Fibre to the DP? Or FTTP?

Purely out of interest, I have two questions about the following pole and its associated green cabinet. The cabinet is significantly smaller than either brand of FTTC cabinet (and clearly isn't one, of any familiar design, anyway). Yes, the lock is broken and the door is held closed by a brick and some duct tape, but no, I daren't open the door and take a photo, although I was very tempted. The cabinet was making a noise, i.e. it has fans.

I also specifically would like to know what the white box is - there is another pole about a mile away with one on, and the other side to the one I photographed here has flashing LEDs on it. There was no green cabinet at the other pole, although it had the green splice tray(?) pole-attachment below the white box.

You can click on the magnifying glass when you mouseover the picture in Photobucket for the full-res pic.

The pole is here, so as you can see, it's very rural and so probably part of a Suffolk fibre extension programme.

Pole with white box showing

Same pole, slightly further down

Green cabinet beside the pole

Edited by deleted (Fri 06-May-16 16:33:03)

That white box looks like a FTTrn box that I saw once. So my guess is it is fibre to the remote node

Indeed, it's the Hybrid enclosure containing all the kit , fibre and copper terminations. The green box is the power Pilar

Ah, cheers for the replies. I started a thread a while back and guessed it was FTTrn, but I was wrong and it was FTTP. This time it's the other way around!

Edited by deleted (Fri 06-May-16 17:35:11)

I agree with the answers about all the green stuff, but the white box ...

It could be FTTRN, but it just could be G.Fast.

IMO, it is more likely to be FTTRN with a Huawei DSLAM. However, that enclosure looks incredibly like the one at the top of this story:
http://blog.thinkbroadband.com/2015/09/g-fast-and-fo...

The blog article suggests there might be a model ID plate on one side of the box. Can you see what it says?

Similarity to the G.Fast prototypes are probably because Huawei maybe re-purposed the existing FTTRN enclosure when making prototypes.

It won't be G.fast unless he's in a trial area. Which I don't think he is.

There seems no reason why VDSL2 & g.fast FttRN shouldn't use the same physical boxes. Aside from the technical detail of the modulation, encoding and so on, the installation requirements are surely identical with comparable power consumption. It would make for an easy retro-fit too.

nb. I should add that if you look inside VM boxes (or at least the ones round here), they contain a similar sort of sealed, finned, weather sealed box with connections for fibre & coax. I also saw inside the adjacent power cabinet (vandals had prised the doors open - not difficult, they are flimsy). The power cabinet was atrocious. It has a 48V switch-mode power supply, rather like one a bigger version of what you find in a PC. Open vents with standard cooling fans and no attempt at sealing. The mains part had a meter plus, a breaker board and a plastic 13 amp socket as you'd find at your local Wickes branch. All screwed to a bit of backboard that was lodged in place. That clearly supplied he 48V required for the network cabinets in the vicinity via dedicated DC cables.

I have a photo somewhere, I'll have to dig it out. The box was unmonitored and VM ignored my message via their fault reporting page. I wrapped duct tape round the box and about 4 months later they put the door back on properly.

*** edit ***

I found a couple of photos of the local VM equivalent. The network cabinet door was half open, hence the angle of the photo. Note how similar the die cast network box is to the FttRN one. Compare it to the power cabinet. I did it a slight disservice as the power supply is a UPS too and it's 60V, not 48V. Also the sockets are metal clad and not plastic and there's no meter. However, it's not exactly neat (and there's no monitoring of the enclosure).

http://i1097.photobucket.com/albums/g360/steve_jones...

http://i1097.photobucket.com/albums/g360/steve_jones...


I don't think the leaves and beer cans are standard VM kit.

Of course the interesting thing is how converged the network node physical infrastructure becomes when cable is compared with FttRN. Similar frequency of cabinets (VM ones seem to be about 100-200m apart and local power distribution). Perhaps not surprising for any hybrid architecture. Whilst co-ax is a better transmission medium than twisted pair, the cable segments are shared and the total length with all the spurs must be quite long.

Edited by deleted (Fri 06-May-16 19:20:13)

If you check the BT Wholsale database it displays as FTTC available -
http://dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.AddressOut...

E.G:
FTTC Range A (Clean) 80 80 20 20 -- Available
FTTC Range B (Impacted) 80 67.5 20 18.1 -- Available

So it appears to be FTTrN.

It's FTTRN

That is correct on the FTTRN and easy to tell if its G.fast as on the wholesale checkers once live you get offered a 300 Mbps service option, if its a VDSL2 node then the usual up to 76 Mbps range.

The boxes are potentially interchangeable, and the labs have vdsl2 and g.fast running from the same boxes.

The power pillar can in theory be some distance away and supply power over copper pairs to a number of FTTrN units if needed.