I believe the splitters are underground, the manifolds are mounted on poles where there is an overhead feed.
I dont believe it actually touch's FTTC

Roberto
As I understand it, the Fibre voice access product (FVA) can be rented on any FTTP installation, the ONT has 2 voice ports as well as two Ge ports so can have two lines. Uses the 135Kbit GEA product (unconteded VLAN) to give the quality.

Any Voice product would be carried over the IP layer so wouldn't connect to the existing voice network in the local exchange and it wouldn't matter which exchange building the Headend was in. The supplier would need to configure a voice VPN from the Head end site to avoid contention in their Core network.

A supplier would have an IP based Call server and would need some sort of Media gateway to interconnect to the TDM voice world.

I assume that to keep your existing number you would have to port it to the new system.

Some suppliers must alreadly be doing this as the small fibre based suppliers offer voice services without a copper pair.

FTTC served over the copper still uses the baseband for the voice so still uses the copper back to the original exchange and goes nowhere near the FTTC handover in the exchange. You could just use voice over the Broadband like Skype or BTs broadband talk product but are then at the mercy of power cuts and BB dropouts. They could fit an ATA in the Cab to feed the voice over the fibre as happens in the ONT but the cabs would have to be bigger with more power. I suspect the power would then need cooling due to the density, making it less economic etc.

In reply to a post by Ribble:

I believe the splitters are underground, the manifolds are mounted on poles where there is an overhead feed.
I dont believe it actually touch's FTTC

Andrew thinks it runs from the FTTC cabinet. Thats seems eminently sensible, otherwise we are talking about FTTC and native FTTP both being suppied to the same area. That would be a financial nonsense.

The biggest issue will be the installation cost, as the fibre is only ran from the FTTC street cabinet, it should be lower cost to install than fibre based Ethernet solutions, but a price in the range of £500 to £1500 seems likely.

from this News Article.

Contrary to my opinion earlier in this thread, it seems from that article that Fibre Voice Access will be an option.

Thanks kitcat. My post a couple of minutes ago I thought I had posted an hour ago and didn't see yours until I Continued from Preview. So I wasn't ignoring you.

I've read yours quickly a couple of times. Food and then another couple of slower reads needed .
_{Edit - typos.}

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 03-Jul-12 22:12:45)

In a few years I expect the phone service will be supplied over that fibre, but the others have already explained that. Presumably as much copper as is economically viable will then be recovered.

Round this way a few proactive souls have been trying to recover it before it's even finished with.