Local fibre rollout

My exchange area, Rushden, is in the throes of fibre rollout with Openreach and their contractors digging holes and blue cords are appearing at the base of telephone poles. The pole serving me is the last at the end of the street and as the cable to it appears not to have been ducted a fibre cable has been joined to it from the next pole along the street. This seems to have been done on several poles in the area. One thing which puzzles me is that in one place this has been done to a fibreglass? pole and I wonder how this will accommodate a CBT as the cables lead out of the top of the pole and there is no nearby chamber. Will a CBT fit inside the pole?

Fibre glass and metal pole manifolds installed inside the pole

The CBT is in the footway box and the tails extend into the base of the hollow pole.

The ”Squid” 😀

I did say that there was no footway chamber hence feeding the pole with an overhead fibre cable.

Openreach will still use a CBT, just not the usual 4/8/12 port black plastic rectangular box with the fixed angular ports.

Rather they will utilise the 'flexible tail' CBT that has the ports on the end of short leads, as variously linked in the posts above. Also known as the 'squid'.

This enables them to continue to use the regular connectorised drop cables to/from the premises that have the OptiTap screw in connector on the end. However rather than screwing the connector into the fixed port CBT, the respective drop cable simply screws into the short flexible 'fly-leads' on the squid-style CBT the same way.

Hope that helps to clarify.

Thanks for clarifying that, I didn't realise they had equipment that could be utilised in restricted space.

Yes the de facto standard fare is the Corning "MST" range of CBTs.

I recently became aware from a poster at ISPreview that Openreach have also used "slimline" Corning 'Evolve' CBTs in places such as Salisbury (which is the pilot Full Fibre test city for Openreach) in wall mounted scenarios. I'm not sure that these are being used more widely though. That may have been a bit of a "special" for Salisbury given its prominence in being made the pilot.

Then there is a new NOVUX range of CommScope CBTs announced with Openreach in the middle last year (but unsure if they have deployed any) which again are smaller and denser than the original Corning MST units, which have been around for around a decade and in use by Openreach since they transitioned away from the original blown fibre manifold units they used in the very early days of their FTTP delivery to the "connectorised" delivery model.