Is my cabinet really being upgraded in 2014?

Can anyone help, like others I'm trying to plan my broadband. My cabinet, 30 on EMBELPE (Belper) is in Derbyshire's BDUK plan for Phase 2 2014. Anyone got information as to when it really might be?

Seems not.

Have you contacted the Derbyshire project team, as they would be the best to ask about a date, also what does the BT wholesale adsl checker say for your phone number or address?

If the FTTC cab is not live by now, its very likely to be Q1 2015 before its live.

Edited by deleted (Thu 11-Dec-14 19:15:10)

It's worth pointing out that BT work to Financial Year quarters. So BT Q1 is April-May. I realise you probably mean Calendar Year Q1, but things could get confusing .

Perhaps post a postcode and someone may be able to find something out

Thanks for the replies. I've tried contacting the Derbyshire BDUK team by email and the reply is that "because of Government cuts they do not have the staff to answer questions". Hope that doesn't mean nobody's administering the contract. I was hoping for some inside information. I realise that things can go wrong but if the cabinet is scheduled for 2014 the contract must be running late.
As regards a postcode one reply asked for, it's DE56 2TR but if people don't have access to cabinet level information, they won't be able to help.

I shouldn't count on it. My exchange was listed as going live by 31/12/14 when I last checked it two weeks ago, but on looking today it's been put back 18 months. 18 months!. So I think the dates on the rollout plans appear to be generated by one of the National Lottery computers. I don't think you can rely on them at all, unfortunately. It doesn't appear that there's actually any science behind the estimated dates, just guesswork.

Remember the exchange date is meaningless since not all cabs on an exchange are necessarily upgraded and even if they are it is unlikely that all will be completed on the same date. The only date that is relevant is the date when the cab to which your phone line is connected is to be enabled.

Yes but my CABINET was in BDUK as Phase 2 2014, the exchange has been enabled for some time (year?)

My cabinet - number 3, if you want to know - was listed in the Where and When site as going live this month, when suddenly, within days of alleged activation, out of the blue they moved it back 18 months. Sam Knows still lists it as 31/12/14, which shows how sudden the change has been. Clearly the "planners" aren't worthy of the name. I would understand a few month's delay due to unforeseen circumstances, but this tells me that the original date was never intended and simply a convenient placemark. And if they can do it with mine, they can do it with others. Unfortunately, the dates BT gives are simply a work of fiction and cannot be trusted under any circumstances.

Some places encounter delays. Some of these delays are of an extended length. This can't be helped, nor planned. The planners, of course, know that delays are going to be encountered somewhere, but never know where.

In the past, the date thing worked differently: a cabinet was given a placeholder date that was one of 4 dates: end of December, March, June or September. These end-of-quarter dates just signified the quarter during which the cabinet was expected to go live.

Many did go live in the quarter ... wherupon the placeholder date suddenly changed into a real date with about a weeks's notice. But those with delays didn't get this update; they encountered the process you've just seen: between 1 and 2 weeks ahead of the end of the quarter, every placeholder was automatically pushed back to the end of the following quarter. Even if the cabinet was just shy of being given a proper go-live date within the original quarter.

Everyone knew that placeholders were meaningless until they changed to a real date. Some people complained loudly. And a subset of people, with cabinets with long delays, went through this quarterly agony for over a year.

Someone decided they didn't like BT publishing dates in this way, so complained to the ASA that these published dates were effectively an advert, and that BT needed to be more accurate. ASA agreed.

As anyone seasoned could have told them, though, the law of unintended consequences came about. Rather than making the dates more accurate, the opposite happened: BT decided against the extra cost of the project management work to make the dates more accurate, so changed the system: the published dates were given a precautionary allowance that saw them all pushed back 6 months to a year. Cabinets still went live whenever they were ready, but the dates attached to them became meaningless.

All in all, the dates became fictional so that no-one could complain to ASA.

Hello

I am in the same boat as you. I am on cabinet 22 on the Belper exchange.
My postcode is DE56 1BX. My cabinet was showing as due for the first half of 2014, then it moved to 31-12-14 and now suddenly it is "under review"!!

It is just so frustrating.

Delays do occur. I understand that. I just wish we could have more information.

Hopefully we'll get better news in the New Year.

I'm on Cab 12 on the Belper Exchange. Like others on here I've seen the date shift repeatedly and no reason given by OpenReach. At the end of last year it shifted from 31/12/2014 out to 30/09/2015; but I have zero confidence in that projection.

It can't be planning permission, this was approved back in April 2013.

I've emailed the OpenReach CEO (Joe Garner) to ask him about the repeated failures in project management on this exchange. If there are genuine reasons for delay they should publish the details and what they plan to do to remedy the situation.

About a month ago BT OpenReach shifted the availability date from Sept 2015 to March 2016 for cabinet 12 in Belper. When I originally checked it was April 2013. Their project management is absolutely hopeless. BT could save loads of money by not employing their current project managers and instead using a blindfolded amateur darts player throwing in the general direction of a calendar.

I've actually achieved a direct personal dialogue with Joe Garner on this topic. He thinks he's done a wonderful job given that the fastbroadband "fibre covers 90% of the UK" What utter tosh!!

orchardman some contrext I think might be uselful and might bring some facts to your comment

FYI there are 92,000 street boxes in uk if which your is one

nearly 50,-000 of those covered by BT as part of commercial programme in 5 years
another X thousands delivered under BDUK in around 3.5 years -- sure mcsalffor might be able to give a view (but lest say its another 25,000 or more which ir could well be -- think there were around 200 this week alone

you box not funded by government so there has to be some prioritisation any hiccup some as power cost , wayleave objection and the cab can lose it slot (for 1 - 3 years or ever) - wonder if there was an objection or issue around siting

that means the business has deployed well in excess of ciria 60 - 70 cab delivered each day and every day in the last 4 -5 years

you do cabs that have contractual milestones before ones that don't

Quote all the figures you like. There is no getting away from the facts on the ground. A rolling six month slippage over a period of 38 months is strongly indicative of very poor project management.

If BT OpenReach could not deliver until March 2016 it should have said so in December 2012 and not publish optimistic guesswork. It has distorted the priority planning process.

There's no wayleave problem, no planning permission problem, no blocked ducts, and no power problem. I've checked and I also challenged Joe Garner to prove differently.

I don't mind being in a queue, it is the poor project management I object to.

67,830 live FTTC as of today I believe, and some 843 FTTP areas.

The reality of what this means is over on http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/

90.1% fibre based coverage (this means speeds from 0 to 330 Mbps).
If you use a 30 Mbps or faster filter this drops to 85.4%
If you use a 24 Mbps or faster filter this drops to 86.2%

Given the UK has some 27.5 million households this means there will be around 4 million who feel that when people talking about improving coverage people are lying, the actuality is that it is not lies but the fact that coverage is NOT uniform when many appear to believe it is meant to 90% of every community rather than a national average.

On the delayed commercial cabinets the BDUK work is also a big reason why some are so late, i.e. to ensure contract targets are hit some commercial cabs are effectively on hold.

I would point out that our data analysis only includes cabinets that have gone live, not those where it is expected to arrive, around 1,400 cabinets with figure go live dates, some commercial some BDUK based.

So yes UK is doing well on coverage, but for those so far missing out it feels worse than four years ago.

This is the thing the figures show that some 4 million households are in a similar position, so you are not alone.

The excessive dates long dates in the future are the result of previous complaints where for cabinets that were on the plan, but no resources available to complete the job or start it in some cases that the data kept slipping every quarter. People complained, so dates a year or two years away were then used so that the project planners could be more certain of delivering within target.

The question is with thousands of cabinets still to deliver, who should get theirs done first. Maybe if the BDUK process had started a year later you would have seen your cabinet actually delivered.

If people don't like the Openreach plan then there are alternatives, but so long as everyone always has a go at BT/Openreach they will continue to be seen as the only delivery method available. TalkTalk FTTH, Virgin Media Project Lightning and others are looking at the commercial areas with a view to serious competition.

I've looked at the alternatives. They all, including Virgin, seem to require a two to three year commitment and a monthly spend of £350+ ex VAT Giving a minimum commitment of around £14,000. then magically we'd get fibre in 50-80 working days. If we had accurate planning figures from BT we could have made a decision in 2013. Ironically we have a major fibre route passing within 1.5 metres of our front door and the Exchange is less than 500 metres away.

The current position we (and four million other households) don't know when it will be delivered. Even Joe Garner doesn't know.

so you currently must get around 15 - 17 m/bps then from copper

The Government plans for the final 5% do not involve BT in any of the trials either, so if the BT planners were to decide to drop cabinet from commercial plan totally you would be looking at one of those.

At 500m you should be getting about the same download speeds I actually get from FTTC

Yep I get 18mbps inward but only 1 mbps in the opposite direction. I try to run training across it, but it is not always good at the client end need something like 40/40 to do the job.

Ironically I'm eligible for up to £3000 rollout voucher but that BDUK scheme will expire before OpenReach delivr, if they don't slip their dates again.

I rather suspect BT would prefer to delay to gain the leased line income albeit indirectly. To think in Stockholm you can get 1Gbps Synchronous for 25 Euro a month.

Can get Gigabit for similar prices in the UK just need to know where to look, e.g. Gigaclear, Hyperoptic, B4RN, TalkTalk, Sky

Not spent a lot of time looking at the Stockholm coverage, but willing to bet there will be people like you if you look hard enough

See above: 18 mbps down and 1 mbps up; contended of course.

The cabinet checker estimate for FTTC is 80/20 but I might as well be on the moon so far as BTOR planning is concerned.

If they are having problems getting the cables in place (alongside the existing Fibre run) I'm happy to pull the cables, I have the right lube, winch and torque gauge. It should take at least 3 hours, including the mandatory cups of tea.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

On the delayed commercial cabinets the BDUK work is also a big reason why some are so late, i.e. to ensure contract targets are hit some commercial cabs are effectively on hold.

Don't we know it

Paul