In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Think about it: if a cabinet serves x hundred people, and those people live in an area of higher population density, then inevitably the cabinet>property length will be shortened.

I can see this is the case in the centre of Edinburgh, which is all old tenements - there are BT cabinets everywhere.

Glaswegians put dummies there because they know the population of Edinburgh are very dense.

Think about it: if a cabinet serves x hundred people, and those people live in an area of higher population density, then inevitably the cabinet>property length will be shortened.

Why should the proximity of high density housing have any affect on cab location/D-side length ? It takes a very large new development to make BT consider fitting a new cabinet, the usual action is to feed it from an existing cab, where costs can be kept down.

I think the issue is that we laymen have no idea what range of connectability PCPs have. Clearly there are many sizes, but how many lines can the large and small ones support? Roughly, of course.

Edit - for example, this is mine. There are clearly many hundreds of pairs visible when it is opened.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 20-Dec-11 22:14:29)

I'm moving house shortly, and took the effort to work out where FTTC was available (it was the only town in the county with fibre, and only 1 of the 3 exchanges have been upgraded), before looking at property.

When I mapped out the location of the cabinets, I found that they would tend to trail out from the exchange along major roads, and could even appear every 200-300 yards - but the postcodes covered would then spread out sideways a long way. It gave long, thin ribbons of coverage to each cabinet, at 90 degrees to the direction of the main road.

I suspect the same is true even in the denser cities - the cabinets might be close together along the main roads, but the distance each cabinet supports will still be quite long areas out at 90 degrees to the main roads.

In my current area, cabinet coverage was in more circular patches. The distances to the furthest locations then usually jogged around a little to get to the extremes.

But still, in both my current & next town, the maximum distance to cabinet seemed to be around 700 metres.

And, IIRC, BT's average is around 300 subscribers per cabinet. 25 million lines and 80,000 cabinets, I think.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Think about it: if a cabinet serves x hundred people, and those people live in an area of higher population density, then inevitably the cabinet>property length will be shortened.

Why should the proximity of high density housing have any affect on cab location/D-side length ? It takes a very large new development to make BT consider fitting a new cabinet, the usual action is to feed it from an existing cab, where costs can be kept down.

The response to your previous post highlight two points:

(1) The silliness (in my opinion) of allowing anonymous posters.
(2) That one or more of those anonymous posters does not know (or has failed to guess) your mode of employment.

Your numbers are in the ball park, 5500 exchanges, 85000 cabinets.

90% of lines within 1km of cable of the cabinet.

The big FTTC cabs can support 288 lines, and the sleeve type ones I think drop to 144. For future Ericsson showed off a small house brick sized MSAN that handled 10 lines, and could run off the power from copper pairs, i.e. no need for mains. This was some three years ago too

In reply to a post by burakkucat:

(1) The silliness (in my opinion) of allowing anonymous posters.
(2) That one or more of those anonymous posters does not know (or has failed to guess) your mode of employment.

Hi burakkucat,

I know you are already aware of this, but for anyone else who may be interested, I find the forum at Kitz forum very useful as posters do need to be signed in.

BTW, the kitz forum has only this week started a dedicated FTTC & FTTH Issues section (& there does appear to be room for an active BT installation engineer at the moment).

Edited by deleted (Wed 21-Dec-11 17:57:40)