All might be pretty clear but its also wrong

Mine was due September and is now accepting orders

In reply to a post by omgFTTC:

Over six months ago now, when we were meant to be live in June, Kinda wish I had "NEVER" heard nothng about FTTC ,just a complete waste of time.

only 6 months???

FTTC first appeared in my neighbourhood in end of 2010. Neighbours not half a street away have been able to order for nearly 20months longer than me.

The date for my cabinet was pushed back and back and back and back until I finally saw works near the PCP in July - and I was able to order and was installed last week. Apparently massive issues locating the FTTC cabinet next to my PCP - I didn't get the details, but it was the only one missed in a large area.

Over half the town couldn't get ADSL (some got 256kbps, many nothing) so BT's customers were losing out to Virgin Media - so I suspect that's why this town had FTTC appear in 2010.

In reply to a post by GMAN98:

Mine was due September and is now accepting orders

Likewise mine said Sept 30th, but on August 26th it went "live"

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Do you work for BT.

Not one bit in the slightest.

I've worked on some very large, long, technology projects that require good planning by good project managers. But you can't plan for everything, and plans need to be adapted - possibly easily, and possibly with large impact.

as I have never heard of such total rubbish. So you are saying you have no Plan. You have no timescales and you have no budget.?

I'm pretty sure I didn't say that there was no plan, nor that there was no timetable, nor that there was no budget.

In fact I specifically said that the plans had to work efficiently (ie cost-effectively, within budget), but that they had to be adaptable. You even pointed out that having a plan without contingency was stupid - so perhaps it shouldn't be hard for you to believe that BT's plan is built around contingency.

One way to handle contingency is to overstaff, and throw money at any problems to keep to the deadlines - money which we can really ill-afford at this time. Another way to deal with problems is to just let those problem cabinets be pushed-out in time, and let the efficiently-staffed teams come back later.

All I am saying is that I think BT are running the project to favour being in-budget more than they are favouring the meeting of deadlines for *some* of the individual cabinets.

And to do that, I absolutely think they not only have a plan - but that they have a *very* good grasp on it. I believe that the plan takes account of the unknown factors that I listed (or at least it takes account of the fact that these factors *will* appear somewhere) and I believe that they accept that a portion of cabinets will be delayed because of it.

And BT must be doing something right with the *overall* timetable & deadlines. They've changed the plans so they finish in 2014 instead of 2015. And now they're adapting those plans to include the BDUK-funded extras in the 2013-2014 timescales too.

Frankly, if you think you've never heard such rubbish, you need to re-think.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

You are fundamentally wrong here.

Planning permission is an unknown - because you don't know whether you will get it. This can require changing the plan, multiple times.

Power is an unknown - because ....

An excellent post. Which has of course been effectively ignored by the experts I referred to earlier.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Most of what is needed is being deployed and used now in Cornwall

Good point - I've not checked out the Cornish stuff recently. It all seemed to be so sloooow.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

For example myself. My two largest projects were at two separate single sites, one at just over £1m and the other around £1.5m, over 30 years ago. (I wonder how much that is these days?). Completed on time and to budget.

Maybe you can answer then, what happens when a project doesn't meet various milestone dates?

Too hypothetical a question.

My post was merely poking fun at the few who seem to think that their possible knowledge of the user manual for elementary project planning software, and/or organising an office move for 30 people from one place to another, ensuring all the desks and their drawers get to the right place and group calling systems are successfully set up, means they have the slightest idea.

See WWWombat's very good post, listing just some major events that can interfere with even a superb plan that has not been devised incorporating 500% slippage possibility in every path. Itself something that would render the project unviable.

From the published BT results, at the strategic level the coverage and company financial targets seem to be being reasonably well adhered to. That implies brilliant top level project management, and hell for the poor lower level managers who have to redeploy teams of their own and sub-contractors' staff to entirely different areas at less than 24 hours notice because it is not feasible for them to wait a week doing nothing whilst something happens allowing them to do three consecutive half days to enable four specific cabinets on time.

As MrSaffron said. The solution is not to give any date other than the end of 2018 for completion of currently planned deployments.

I accept there could be improvements in the information given to the end user base. The trouble with that is that the more detailed the information that is given, the more changes will also inevitably occur. This giving an even worse impression than now. Catch 22.

Don't think I'm being all-BT-fanboy here though...

Let me be the first to say that I find the information flow from Openreach (about their plans for individual cabinets) to be terrible.

And that their behaviour in making mass push-backs to all remaining dates every quarter is a shocking kick-in-the-teeth to their customers and a shot-in-the-foot to themselves.

But I'm not saying that their planning is bad, or that their handling of contingencies is bad. Or that they're making bad choices about how, where and when to compete with Virgin.

No - what I am saying they are bad at is in keeping the public informed in a decent way.

On here, we *ought* to be the best advocates for fibre-based broadband that you can find in the UK. Instead we're reduced to bickering about the quality of the planning that is otherwise totally hidden from us.

They have done fibre on demand trials
Exchange only lines
Varying sizes of cabinets
Overheard FTTP in tight town streets with poles housing 32 way fibre splitters

They have the advantage of being able to concentrate on their area and some freedom to do things. Some 10,000 homes/businesses with FTTP passed and >1000 connected.

Was interesting being taken around, and also driving myself to the bits you don't get shown and seeing FTTC cabs in many places.

So what did they do for the exchange-only lines? Use fibre-on-demand as the solution?

I just look on the Cornish SFBB website, which suggests that the EO solution is different from FTTP (it gets a different colour in their jigsaw animation) but doesn't hint at what the solution actually is.

I did wonder if it would be a bonded-copper solution, but even that gets a tangential reference to being used in the sparse areas.

And how small did the cabinets go?