Fate of my cabinet

Hi all. My wanderings online searching for information has brought me to this forum. Does anyone have any info about cabinets that have been left behind in the roll out plans?

I live in Portishead on a new-ish estate (2007). Fibre broadband rolled in to town a few years ago and breezed through my area updating cabinets but mine was missed out. As the years have gone by I have seen my cabinet go from estimated date to the next estimated date and finally to "Under Review".

I eventually contacted my MP to chase this up as I was getting nowhere with OpenReach/BT. In the end I got a fairly generic response about my cabinet not meeting the standards of the economic modelling.

I'd like to know if anyone knows what these reason could be? There certainly are enough houses in the area for this to be viable. It must be an engineering problem?

Is there any hope? I've been waiting years now whilst the majority of my neighbours have great internet. Is there anything I or my fellow residents can do to expedite this process?

I am connected to cabinet 32 on the Portishead exchange. I'd appreciate any advice or insider knowledge!

Cheers,
Case

Yes around 24,000 are left out at this time.

Cabinet 32 & 33 are waiting on a survey and may be live by Mar 2017
Cabinet 19 & 20 are on the Devon and Somerset BDUK project plans

Cabinet 23 features in no plans at this time.

Your local BDUK project are the custodians of the upgrade work for cabinets that are uneconomic - CDS, aka Connecting Devon and Somerset.

The Portishead exchange appears to have been mostly upgraded 5 years ago, but CDS have 5 cabinets down for an upgrade, of which 3 have gone live. Cab 32 isn't amongst these ... and is instead amongst the 3 cabinets not down for an upgrade at all. Possibly the largest of those three too.

CDS would be the best people to contact to find out if your postcode has been included in their "white" list (ie you qualify for a BDUK-subsidised upgrade) or not. That is the first step.

Then you would want to ask them if your cabinet is in their plans for phase 1 ... but it probably isn't.

Unfortunately, that is where your easy options currently end.

Ordinarily, we'd next advise that you ask about the likelihood of being included in phase 2.

However, the atmosphere between CDS and the county councils is not good, and CDS recently failed to reach an agreement with BT for phase 2. The plans for future progress are not clear ... and you're not likely to get a clear answer right now.

Evening Andrew

Does ADSL Uptake have any bearing on the FTTC decisions?

That is if very few on Cab 32 have ADSL, it is considered very unlikely that many would upgrade to VDSL, bearing in mind also that on average at presnt, only 20% of subscribers in VDSL enabled cabinets have actually upgraded to VDSL.

Cab 32 is down on the list, just needs the survey doing, which means power, location and other factors, so if power company come back with a silly price tag might not happen.

ADSL take-up seems to not be a big factor, for the BDUK projects it is more about value for money, i.e. for the gap funding cost will it deliver a decent number of superfast and/or USC connections. There are some cabs I've seen upgraded that give very few superfast but they've lifted almost everyone from 1 Mbps or slower to the 10 to 20 region so no hard and fast rules.

For the county projects with their targets, a lot is down to how the original lists of cabinets got sorted, so it may seem a bit random with some that are left out, and it constantly confuses people why say 1 out of 19 cabs on an exchange is missed out, but every work done on another down the road to fix EO lines.

In short unless a project is working to 100% at a high speed there is going to be those left behind.

What list are you looking at?

it could also be challenging to site there are a number of cabs removed due to iinability to site

Thank-you for the information posted.

All very frustrating. Seems it would be easier to move house...

Again, thanks for the info

Case

I've noticed on the OpenReach website that they've updated their "Where and When" section. My cabinet used to be listed as under review but now states "In scope".

I'm assuming that this essentially means the same thing - part of a plan but still no dates of any note.


Does anyone know you know when this survey that was mentioned in earlier posts is due to be performed?

If the estimation of possibly live by Mar '17 is accurate I suppose I've only got a year left to wait!


Thanks for all the info - justing having some details makes a world of difference

It all depends, mine went from exploring solutions, to design to field survey all in the space of about 10 days.