Cabinet Switch On

Hi - I'm connected to Cabinet 28 on the STONE (Staffordshire / West Midlands) Exchange. The Exchange went live for Fibre Broadband in January and I have a few friends elsewhere in the Town that have got FTTC Broadband. However my Cabinet went from an Availability Date of 31-Mar-2014 when the Exchange was enabled , to 30-Jun-2014 and has now jumped out to 30-Sep-2014. Very Frustrating! There is Virgin Cable through much of the town but not on my estate.

Can anyone give me any more information as to when my Cabinet might finally be turned on?

The dates OpenReach put up seem to be guestimates! I would have thought BT would have wanted to turn on our Cabinet early, but they sort of seem to be targeting the areas with Cable.

Are we just a captive audience and so low priority?

In the exact same boat, suffered constant delays and set backs, currently on 1mb max connection.

I checked roadworks around the time ours was meant to be available and there were 2 planned areas, they got permission granted for the duct laying, but didn't receive permission for placing traffic lights on the nearby road.

So delayed another quarter because council wouldn't let them use temporary traffic lights...or so it seems.

Did you happen to see anything similar on roadworks.org? might make the situation a little clearer

FTTC Cabinet has been sitting there for quite a while - maybe 8~10 months. Then late last year there was a flurry of roadworks running conduit to the copper cabinet plus along and across the road - looked like for power. Since the Exchange was enabled, the Cabinet's just sat there. We have quite good ADSL2+ speeds as its a new Estate with a relatively short run to the Exchange. I just thought we might get our Cabinet enabled quickly as probably almost all the houses on the Estate would have broadband and probably nearly all of those on a BT line.

I'm in Blythe Bridge (WMBLY), so not far away from you and in exactly the same boat, well perhaps a bit worse as we don't even have ADSL2+. The cabinets have been in place for about a year now,and the Exchange live for about 3 months.

I've been thinking of sending BTO a 1st birthday card for the "slippage", DSLChecker's original date was 31-Aug-13, its now 30-Sep-14

I thought I would email that Watchdog address that came out last week, and got a call at the weekend from a BT Retail guy, who was hopeless and just said it will be September.

Mark

I'm on the same exchange as you Mark (WMBLY) and am just as frustrated. Andrew (the site owner) even emailed and spoke to BT on my behalf and they could not give a specific reason why my cabinet had not been enabled!!!

The cabinet I am on was installed almost 12 months ago, and as you say we have had several live dates slip, and are now showing the next live date as Sept 2014 (a quarter end date, so not likely to happen.)

The annoying thing is those of us in this situation just want to know why there is a delay, and a better indication of when the cabinets will go live.

I also get annoyed when you go onto sites such as BT infinity, they offer you the chance to move to their current available broadband speed and they will then upgrade you to fibre when it is ready. Well I really do believe this is mis-selling a product if I had based my decision to move to another company based on the BT live dates for my cabinet I would have been paying for a far inferior product than I currently use (SKY LLU) for the past 9 months and in a contract which would be difficult to get out of.

BT really do need to get their act together on this, as clearly I am not alone in my frustrations.

Sorry for hi-jacking this thread Ian

Yes I also emailed Andrew and got the same answer as you, I have noticed that Western Power are doing a load of ducting work along Uttoxeter road in August, so perhaps, hopefully this is either the power for the fibre cabinets or unblocking the ducting to get the fibre blown through.

But yes very frustrated now by the lack of information, a slip of a year is not really a slip!!!

Mark