BT Moving Fibre Goalposts

So up until this month when typing my HACKLETON postcode details into the Where & When checker I got a result saying CS - Coming Soon, and the accompanying file listed my exchange as due to go live by 31/12/14. Now, when I do a search, the result comes up PA - Planned Area, with a general estimate within 18 months.

Now, I appreciate that unforeseen issues may cause delays, but to go from a matter of two or three weeks to a vague 18 months in the future is taking the p*ss somewhat. There's no way that BT suddenly discovered this in the last couple of weeks and must have had an inkling for a while that the target dates would not be met. And to change the dates so heavily when it was so tantalisingly close, without any matter of explanation, is bordering on the cavalier and shows that BT must hold its customers in complete contempt. Such an extreme change should warrant some kind of explanation as a matter of course, if only out of common decency at least.

It would be useful if someone with links to BT could explain why the goalposts have not so much been moved as completely obliterated. For a communications company they seem pretty dire at actually communicating. Very poor.

Explanation posted over in this thread.

Sorry, I don't really agree with that.

I do have some sympathy for BT in that people may sometimes have unrealistic expectations, but there is a middle ground between giving precise dates and pie in the sky fabrications. My cabinet falls in the latter category.

They could quite easily give a prominent disclaimer that circumstances beyond their control may push back dates, but to go from estimating a matter of days to putting the whole thing back by 18 months just shows that they have chosen to simply make things up, and IMO that is not acceptable. It's treating the customer with contempt.

I don't see the point of publishing dates if they bear no resemblance to reality. If my cabinet was never intended to go live by the end of this year, then why give the customer false expectations? I would much rather they actually applied some thought and let me truthfully know that no action will be taken for x days or months, rather than get my hopes up that I can finally emerge from the digital stoneage into acceptable speeds, all the while knowing that this was never going to happen anyway. It's deceit, no other explanation.

If, within the last week or so, they encountered a massive problem that threw their planning into disarray, there would be no disgrace in admitting this to the public and letting people know the nature of the issue. But the way that they have done it, with the deadline looming within a matter of days, indicates that some pen pusher somewhere just got an automated flag that certain dates were about to become overdue, and simply entered new made up timescales just for the sake of having something in the field. Now that either shows them to be complete amateurs, or it demonstrates a breathtaking contempt for the consumer. Either way it doesn't reflect well on BT at all. They clearly view the customer as an inconvenience.

exactly like me - Wilstead exchange up until 24 hours ago was 'coming soon' 31/12/2014 now 'planned for' within 18 months. I wonder how many more exchanges have changed that were due by the end of the year

Perhaps no information until the cabinet is ready to take orders is the way to go.

Why do you consider the date given as being "pie in the sky"? Do you know everything that has happened relating to your cab? Possible wayleave problems, siting problems, power supply problems, blocked duct problems, etc. etc. and the know on effect of each. Have you ever project managed a really really large scheme such as the roll-out of FTTC nationwide. I suspect not.

I'm sorry but your post smacks more like one from a small child that has lost its sweeties.

Because unless all the problems you have mentioned have all occurred within the last two weeks, the balance of probability would indicate that the original timeline was never actually intended to be met. Otherwise, BT would not have left it until the last minute to change the dates. It's the cavalier way in which the delays have been handled which is the subject of my ire. Major problems should have been identified months ago and delays calculated then, not just before go-live. And the fact that my cabinet is not unique with this problem strongly supports the notion that the "delay" is more a case of the original dates being fictitious rather than any unforeseen problems causing havoc with planning.

I have managed large scale projects, albeit not in the telecoms sector. And I can tell you that it was not uncommon for there to be delays caused by events beyond my team's control. But I never allowed the project to come within days of the intended deadline only to announce there would be a further delay of 1.5 years. Weeks, maybe. A month or two, possibly. But one and a half years? If I had done I wouldn't have managed many more projects, I can tell you. No project manager worth their salt would be so complacent as to allow such a huge delay to occur within days of the completion date. They should have been picked up much earlier. The final days should be all about quality control and double checking, not uncovering a massive potential problem.

As for your personal comments, I'd say the bigger child was the one hiding behind the anonymity of their keyboard to throw out idiotic insults.

If it has to be an extreme then I should agree that no information is better than deception. The whole point of releasing dates is so that people can have a picture of how the rollout might affect them. But if a percentage of dates are clearly fabricated, then it puts the entire website under a question mark, since no-one can possibly tell beforehand whether or not their own dates are one of the real ones or one of the false ones.

I would suggest that anything scheduled within the next 3-6 months could probably be published, as BT should (if they are doing things properly), at least have a better insight on those. But something 18 months away should never have been allowed to have been given a Coming Soon date in the first place. It's just misleading. It can't be that hard to manage that much at least, can it?

While the projects yoiu managed will have had an end-date fixed in the contract, that is NOT the case for the FTTC / FTTP rollout.

Fibre broadband is simply an additional service that does not yet form part of the USO, therefore all dates are estimates and as long as Openreach can show they are making their best efforts to meet them there is no comeback.

Once it does form part of the USO then Openreach will have to abide by fixed go-live dates to avoid penalties, until that happens all that they could be found guilty of is false advertising and the ASA have already dealt with that.

I'm sorry but you are still coming across as not understanding the many variable and unknowns involved in such a massive project. Yes, BT could have managed the project better and kept you and everyone else informed at every step, both progress and hiccup, along the way. Doing so would however have involved additional cost, and as a result diverted scarce resources which could then have lead to further delays.

As for my comment about sounding like a small child deprived of its sweeties, I stand by that comment given your subsequent posts. Remember that there are many who currently have zero prospect of faster broadband, especially those in areas where there is no BDUK funding such as London. In my case I have helped raise over £18K to allow our development to get an FTTC service. I have to ask what have you done to get yours and how much did it cost you?

There is a difference between fabricated and unforeseen circumstances mean a small percentage shift further away.

I know why so many firms say nothing about things, and also why the council projects are often very tight lipped with roll-out plans.

Obviously having to push a cabinet back down the roll-out list is not good, but with limited resources and fixed budgets and penalties from council projects the remaining commercial cabinets are often going to be the ones slipping.

I agree there is a difference. My issue is not that there has been a delay: any large project will inevitably incur some and this often cannot be laid at the feet of the project team.

However, there is a difference between a project over running and one where the dates seem to be arbitrary. My cabinet has had an estimated end date of December 2014 for several months now. Given that we are only two or three weeks from that completion date, it seems rather shocking that something has happened to cause the date to be put back by one and a half years at this late stage. I would have assumed that the final weeks before going live would be given to testing and quality control, not major works, so it's inconceivable that they would have found something at this stage that would entail the project being put back by such a large span of time. That would more likely have happened earlier in the project cycle. This suggests that it's not an operational issue which has caused the delay, but more a planning one, and that perhaps the original dates were not realistic. I strongly suspect that my cabinet was never truly envisaged as going live this year, except only in a broadest of planning timetables. So this becomes an issue of communication, rather than project deliverables.

Why couldn't BT have been honest about the expected timeframes in the first place, instead of raising expectations to an impossible degree? And if the delay was truly caused by a large minute operational catastrophe, then why not have some means of communicating that? The way it has been done is the issue as far as I'm concerned, as it suggests quite strongly that the dates are guesses at best. And as already mentioned, if some of the dates are simply for show or PR, then it means that none of the dates given can be taken even as an estimate, which in turns raises the question as to why dates are published in the first place. It means that BT loses all credibility with their published data, as everything has to be taken with a large dose of salt. I don't see the point, quite frankly. What do they gain from this? They would have been far better off not promising an imminent delivery at all.

I appreciate that. I was simply responding to the question as to whether I had managed projects before.

Contractual obligations are not the issue here. Communication is. I can think of no conceivable circumstance beyond a natural disaster that would entail a cabinet's go live date being put back by 18 months just before it was due to be switched on. And if I'm wrong in that, then why can't BT publish this? And if I'm right, then I stand by my comments that it shows a cavalier attitude to the impact such a program may have on people. And it puts a question mark against any dates they publish at all.

and you are showing a lack of understanding of my posts, although I can't tell whether it's because you haven't bothered to read them properly or you are simply desperate to make a point.

At no point have I said that BT should keep the public informed about every little event in the project. I really don't know where you get that from. But if you can't see the difference between a minor delay of some weeks or months and effectively shelving the go live for a particular cabinet for more than a year just before the promised delivery date, then I'd say that it's you that's showing a level of immaturity in your understanding and it's a little rich for you to start throwing around allegations of infantile behaviour in your posts.

To try and make it simple enough for even you to understand, if the go live had been put back by, say, three months, I would have found it frustrating but I would also have understood that sometimes things happen. Alternatively, if the go live had never been promised to take place so soon in the first place, then my expectations would not have been raised and I would have been resigned to waiting my turn. However, putting the dates back by such an enormous amount IMO warrants an explanation of some kind. The way I see it, there are only two possibilities: either something fairly catastrophic has happened to the cabinet or linked areas, in which case BT has my sympathy, or the published dates are simply an alternative to leaving the field empty, in which case BT doesn't and my earlier comments stand.

But in both cases the lack of any feedback for such a hefty change has compounded the issue. If the former, then I don't think it too much to ask that BT let people know why they've had to have let them down and I wouldn't think any worse of them for being the victim of circumstance. If the latter, then it's basically an admission that the website is not fit for purpose and the question remains why is it there in the first place?

Get it now?

OK so here is an example.
Ducts found to be blocked - simply job - supposedly

Unfortunately ducts were put in 1950's on unregistered land
Since then boundaries have moved and the ducts now appear to be under a boundary hedge put in by a house owner.
Current owner knows nothing about BT ducts on his property nor did he put the hedge in, nor was he responsible for determining the boundaries....... but is not going to let BT under any circumstances dig up his pristine cut hedge for get at them.

Well that is going to be good for a year of lawyers arguing over it in itself.
and the lawyers will be watching carefully for BT to make even the slightest allegation that the problem is the householder - so BT will say nothing whatsoever.

...and yes I do know of a hedge recently planted directly on top of a BT duct line on private property despite me telling them what they were doing.

either something fairly catastrophic has happened to the cabinet or linked areas,

This often happens. The main culprits being power supply where costs can spiral out of control if the power company claims the need to install a new transformer or blocked ducts where waits often well in excess of three months can be involved due to the necessary notice for road closures or the like.

Just be grateful that you should in due course get faster broadband. For many, both rural and urban, faster broadband is a distant pipe dream.

I CAN understand your frustration. BT were perhaps in error in making any advance notification and instead should perhaps instead hold back any notice until just a few weeks before the go live date. However just think how frustrating it would be to not know what was intended. Judging how much information to give and at what point requires a delicate balance and would no doubt cost more than the present system where a few estimates turn out to be wildly adrift. Personally I think they've got the balance about right but it does require, patience, tolerance and understanding from their potential customers.

Council can put a hold on non emergency roadworks so you can enjoy a new road surface. Have seen this add many months for some cabinets

Or power people have said £15k to connect power now or wait until we do some other work next year and it will be just £4k

Or out of the 58,000 cabs that are live you are in the 2% were original planning got it wrong

Have chased over 100 cabs like this and reasons are varied

More resources from the BT side might help but that makes budgets even harder. The shoestring nature was clear when lots of places slated for FTTP saw the plans dropped

shure

so assumiing your exchange is Hackleton (this is a 742 premise exchange so lucky to be being done at all at that size) and will be a child of a main exchange (proably northampton or somewhere like that)-- i assume it being covered under Northants BDUK -- there are any number of reasons for delay -- my main concern would be how much coverage will actually be deploiyed - so the exchange coud be enabled but your cab not-- suggest you look at your local authority to see if you will even get anyt benefit ? as they are responsblle -- your exchange is probably imiles away from the spine and probably will require extensive civils to ger the the exchange (in KM's), including road work, TMA requiremens , blocks ducts , Civil works blockanes by LA in December, (spine probably got to come from northampton or somewhere line that) - the post suggests you have no understanding of the comliexixty of the programme have not even spoken to the LA who are responsbile for the project -- if i was in that exchange i would be concerned would be how much coverage will actually be deploiyed - so the exchange coud be enabled but your cab not so you could find out you actualy dont get any benefit at all

Edited by deleted (Sat 13-Dec-14 19:53:15)

My contact in Bedford Borough Council has had an email fired at him today asking what this means.

roadworks.org says that BT are doing duct unblocking work in Wilstead on 16th-18th December, I have been told that a duct blockage is the last hold up for Wilstead exchange so this could be the work needed to sort it out.

I take this as a very bad behaviour from BT after the ASA ruling, but I am entirely unsurprised. As BDUK has put cash into getting Wilstead enabled then anything about it should be public knowledge and BT should have a large rocket put up them if they try to hide it.

FYI

dates for wilstead will be drived by Beds BC -- its not only govermentt by BT monies in BDUK contracts (most choose to ignore that) -- so check to see when the actual date as all decisions aroud any BDUK cabs you shoudl be speaking to the the LA -- Please note that is the exchange being enabled 0-- you will need to check with La to see your postcode actually gets any beneift there are anumber od reasons -- actually getting permissions to do street wiorks and TMA requirement is getting harder and harder

LA's are very careful about what they tell residents around BDUK -- dont forget this an excnage enablement -- you will need to find who actually benefits from the enablment

Mine exactly the same 31-12-2014. I am not holding my breath despite my cab being wired to the adjacent new fibre cab over 4 months ago. Every engineer I see working on it seems to thinks months still. Probably a little like a hospital booking everyone in at 2.00pm, making you wait all afternoon while they work through everybody.

In this case I have a contact in the Council, he tells me that the initial batch of cabinets for SMWLS are all installed and ready but there is a blocked fibre duct that is preventing it going live before the end of 2014. He said the blockage affected all FTTC cabinets on the exchange so I assume that it must be a common duct from somewhere. roadworks.org shows work to fix a blocked duct is scheduled for 3 days from Tuesday.

My village is all served from Cabinet 5, a new Huawei 288 line FTTC cabinet was stood in early October and power was connected the same week. I saw the copper links through to the D-side lines being put in about a week later. There are 4 other similar cabinets that were stood and connected up in the same month in 2 or 3 other local villages and a couple on another exchange just a couple of miles away. All are shown as Phase 3 of the local BDUK plan, available in January to June 2015.

As far as I can tell the power is off inside the cabinet, no fan noise with my ear against the vents.

Edited by rippedcotton (Sun 14-Dec-14 23:47:01)

The other day our exchange WHALEY BRIDGE was listed as December 2014, now it's listed as March 2015. It's really annoying considering the next exhange over has had Fibre for over two years.

The only real valid one there is blocked ducts. Wayleaves should be sorted out before you have a scheduled date as should cabinet siting and power. If BT do not do that they are not doing any proper planning which my explain why their rollout is frequently a mess. There should be a site survey to look at any potential issues before putting into a project rollout plan

If you think blocked ducts are the only cause of delays you really do need to think again. Delays in the provision of power are one of the major grounds for delay. In addition the cost of a power connection can sometime wildly exceed the initial estimate resulting in the commercial viability of an upgrade becoming unviable. Negotiation in this area can take many many months before a resolution is found or BT feel they need to walk away and abandon the upgrade.

A good example is when the trench for the power is opened up and the records do not match what the ground looks like causing confusion/delays.

Have heard of one cabinet where all the surveys said fine, but on digging and unmarked utility and not found with the usual testers was encountered, meaning a cab may not fit.

The scale is such that there are approx. 1000 cabinets going live each month. So if we are seeing just 20 with delays each month, that is pretty good management, not perfect but perfection to reduce a 2% error might involve more expense, e.g. building more slack into the programme or employing more people.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps no information until the cabinet is ready to take orders is the way to go.

This is what Superfast Cymru do, but this also generates much frustration and complaints.

It seems companeis can only do either:

a. give no information out at all, or
b. give a single etimated date which can then change without warning or explanation.

It's like they exist iin an information black hole and using technology from the sixties to manage their information, and gives the impression of complete dispogasation and not knowing what they are doing.

No-one's taken an approach that says "What information would I like if was a customer and waiting for a service?".

Something I've suggested before, here I think and to Superfast Cymru (but they are far too stubborn to listen).

Upload a list of cabinets with current esitimated dates and a brief status message.

It's not beyond anyone in their IT team to do this, considering the impressive interactive web sites that they have already done that are also extremely uninformative and useless, and the information must be there somewhere sitting in some electronic format, maybe even as low-tech as a spreadsheet as I can't believe they do everything on pen and paper.

Even if a brief status message does not exist in a format that is publicly displayable, it is a really simple matter to create such a field and whoever then updates the date in the system can just type in a brief summary. Or would this take up to much of their time?

This would help to resolve all the dissatisfaction and perceived lack of information and action.

I'm an an analyst/programmer myself - therefore that's why I can analyse this problem in great detail and produce a techincal specification that will satisfy the customer....but it's not rocket science is it?

Superfast Cymru dont concern themselves with accurate information or facts or anything so mundane. They are far too busy generating positive PR spin on a chaotic and patchy roll out.

This is the organisation that informed my AM that new planning consent requirement was delaying a resiting of a fibre twin some 2 months AFTER the new siting was agreed between Openjoke and the Local Planning Authority - AND several weeks after the planners told me that there were NO planning issues preventing the cabinet being stood.

At best Superfast Cymru is an incompetent waste of money, I will keep private my personal view of them - suffice it to say I consider them an expensive gravy train that should be disbanded.

The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

So the more info they give out there will always be someone trying to pick holes in it, moaning about how it is not enough or sad to say just too thick to understand that an estimate is not a guarantee.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries.....and then we get the moans most probably from the same people about why line rental/council tax keeps on going up.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish. Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

In reply to a post by zom22:

The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

So the more info they give out there will always be someone trying to pick holes in it, moaning about how it is not enough or sad to say just too thick to understand that an estimate is not a guarantee.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries.....and then we get the moans most probably from the same people about why line rental/council tax keeps on going up.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish. Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

Exactly.

I wonder how many of these people have actually tied managing a project of 1% of the size of FTTC rollout let alone trying to manage interfaces to numerous external subcontractors or public bodies. It is not easy ...

I once had someone "moaning" about one of my major programmes - he was invited to follow me for a week. He lasted three days before he told me he then realised what was actually going on.

In reply to a post by zom22:

The trouble is that in today's world there are always some people trying to make trouble.

The touble is that in today's worl,d there are always businesses to hide thier sloppy management and the way they waste peoples' money.

All of this takes up valuable time of staff - or you need to employ more to service these inquiries

Are you serious? How many more staff do you think it would take to update a one-sentence status description each time they had to make a change to the date or status within their own internal systems? Do you think whoever updates a date and presses Enter then needs to write down a brief sentence on a bit of paper and then hand it to a new person who they will employ specifically for the purpose of going into the same record and finding the record that has just been updated by the previous person and then updating it to add the description that has just been given to them on paper by that previous person?

They could emply this person from the other people that will no longer be needed to service the existing enquiries that keep coming in becuase of a lack of information being publicised. Yes, putting out a status update on a web site along with the latest estimated date would actiually SAVE a lot of time in dealing with enquiries, and it would also save the time of staff on this forum too who chase up hundreds of status updates on cabinets becuase of enquirie. In fact, the vast majority of enquiries seen on Superfast Cymru's Twitter are things like "When is my cabinet being done?", "What's the delay?", etc. They jsut don't put this information out on the web site. So they have a couple of staff employed specifically to answer these queries on Twitter, or more specifically to cut and paste the standard reply "Sorry, we don't give out any information because things can change". Presumably, they can't be bothered to update things when things do change.

I do the same - if people want an estimate of time I'll give it to them. If they keep on coming back or I keep on being asked endlessly I start to put out a load of rubbish.

Great customer service you provide, to give people rubbish. I take it that if you are delayed on a job then you don't bother telling people (you keep the date a secret) or you just make the change and accept them to swallow it without explanation (maybe because you keep allowing other work to leapfrog it therefore you don't want them to know the real explanation), and if you keep putting it back and putting it back then they are not supposed to get fed up with you and complain?

Which do they want - me to produce umpteen status estimates or to actually do the job?

In an outfit like BT, engineers do have to produce logs and reports on things that they have done, or have not been able to do, and give reasons. In fact, any business needs to have job sheets and logs and things like that (don't you?). Presumably, this information is then input into computer systems by people who are not actually doing the physical job, therefore the time taken to put in status updates and publicise to the customer does not affect the physical job being done.

Are you actually in business? You don't seem to have a very good idea of how business works.

Edited by deleted (Tue 16-Dec-14 10:00:20)

For all the moans though am seeing a good level of activity with regards to Exchange Only lines and FTTP is popping up.

Here in lies the problem until its 100% at superfast there will be complaints, and am willing to bet that even if a 100% goal was announced it would be too slow, or people complain about the order it is being done in.

Some of the PR does not help, and have fed back on some real gaffes when I have heard them to get people better educated. Keeping an eye on the announcements is a long job, but it needs to be done to keep an eye on the 'facts' that published.

I think you may be missing my point. It's not that there has been a delay, it's the way the delay has unfolded.

Any of the above examples you have given would have been apparent long before the final implementation date. If e.g. they only started planning roadworks a week or two before intending to go live I suggest they need a new project manager. This is something that should have been arranged months ago. And if it had been, then I wouldn't have been so upset, as I fully accept unforeseen things may happen.

But my point is that the timing of the delay strongly suggests that nothing unforeseen has occurred. They have simply moved a placemark with no thought as to how that might affect people. And that is why I am angry. It's apparent that my exchange should never have been on the Coming Soon lists in the first place, so all they have done is got people's hopes up for nothing.

And I have been in touch with my LA. They are not aware of any reason why the delay has taken place.

And, finally, if I am wrong and some major issue did happen just days before go live, serious enough to delay the implementation by 18 months, then I maintain that such a significant delay should warrant some kind of explanation. It's not acceptable to pull the rug out from under people at such a late stage without any information whatsoever.

In your experience do the power people make such late demands for connection just before implementation? Shouldn't the agreements to cover this be made well in advance? It seems a little odd to me that such an important aspect be left until a week or two before implementation. I doubt any power company will do anything without more notice than that.

In 99% of cases the planning and checks do match exactly what is found in the ground.

The complaints and shifting date cabinets seem to be perhaps just 1% of the cabinets going live each month, which seems to be around 1000 per month at current rates.

Maybe if they doubled or trebled the number of staff in the planning and checking side better dates would be possible, but then there would be more questions about BT wasting money and not delivering value for money in terms of what is delivered. 100% perfection in planning generally means more time or more money or both.

I'm sure this does happen. But it strikes me that any project manager who doesn't scope this kind of thing out before committing to a specific go-live date needs to go back to school. Any boundary issues should be handled well in advance, and if it turns out that they might delay the project then this should come to light well before the go live date

I disagree that the only alternatives are information on every step or no information at all. If something happens to cause a significant delay then explanations are warranted. And a brief explanation should not cost a lot in time or resources.

Have they committed to a specific go live date? Or just provided an estimate?

I think you misunderstand. I'm not looking for 100% accuracy. I fully understand delays may occur. If my cabinet had been put back by e.g. three months I would have just shrugged my shoulders and hoped for the best. But can you not see the different frustration levels an 18 month delay will cause, especially when only announced a week or two before expected go live?

I understand the frustration, but given the scale and speed of roll-out and the limited resources that seem to be employed, I am not sure without lots more resources that things will improve.

There is a distinct feeling that as with some of the council sides they may just clam up and give no information, since its easy to field off no information moans, than it is wrong information moans.

In principle you are right, but the time it takes, which costs money and detracts one or more person from actually getting things done, to deal with the questions and criticism from the many people that do not like the explanation is where the costs/resources become drained.

Back in 2010 and 2011 the Openreach overall schedule planning spreadsheets were leaked two or three times. I expect up to date ones exist but the leakers were shot at dawn.

It was clear from those that the planning was by area, where an area comprised many postcodes.

Each area was given a "Phase" in which it was expected to take place. There were no dates given for the phases, though I assume somewhere there were provisional dates for those.

The rollout did prove to follow the phases reasonably well. However, occasionally an area would not be done at the same time as others in the same phase, and although it retained its phase number several later phases could complete before this one. It didn't get a new phase number.

The quarter end dates we see I think initially arose from the phase dates. That would explain the quarter by quarter slippage we used to see, as the re-scheduling of incomplete areas/postcodes, (as some of any particular area might have been completed), would sensibly occur near quarter-end.

Scheduling plus detailed research and planning at the at the cabinet level would not occur until close to the start of the relevant phase. There is no way a national cabinet schedule could ever have been created, due to the unknown unknowns.

... there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

I imagine the reason so many dates, it seems nearly all, have now slipped so much is because of the number of infill and BDUK projects now running. That makes it even harder to give reasonably accurate dates than during the bulk rollout.

I don't know about that. They already have a Twitter feed. How hard could it be to provide cabinet updates? I agree Q&A would be very time consuming, but releasing info is the matter of a moment and should take barely any resource.

so, in the latest twist, the site has been updated again to Coming Soon within the next 6 months. So in the space of three weeks we've gone from imminent, to not happening for 18 months, to going live in the next six months.

While I'm happier in principle with the thought that we may go live within half a year, I can't help but be more than a little sceptical, especially as according to Superfast Northamptonshire the information they have from BT is that it will be July at the earliest. So that's 7 months minimum, then.

I won't hold my breath

Thanks for the info RobertoS.

Believe it or not, I do understand the issues BT may be coming up with and I don't blame them for circumstances beyond their control. But I also think that once they take the decision to publish dates then they have an obligation to make them as accurate as possible. And this includes giving explanations for serious delays. It's all about being professional and managing expectations. I also don't think it would be that hard to do. An extra field denoting reason for delay is the work of a moment.

have you spoken to your local authority as this is a BDUK cab and not commercial nd all updates a re managed by the BDUK local project

for an BDUK enabled ares you shoudl be looking at the Local authority broadband website

I have spoken to the Superfast Northamptonshire team. They get their information from BT, who told them it would probably be end July 2015 at the earliest, which doesn't tie in with the dates on the website, of course.

They also told me they have no control over the schedule. That lies with BT.

I just made this post in General Chatter:-

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

It looks to me as though they did a "Replace all" of the field for the outstanding ones, to give time to put the actual new dates in which they couldn't manage by the end of 2014.

Now they are doing that.

Earlier, did you mean 18 months, or was it the June 2015 that everybody else seems to have got?

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 18-Dec-14 19:53:57)

They've changed it again and I can't quite remember. I'm sure I read 18 months somewhere. I do know it moved from Coming Soon to Planning & Survey and back to Coming Soon again, which would support your guess that they did a blanket change for all due cabinets while they worked out where they were exactly.

Which is a variable feast, some are excellent, others are devoid of almost all information beyond "We have a BDUK project in n phases".

Hi,
Just used the new checker. Entered my BT number, it's now displaying: Coming Soon. Previously it was: Under Review.
CMSTE 24

Does this means that BT will be installing a new fibre cab?

My status has moved from Exchange Enabled to Coming Soon

Most odd as the final Cabinets for the village were installed this week and all build out work is now completed. Is this normal?

NDPEM 3

Edit: Must have been a glitch, Back to Exchange enabled

Edited by deleted (Fri 19-Dec-14 17:58:40)

In reply to a post by max360:

Hi,
Just used the new checker. Entered my BT number, it's now displaying: Coming Soon. Previously it was: Under Review.
CMSTE 24

Does this means that BT will be installing a new fibre cab?

Now back to: UR -Under Review!!!

My Cab did the same earlier - got briefly excited for an hour!