Fibre in Cities / Multiple PCPs per DSLAM?

Hi folks. I'm wondering if someone might be able to answer a couple of questions for me.

Basically, after many years without fibre and Openreach constantly providing estimated enablement dates for my work's cabinet that have come and gone, they have finally admitted that they now have no intention to bring fibre to my cabinet as it just wouldn't be commercially viable for them.

I don't disagree with their decision, as after a bit of research I've worked out that the cabinet in question serves a mere 75 properties. It would take years to pay back the cost of installing the fibre and cabinet before they could even turn a profit, so fair enough. (The fibre enabled cabinet at my home address serves in excess of 200 customers).

It is located in a city centre where cabinets are placed less than a hundred yards from eachother, so I'm imagining that the others serve a similar number of properties and are in the same situation. Looking at the availability checker, a lot of other city centres also seem to be lacking fibre access too.

Like I say, I completely agree with the refusal to invest in city centres from a business point of view. However, my question is this: Why do Openreach not install one DSLAM to serve two (or more) PCPs in situations like this? With the PCP cabinets less than 100 yards from each other, serving a small number of customers, why can't/won't they install a DSLAM somewhere in between two PCPs that both cabinets can be connected to? I can't imagine distance being an issue, as each PCP would be no more than 50 metres from the DSLAM inbetween. The cabinet I'm using at home right now is 65 metres from its fibre twin.

Sorry to ramble! I'm just interested in the facts that's all. Thanks in advance.

Oh and I forgot to mention that the cabinet I'm referring to is Derby 13.

Because power management has to be applied to each fttc cabinet to reduce inteference with echange based services, and that is based on the PCP it is connected to.

Ah I see. Similar to taking voltage drop into account, so cabs further from the exchange need more power?

It's a shame they can't create some kind of "double cabinet" that houses multiple independent DSLAMs for multiple PCPs.

Do you happen to know if there are any plans in place regarding neglected city centres at all?

In reply to a post by derby13:

Ah I see. Similar to taking voltage drop into account, so cabs further from the exchange need more power?

It's a shame they can't create some kind of "double cabinet" that houses multiple independent DSLAMs for multiple PCPs.

Do you happen to know if there are any plans in place regarding neglected city centres at all?

The issue is protecting those people that don't want FTTC, you need power masking set correctly so as not to interfere with ADSL. If you connected an FTTC cab to two PCPs you'd need different power masking for the two.

A stupid decision imho, were it not for the enforced pseudo competition enforced by OFCOM, where you can buy the same service provided by the same engineers on the same hardware with the same underlying costs from 100 different providers, we'd probably find that BT would have just moved everyone over to VDSL when it reached a cabinet.

I'm not even 100% sure we'd see higher prices as at least we'd only be paying for one support team, one set of fatcat CEOs, we would not have to subsidise stupid loss making offers (get 6 months free broadband and £125 sainsburys voucher and £100 quidco cashback!) etc.

We'd almost certainly see better service, as we did when BT were a monopoly and did not try to charge you for fixing their own faults.

Edited by nemeth782 (Tue 05-Jan-16 18:34:35)

In reply to a post by derby13:

I don't disagree with their decision, as after a bit of research I've worked out that the cabinet in question serves a mere 75 properties. It would take years to pay back the cost of installing the fibre and cabinet before they could even turn a profit, so fair enough. (The fibre enabled cabinet at my home address serves in excess of 200 customers).

Actually, plenty of PCP's of this kind of size have been enabled. But only with subsidy funding - which is usually from a BDUK project.

Unfortunately for you, the Staffordshire project has (so far) refused to upgrade cabinets within the city of Derby (but see later...)

Your other alternative is to engage with Openreach with private funding. Looking at the codelook site, I can see that this appears to have happened at a few cabinets on the Derby exchange. Cab 105 appears to have 49 lines, and is marked as being live from June 2015, as part of "Phase Privately Funded"; a few other cabs are marked "Phase 09b PF" too - and "PF" is not a marking I have seen before.

Having just checked that site, I can see quite a few Derby cabinets that are now marked to be part of the Staffordshire SEP programme (ie phase 2) - and they certainly look to be within the city limits. Perhaps Staffordshire have changed their policy...

Wombat

Pf -- Private / Funding are those cab where community / business Park / Managing agent / Developer have co funded the gap with openreach to enable the cabinet - Derby 105 is such cabinet -- that programme is now called Community fibre partnership (http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/the-big-build/Fibre-roll-out.aspx)

Derby is not in Staffordshire !

It's in Derbyshire. !

Doh! Of course it is. The "SEP" entries on codelook even said that, but I still typed it up wrong.

Temporary brain fade...

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

Pf -- Private / Funding are those cab where community / business Park / Managing agent / Developer have co funded the gap with openreach to enable the cabinet - Derby 105 is such cabinet -- that programme is now called Community fibre partnership (http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/the-big-build/Fibre-roll-out.aspx)

That's what I guessed.

I'd not seen the full label (of "Privately Financed") in any of the listings before, even though I knew these things happened ... but I expected to only see it for the occasional cab.

Seeing the smaller "PF" label for 33 cabinets was quite a surprise. Could there really be that many privately financed ones? Or have they mislabelled the ordinary "Phase 09b" cabinets? Every "PF"-labelled cabinet is also labelled "Phase 09b" (and vice-versa).

Those 33 cabinets are sized between 275 and 750 lines - which seem plenty large enough for commercial coverage. Examples are cabs 2, 4, 5 and 9.