FTTC for Schools (Wales)

Ferryside exchange is scheduled for upgrade to fibre in March 2015 under the Superfast Wales programme. A few days ago I spotted an Openreach engineer working with fibre cable in the centre of the village in an underground chamber adjoining what I believe to be cabinet 1. Naturally, I asked him if this was in connection with the fibre upgrade of this cabinet which serves my home. He said it was only for the school about 50 yards away and he was unaware of the timetable for the exchange.

Do schools connect to a street cabinet like other property? If so, does this mean that fibre has already been laid to this cabinet location? Is the FTTC to Schools programme completely independent of the Superfast Wales programme?

I suspect the underground chamber was being used for routing the fibre rather than anything to do with the cab.

The school is probably using a dedicated leased fibre - this technology has been around for years and has no relation to the FTTC/FTTP products that have more recently been implemented.

The technology the school is using is also significantly more expensive and out of the reach financially for most individuals.

Thanks for the explanation, Ian. That makes sense.

I work in a large secondary school in Pembrokeshire and we've had 2 x 100meg fibre lines for at least 8yrs. I can confirm that they are direct from the exchange and our network joins these in a comms Cabinet in our Point of Presence (PoP) room. They are a lot more expensive than the Fibre BT is providing.

I seem to recall the name Updata being associated with "public sector" fibre access in Pembrokeshire

Updata were recently sold to Capita. It will be interesting to see if BT can make inroads to this area now they are rolling out fibre to some parts of some exchanges in Pembrokeshire.

Capita over the last 5 years have bought at least 2 companies that do this sort of networking, Updata being the latest.

There are quite a few others as well. Certainly Synetrix and Xpert Systems were both active around this area for schools. And that is not counting the big companies like Virgin and RM that do this sort of schools connectivity. And spreading the net wider there are loads of companies that do business lease lines (including the likes of Zen).

Fibre is possible almost anywhere and even remote islands are possible if your pocket is deep enough

And sometimes that pocket needs to be very deep. We did have a quote for a school years ago that had an installation cost of £372,000. They were about 6 miles from the exchange and the fibre had to be run over poles all the way.

Needless to say we decided not to provide it.

I know Logicalis have a big programme in Wales for ethernet circuits to most if not all schools to provide them with 100meg circuits - the engineers were probably cabling for this. It has nothing to do with FTTC it will be a dedicated fibre from the exchange.

Poles all the way? Why?

If the poles were already there that would be cheap but I'm guessing in your example they weren't.