In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

The 'smaller' cabinets are already out there, the Huawei 96 and ECI. They are now installed instead of the larger originals (Huawei 288), the most obvious reason being less impact, street furniture wise, and most likely, cheaper to install. So they are being used exactly where you'd expect, next to an existing street cabinet.

The picture I saw looked a lot smaller than even the currently-deployed Huawei 96 & ECI cabinets that I've seen around (or photos of).

Take a look at page 13 of The BT Q2 results slides, and tell me if that looks like something already out there. Granted this photo isn't clothed in a cabinet.

Certainly I've seen some telecom vendors with equipment aimed at as few as 6-10 properties. Whether BT will ever go that small is another matter...

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The FTTC cabinets will pretty much always be close to an existing cabinet.

One eventual infil option will be for very small (possibly in chamber under pavement) VDSL kit, BT has used this in trials are Martlesham Heath.

The priority has generally being on getting the easy to connect cabinets connected to hit their 2/3rds target. UK has some 85,000 street cabinets to give you some idea of the scale of work.

so business case out the window, ease of work top of list?

Where easy to connect includes some degree of cost/hours of work, which all form a business case.

Remember the pressure is on to finish the roll-out early now, so if a council is difficult over location of cabs then BT may simply move on.

Also explains the delays for some areas, ie. limited number of teams doing the work, and a delay of just a two days will knock on down the schedule, or lead to some cabs being abandoned. The reason some people see a cabinet installed, but not going active is that different teams do different parts of the jobs, and some may be having more snags than others.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Also explains the delays for some areas, ie. limited number of teams doing the work, and a delay of just a two days will knock on down the schedule, or lead to some cabs being abandoned. The reason some people see a cabinet installed, but not going active is that different teams do different parts of the jobs, and some may be having more snags than others.

And where a team out in the field has to move on because of a snag, there is extra work generated on another team - the one in the office that makes the plans, and books the roadworks slots. If that team is also busy & pressured, then it can be hard to find time to rejig all the surrounding plans.

If BT are still ramping up the pool of engineers who perform this work, then the planning work will become ever more stretched.

I still think the beaurocracy behind roadworks fails us here - because any one small snag is pretty much guaranteed to trigger a month delay to a cabinet. That, in turn, forces planners to have to rejig plans in a month+ rather than just delay today, and then work on catching up.