial plan just means it is being done with government (BDUK) funding, it if is returning a vendor this means the PCP is already in place or planned to be so would assume it means FTTC will be available, hope so anyway..

In reply to a post by olicuk:

another cabinet due to be implemented not far away has an uplift of 409.02 (PCP 92 here) which doesn't seem to make sense if it's the multiplier of the current speed?

The multiplier of average speed in the postcode before, versus average speed in the postcode after.

I guess an average of 128Kbps increased to an average of 50Mbps would qualify.

Does anyone have any more detail on the phase dates though please?

The cabinet plans have always included phases - and as you noticed, the phase numbering matches up well with the public announcements.

Back at the start, deployment also tended to go in the same order as the phase numbering. However, once you get beyond phase 4 or 5, the phase number becomes almost irrelevant to the time of deployment: The project started moving exchanges & cabinets around "at a whim" (to us; they obviously had good reason internally).

I suspect that, as the rollout became more parallel, with more staff, it gave them some freedom.

it's around 375, all on a new-build (2008-2013) estate, all properties within about 400m of the cabinet.

does anyone have a view on how this rates on the scale of commercial attractiveness to Openreach?

On the face of it, the cabinet rates just fine.

The three biggest unknown factors are:
- Getting fibre there. Ducting to be cleared (if blocked) or installed (if full or unusable) can make it more expensive than the norm.
- Getting power there. A new supply usually costs around £1k, but the power companies charge you the full whack if they need something non-standard (such as a long supply connection, or they need to upgrade a transformer). For example, 3 cabinets in North Yorkshire got jeopardised because the power cost was £90k.
- Siting the cabinet. Above ground, there needs to be enough physical space for the cabinet within 100m. Below ground, there must be no services underneath the cabinet. I've also seen cabinets jeopardised because that combination could not be found.

There are also 2 problems that turn up in new-build areas:
- BT didn't know how big the cabinet was (or was going to get) at the time of planning, a fact that may continue to be ignored throughout the commercial rollout. At the most extreme, it ends up being ignored by BDUK because it ought to have been commercial, but is still ignored by BT. At best, the BDUK project takes time to identify these, and works with BT to make sure they get done (as seen by the Warwickshire project)

- The road hasn't yet been adopted by the local authority. In this case, BT have no right to install the cabinet, and the builder is not incentivised to let them (they just want the authority to take the road off their hands ASAP).

This checker shows 2 results for my post code.

13 ECI 96% 18.15 Phase 10a 06/04/2014 Part of the 66% Commercial Plan
22 ECI 3% 4.97 Phase 10a 30/09/2014 Part of the 66% Commercial Plan

---

Cab 13 is 200m away. Cab 22 is actually 1.7 miles away as the crow flys. I'm on cab 13 as I have FTTC. But just wondered if this was an Openreach database anomaly or is some poor sod on my street actually connected to Cab 22?

What I find interesting is that it seems to know what sort of cabinet is going to be provided. It lists my cabinet as Huawei even through no work has yet started to install it (other than replacement doors on the existing cabinet). They are still listing that particular exchange with an availability date of June which I suspect is rather unlikely as no work has started at any of the cabinets to install fibre twins yet (well as of the weekend when I last checked).

The uplift numbers should also be taken with a pinch of salt. They give 4.09 for a property that already has FTTC that used to get a solid full 8Mbps and now gets significantly more than 32Mbps.

What is uplift mean? Does it mean the higher the number the better upload speed? as I can see mine is uplift of 10.51?

As mentioned earlier, uplift = "The multiplier of the average speed in the postcode before upgrade, to get to the average speed in the postcode after the upgrade."

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

What I find interesting is that it seems to know what sort of cabinet is going to be provided. It lists my cabinet as Huawei

I expect this will turn out to be an artefact of the way the source data arrives at Adam.

That will be in the form of a spreadsheet; it wouldn't surprise me if the column were numeric, where zero meant Huawei... and rows where the deployment is unknown default to a zero value.

Is the 66% Commercial Plan the percentage that BT are funding, with the remaining being funded by bduk?
My postcode is not part of the 66% Commercial Plan and the serving cabinet has not been upgraded.

I did receive an email from nga.enquiries several months ago mentioning that my cabinet area has been resurveyed and it is due to get fttp. If this is the case, do you think that it would have been on this latest April 2014 spreadsheet?
Any ideas ?

BT have self-funded coverage of 66%, and the comment on the website refers to this section.

Remember that VM have self-funded coverage of 48% too. The two areas don't entirely overlap, so the total covered by these two amounts to around 78%, IIRC.

Phase 1 of BDUK subsidises coverage of the gap between 78% and 90% (though half the subsidy comes from local councils and the EU, while BT invests some too). The website refers to this part too.

Phase 2 of BDUK subsidises coverage of the gap between 90% and 95%, but little of the plans are set in stone yet. Some councils are trying to figure out how to tweak the funding to get closer to 100%.

FTTP appears so infrequently on the concrete plans, and has been pushed back massively before now, that I doubt if people can really tell you whether it would, or would not, have been in the spreadsheet.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

That will be in the form of a spreadsheet; it wouldn't surprise me if the column were numeric, where zero meant Huawei... and rows where the deployment is unknown default to a zero value.

Not sure... it shows a Huawei for one of the local cabinets which is only just on roadworks.org and doesn't exist yet, but that column is blank for the last cabinet on the exchange which isn't on roadworks.org yet.

If you put in CT188DP you'll see cabinet 2 which is in place and is a Huawei, and 5 which is on roadworks.org for a few weeks time and definitely isn't there yet which it also says Huawei for. CT214HB shows 6 and shows no make for that one.

It could be that they aren't going to do 6, but there are more people on it than 5 I think.

My cabinet is currently being updated as part of the Durham Digital rollout but nothing seems to have updated on the web anywhere yet. The new cab is up and I've seen Openreach guys working on it.

Thanks WWWombat.

We've been trying to identify any potential problems, and are fairly confident all those you've suggested are not applicable to our particular cabinet. We're in the process of setting up a website - fibre.everestpark.org.uk - to document the cabinet, and how obvious a candidate it is to be upgraded now, and have some evidence ruling out many potential problems on the site.

We've not widely publicised the site yet as we still have some photographs and graphics to add to it (eg/ shots of the 4 existing FTTC cabinets along the same main road with our cabinet or development in the same picture - all are within about 300m of our development (two within 100m of my house). Once that's done we plan to leaflet all residents to highlight the website and gauge how many people actually would expect to buy a fibre service it were available. We then plan to highlight the results to Openreach, the local council, and the developers of both phases of the development to try and get some action.

The PCP itself is on an area of grass verge besides a county council maintained road, and we fairly sure the grass surrounding the cabinet is maintained by the council. There is plenty of space for a fibre twin adjacent to the cabinet, and power 'on tap'. The second (final) phase of the development was approved in 2009 so eventual number of properties has been known for some time - all are now complete; the first phase was built before 2009.

Edited by deleted (Thu 29-May-14 23:50:09)

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

There are also 2 problems that turn up in new-build areas:
- BT didn't know how big the cabinet was (or was going to get) at the time of planning, a fact that may continue to be ignored throughout the commercial rollout. At the most extreme, it ends up being ignored by BDUK because it ought to have been commercial, but is still ignored by BT. At best, the BDUK project takes time to identify these, and works with BT to make sure they get done (as seen by the Warwickshire project)

- The road hasn't yet been adopted by the local authority. In this case, BT have no right to install the cabinet, and the builder is not incentivised to let them (they just want the authority to take the road off their hands ASAP).

Sage words, both issues had to be overcome by the campaign here.

We're now at the stage where the first Huawei 288 is going to be full in a month or two, having been enabled 6 months ago and spent over 2 months with no capacity on line cards.

My cabinet (19, on the Melrosegate exchange) shows the following -

Phase: Phase 11b
Deployment date: [blank]
Status: Part of the 66% Commercial Plan

so when might I get fibre?!

Given that the cabinet has now been provided how can one tell what sort of cabinet one has. Would be interesting to see if the information was accurate.

Also why would some cabinets on the exchange show with FTTC information in the BT Broadband availability checker but mine does not?

Some give estimates long before they go in, others start giving estimates just before or when they go live, just the way it is.

If you find a post by Robertos then he has a website with pictures of cabinets so you can tell what you have.