Put a new cabinet in place, was an area with long lines too. Covered this solution to EO in news a couple of months ago

Planning permisionis not an Unknow.If you are ina Conservationarea you no youneed planning permision and council planning departments have SLA's sothe timescale is not unknown

Providing power is a known. Power companies have anSLA so aagain that is not unknow. Providing power to cabinitss is so straight forward in 99% of cases it is a joke if BT use this as an excuse foer delays. If there are power delays in99% of cases it is because BT forgate to put inan order in a the required timescales tothe utility companies.Ican assue you Power companies know where their cables are..

AllProjects have plans and some contingency toallow for the unknows. Most commercial projects finish tothe time scale and tobudget. BT is cuurently completing less than 50% to timescales with many being over 12 months late. THat is unaccptable to any sane person. Would you be happy if some one said it would say take 2 days to instasllsay a central heating boiler and it ended uptaking 2 months?Ithink not. Nor would you wear the lame excuses that they were weaaiting for a partor a electrtician

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Most commercial projects finish tothe time scale and tobudget.

Nonsense.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Planning permisionis not an Unknow.If you are ina Conservationarea you no youneed planning permision and council planning departments have SLA's sothe timescale is not unknown

Providing power is a known. Power companies have anSLA so aagain that is not unknow. Providing power to cabinitss is so straight forward in 99% of cases it is a joke if BT use this as an excuse foer delays. If there are power delays in99% of cases it is because BT forgate to put inan order in a the required timescales tothe utility companies.Ican assue you Power companies know where their cables are..

Once again you show no idea of what yu are talking about.

Piower suppliers SLA are only on URGENT power issues as in power cuts or live lines in dangerous situations.

Non-urgent or routine matters have no such SLA.

I had out mains supply box leaking tar out of it as it was a common insulator in the 50's when the house was built and even though it was making a mess etc UK power networks took six weeks to send somebody around and then in the end it was a sub contractor.

Our cabinets were something similar with a 3 month wait from cabinet going in and again sub contractors doing the job.

The problem is that BT went to the power network companies said they were planning this level of work, the power companies either just nodded their heads expecting them to scale back or just underestimated what they were being told.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Planning permisionis not an Unknow.If you are ina Conservationarea you no youneed planning permision and council planning departments have SLA's sothe timescale is not unknown

Nonsense. The council may have an SLA to respond (they probably call it a target though, as there isn't really a contract), but they're not forced to respond with a YES. It can take more time than expected - to the extent that BT have given up in some locations.

Beyond full planning permission, the council have other responsibilities - including control of the highways. The council can request changes to cabinet siting based on the impact to roads (eg where the pavement is narrow, or the site is too close to the road, or blocks sight-lines). Again, I've heard of cases where refusal from the highways dept causes significant problems (cos there's nowhere left to put the cabinet). I was just reading about a cabinet that got located in a churchyard because the roads were unsuitable.

Every cabinet has to go through this process, and most sail through because of the right amount of pre-planning & co-ordination. But some don't - and our whole disagreement is based on these few - there are unknowns in here. Not fully unknown, but sufficient to build the system around coping with those unknowns. There are no guarantees.

Providing power is a known. Power companies have anSLA so aagain that is not unknow. Providing power to cabinitss is so straight forward in 99% of cases it is a joke if BT use this as an excuse foer delays.

Nonsense. Again power companies may have an SLA to respond, but that doesn't mean that power work can be automatically assumed to go right. And of course, the companies can resort to a "force majeure" clause in the event of workforce being needed elsewhere. No guarantees.

My cabinet is a prime example. It is sitting next to a lit roadsign, but that power source obviously wasn't good enough. The first roadworks to install power presumably established this. 2 months later, new roadworks went across the street & over to near a lampost. Obviously still not good enough. A month later, further roadworks went along the path (in the other direction to the original ones). Within 2 weeks, cabinet was made available - the last in the area.

Again - most work reasonably, but some don't.

How many? I doubt you are right that 99% are straightforward, which smacks of a guess to me. My exchange has 43 cabinets, with not all being converted, so even a single problem here amounts to at least 2.5% - yet my cabinet wasn't the only one delayed by power. My personal guess would be that the figure is nearer 10-20%.

If there are power delays in99% of cases it is because BT forgate to put inan order in a the required timescales tothe utility companies.

I think you are exaggerating a little to suggest that "there are power delays in 99% of cases."

It is ludicrous to believe that, in a nationwide rollout involving 2,000 exchanges and over 40,000 cabinets, BT regularly "forget" to put in an order for power. Poppycock.

But I bet it happens to a few.

Ican assue you Power companies know where their cables are..

And I can assure you that they don't know the state of them all.

This is the real world. Things go wrong. The plans come unstuck in places. The system is designed to get over it - without throwing money at it - at the expense of delaying some cabinets. Live with it.

Remember bob is right an BT cannot plan its way out of a paper bag, which is why no-one can ever make a telephone call or use the internet in this country.

One one hand we Bod arguing his side, and others trying to not say BT is a paragon of virtue, but is perhaps doing better than the disaster some portray and it becoming a verbal spar with very little or no data to back things up.

Yes a lot of exchanges slipped, but what is less obvious is whether in the same period more cabs were added to other areas, certainly some posters have mentioned infill going on in some areas.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

AllProjects have plans and some contingency toallow for the unknows. Most commercial projects finish tothe time scale and tobudget. BT is cuurently completing less than 50% to timescales with many being over 12 months late. THat is unaccptable to any sane person. Would you be happy if some one said it would say take 2 days to instasllsay a central heating boiler and it ended uptaking 2 months?Ithink not. Nor would you wear the lame excuses that they were weaaiting for a partor a electrtician

Why do you spout such absolute rubbish when it is clear that you know absolutely nothing about project management. No doubt you'll be back at the end of December posting the same twaddle when BT extend all outstanding provisional dates again, and then at the end of next March.

If you've got something sensible to contribute please share it but otherwise I would suggest stepping back from your keyboard.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

BT is cuurently completing less than 50% to timescales with many being over 12 months late.

The source of these statistics?

One problem you have is that all the timescales for individual exchanges and individual cabinets are heavily specified with get-out clauses that indicate things may change. Those clauses are there because of a very specific reason - things *do* change. Did you see the story that BT halted work in Kensington & Chelsea because the council rejected most of the planning requests?

The only real timescale that they can currently be held accountable against is whether they reach 67% coverage by the end of 2014.

Pssst. BT's own statistics say that the rollout is using 25 million manhours, and involves 650 planners and 4,000 engineers. Here they state that they're converting between 2,500 and 3,000 cabinets per quarter - connecting over 100,000 properties (at 2,000 per day). Do you really have the stats to say that half of them are late? You must be tracking a lot of cabinets...

The scale looks right. To reach 40,000 cabinets and 20 million properties over a 4 year project, they do indeed need to hit 2,500 cabinets and over a million properties each quarter.

On the overall timescales though...
- Last year, BT reduced their target for reaching 67% coverage from 2015 to 2014.
- 5 months ago, they announced that they'd already reached the 2012 goal of passing 10 million properties (which is 37% coverage, apparently), up from the 4 million they'd reached in February 2011.
- In February 2011, the latest announcement took the number of exchanges in the plan to 800. Today there are roughly 1800 in the plan, and 1200 are already in the "accepting orders" list.
These numbers suggest that "the big picture" is certainly moving along just fine - in fact better than fine. It suggests that they'll be able to handle the BDUK-funded work in parallel too.

With the sheer scale of some of these numbers, you really need to have some good numbers yourself to back up the poppycock that you're peddling. You do have them, don't you? You aren't entirely relying on hyperbole, right?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Remember bob is right an BT cannot plan its way out of a paper bag, which is why no-one can ever make a telephone call or use the internet in this country.

One one hand we Bod arguing his side, and others trying to not say BT is a paragon of virtue, but is perhaps doing better than the disaster some portray and it becoming a verbal spar with very little or no data to back things up.

Yes a lot of exchanges slipped, but what is less obvious is whether in the same period more cabs were added to other areas, certainly some posters have mentioned infill going on in some areas.

I agree that arguing with Bob is indeed making BT look like, as you say, a paragon of virtue. I don't believe it for one second - but I also know that most people on here just don't understand the sheer scale of a national rollout of *anything*. We don't have nationwide coverage of electricity, gas, water or sewage yet!

It is indeed hard to tell whether, in the face of delays in some cabinets (or even exchanges), BT go back and convert cabinets elsewhere. Certainly the habit of only announcing exchange availability hides the local detail, so all we are left with is to watch the big picture - the total number of cabinets converted, or the number of premises passed - and compare those to the final targets.

I think I made both points in my last post on here - that the sheer scale means monitoring 3,000 cabinets each quarter to be able to know how many are late, and that BT keep announcing the "big picture" numbers early (like reaching 10 million premises in May this year).

BT may not be perfect, but there's a blend of scale and "just ambitious enough" about this project that I do admire.
- I'd prefer full fibre, but this country (mostly on £7pm broadband bundles) isn't ready to pay for it yet. Dreams without the means.
- There's a distinct pragmatic-business-realism about the FTTC solution that is turning out to be pretty decent now (who'd have thought 80/20 would turn out so "easy" ), probably good enough for most top-end premises for a decade, and sufficient for the low-end for longer. That BT have turned it into a stepping-stone for FTTP (with fibre-on-demand) becomes an concept that will interesting to watch over the next few years. The question for any copper incumbant is certainly how to become a fibre incumbant without doing it all at once.
- I'd prefer more solutions for those in the rural areas (ie in the final 10% stuck with BDUK's 2Mbps target) - but I detect that solutions are at least being discussed, and communities being involved - which is a distinct step.

In contrast, Virgin continue to do nothing whatsoever to expand their network. In relative terms, they just seem to lack any ambition whatsoever.