Kentish Town Exchange Cabinet 29

Just posting this for anyone else who wants to know the FTTC status of Kentish Town exchange cabinet 29.

Up until late September 2014, the checker at https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html said that FTTC should be available from Kentish Town exchange cabinet 29 on September 30th 2014. A few days before this date (I was checking frequently, itching to order � I had even picked out an ISP and hardware), it changed to: �At this time we cant [sic] provide a delivery date for this cabinet.�

I contacted Openreach at the time to find out what was happening. Three weeks later, I received this reply:

Thank you for your email. Apologises for the delay. Regarding the delay for KENTISH TOWN exchange cabinet 29.

The estimated completion date that we have for this cabinet is late January 2016. At the moment the project is in DSLAM phase. I have gone through LLUMS and found work is in progress.

Please check this case with us again on December 2015.

So I waited.

As it is now December 2015, I contacted Openreach again. Their reply was disappointing:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us.

You are connected to KENTISH TOWN exchnage cabinet 29 .

I am really sorry, but having investigated our network data, we are not currently able to supply you with a fibre broadband service from our existing network.

I appreciate this is disappointing news.

I would like to reassure you of our ambition to bring superfast broadband to as much of the UK as rapidly as possible.

We are pushing ahead to complete one of the most ambitious and largest rollouts of fibre broadband anywhere in the world.

Our £3bn investment coupled with the government�s BDUK programme means fibre currently passes 80% of homes and businesses in the UK.

We are working in partnership with the majority of councils across the UK to increase the fibre broadband footprint to over 95% by 2017.

We appreciate this is of little comfort if you cannot access the superfast fibre network yourself.

Unfortunately your property is not currently included in the network roll-out because after our initial survey, it was established that this cabinet would not be viable for Openreach to upgrade.

However, this is not necessarily the final position. Plans do change as our network grows and it�s worth keeping an eye on our website (http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/) where we publish the very latest fibre coverage information.

For further information regarding Government initiatives within your area please visit http://superfast-openreach.co.uk/rural-broadband/ which covers all areas and not just rural.

Another possible option is to think about getting together with neighbours or a local community group and raising the money to help build the network yourself.

We do have options for privately funded fibre cabinets in some places. We cannot always guarantee this will be feasible in all cases, but we would be willing to look at it if this is an option that you would like to pursue.

If you would like to contact the team, please email [email protected].

Thank you again for taking the time to write to us and although I appreciate this is not the answer you are looking for,

I hope it can help you understand that we have a real commitment to delivering superfast broadband to the people and businesses of Britain.

I am sorry that we have not yet been able to provide you with this service and we really do hope that this position will change in the future

I visited http://superfast-openreach.co.uk/rural-broadband/ but it just confirmed what I already knew: neither Broadband Delivery UK nor the Superfast Extension Programme cover anywhere in Greater London.

So if like me you�re connected to Kentish Town exchange cabinet 29, you�re in the unfortunate 5% of the population who will never get fibre.

So if like me you�re connected to Kentish Town exchange cabinet 29, you�re in the unfortunate 5% of the population who will never get fibre.

Not strictly true as there is the LEP programme which is picking up some EO lines and non-viable cabs in the London area. So rather than never it is more a question of yet more waiting. Your chances are however reduced if you are in an area where Virgin Media is either currently available or planned as part of VM's Project Lightning.

I sussepect the problem here was finding a suitable location to site the new cabinet. Until some other delivery system is provided, e.g. g.fast ( don't hold your breath) you will indeed be at the back of the queue.

It�s been more than a year, so I contacted Openreach again to see if anything�s changed.

Their reply:

Thank you for your email.

In response to your query below, we would like to inform you that as per our network database your property is connected to cabinet 29 and from the exchange KENTISH TOWN.

We�re not currently able to supply you with a fibre service from our existing network. Unfortunately your property isn�t currently included in the fibre roll-out because after our initial survey, it was established that Openreach would not be able to upgrade this cabinet at this moment in time because a viable solution could not be found.

We understand this frustration of not getting fibre but our team is planning to enable this cabinet for fibre broadband.

We near the end of the commercial rollout, we will be looking at those areas that have not yet been upgraded and carrying out the same kind of assessment again. It may be that your cabinet serves enough premises now and we could then upgrade but that may be end of this year, we are unable to advise any specific time scale in this regard.

Thank you again for contacting us and please do keep an eye on our website http://www.homeandwork.openreach.co.uk/when-can-i-ge... for updates.

The words �our team is planning to enable this cabinet for fibre broadband� sound more promising than last time but the vague �may be end of this year� and �we are unable to advise any specific time scale in this regard� don�t fill me with confidence. �It may be that your cabinet serves enough premises now and we could then upgrade� is a phrase that confuses me more than anything: the cabinet is surrounded by flats and houses and is situated in one the most densely-populated areas of the planet, so I doubt a lack of properties is the problem.

Unfortunately your property isn�t currently included in the fibre roll-out because after our initial survey, it was established that Openreach would not be able to upgrade this cabinet at this moment in time because a viable solution could not be found.

This means the cabinet itself will not be upgraded now or any time in the near future.

Is your cabinet in the Kentish Town Conservation Area? If so, it could simply be the council are refusing to authorise an FTTC cabinet anywhere that Openreach can, from the technical point of view, place it.

The emails you are getting look specific to your exchange, but if you read carefully they look very generalised to cover almost all possible reasons for it not going ahead.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Is your cabinet in the Kentish Town Conservation Area? If so, it could simply be the council are refusing to authorise an FTTC cabinet anywhere that Openreach can, from the technical point of view, place it.

That�s an interesting line of investigation. My flat is, in fact, inside a conservation area (though not the Kentish Town one). I wondered if the cabinet is also inside its boundary. Fortunately, I know the exact location of the cabinet (on a little street called Reeds Place), so I could use the map of conservation areas on Camden council�s website (for they are the local authority in question) to check this. It turns out that the cabinet is located in yet another conservation area, this time the one centred around Jeffrey�s Street.

Conveniently, the council�s website has pages for each of its conservation areas listing all the recent planning applications (where �recent� actually goes back several years). Since all the applications are summarised on one page, I could use my browser�s �Find� function and some likely keywords to hone in on the promising candidates.

And I found one for the �Installation of 1 x BT equipment cabinet� on Reeds Place:

http://planningrecords.camden.gov.uk/Northgate/Plann...

Examination of the related documents confirms that it�s an application to install a fibre cabinet very close to the original cabinet. It was approved in April 2011 with no objections received.

However, I also found another application submitted a couple of months later for the �Installation of one BT equipment cabinet� at a location just a few metres away:

http://planningrecords.camden.gov.uk/Northgate/Plann...

The delegated report for that application contains this illuminating passage:

App c) 2011/0695/P , Pavement on Reeds Place, Adjacent to Chichester Court A prior approval application was granted but there were a number of objections from residents. It appears that this application is to relocate the proposed cabinet to this new location

Why none of the residents objected during the original consultation period remains a mystery to me. But apparently Openreach were tenacious enough to have another attempt.

Approval for the second application was granted in July 2011. I still haven�t managed to determine why Openreach didn�t follow through. The planning decision expired in July 2014.

Openreach probably found an underground obstruction and couldn't site the cabinet

But the ability to site the cab might be the fundamental issue

Sounds like you've been seriously patient waiting for better broadband.
If you're interested, we would be happy to look up your postcode to see if we have plans to roll out to your area.
Just send over a DM and we can look into this for you.


Karis