Because they dont have absolute power over:

Power companies
Ability to dig up roads to clear blockages
Weather
More urgent repair work
Staff sickness
Objections to cabinet and subsequent relocation


The list goes on

So you mean they don't factor those into their plans?

I am being deliberately provocative and I appreciate that things like that might happen in individual builds (although unplanned digging up roads will be a rare occurrence). I think my real point is that better planning, better management, and most importantly, better communication of what's going on and what's going wrong would actually address many of the issues. The decision to publish less information about the programme as a result of criticism of what they had published is an example of poor management decisions. Something that can happen when you have a near monopoly, but doesn't have to happen!

And blaming people who complain about poor communication, rather than the poor communicator, seems a bit perverse to me. Anyway, this isn't going to solve any of the world's problems...

You can factor them in, but many are finger in the air variables

If it were me I wouldn't be communicating anything until a cabinet is up and running

The ruling by the ASA was:

The claim must not appear again in its current form. We told BT to ensure that the availability checker only included dates if they corresponded to scheduled plans for Openreach to engineer the BT Infinity service to the corresponding area.

That sounds pretty fair to me, and I wouldn't say scheduled implies it will definitely happen by that date. If they are now quoting March 2014 dates when there are no scheduled plans for engineering work then you could argue they're still not in compliance.

Edited by deleted (Thu 21-Mar-13 12:54:53)

So if power people on 1 in 100 cabinets take 3 months Openreach should always allow 3 months or the book based 28 days (if that is what SLA says)

I suspect those doing their management are doing the best they can with the level of resources they have.

Given more staff to plan and manage each part of the roll-out and produce the more granular data they could do a better job for sure, problem being that extra staff will cost and remove cabinets from the roll-out potentially.

Exactly, you have to weight up just how important providing an accurate date is vs the cost of providing that accurate date.

I'd rather see no dates and more cabs

In reply to a post by Bright:

So you mean they don't factor those into their plans?

I am being deliberately provocative and I appreciate that things like that might happen in individual builds (although unplanned digging up roads will be a rare occurrence). I think my real point is that better planning, better management,

The problem here is an understanding of scale.

By "better management", you really mean that BT ought to be able to project manage better, to get one cabinet (*your* cabinet) up as fast as possible, and to not slip. You then kinda "hope" that they apply the same measure to every other cabinet around... and Bob's your uncle... project done.

But BT's yardstick is different. They don't want any one cabinet to be finished as fast as possible. They don't even want *all* cabinets done as quickly as possible. They want 66% of the population done by (some point in) 2014 but most importantly they want it done to budget.

The usual ways to get a programme done *quickly* are to stack the sequence of activities as close together as possible, and to have as many people work on it as possible, in parallel.

The problem is that any delay anywhere will result in people sitting idle, waiting to be assigned new work. And there goes the budget...

If the project is to run *cheaply* then you don't try to run each activity too close together - so you don't even request a power connection until you know the cab is in place, for example. It means the installation time for any one cabinet is extended by periods of sitting idle, and the installation time for a cabinet with problems has those idle times amplified. But the *people* are kept fully busy.

When you own 80,000 cabinets, and need to enable 200 every week, you are soon going to find a percentage of delays. As BT know the *average* install time, and the average number that encounter delays, they know how many cabinets have to be being installed in parallel - taking into account both wasted leadtime *and* wasted delay time. They can start the work for a lot more cabinets, knowing that delays *will* be encountered, but without knowing *where*.

The overall result is that the national plan is well ahead of schedule (the target date has moved forwards from late 2015 to mid 2014), but the schedule of a few individual cabinets can vary hugely.

The fact is that BT appear to be managing the project rather well - from their perspective. But individuals may see something different - and those poor souls who connect via the very few of the *really tricky* cabinets get shafted because...

and most importantly, better communication of what's going on and what's going wrong

This aspect is what they've been really bad at.

You sort of answered your own questions.

In reply to a post by Bright:

Why? What would need to be done to provide accurate dates? Why does that slow down roll-out?

You'd need a team of engineers in each rollout area who stayed there even throughout delays so that they could deliver ontime. Very costly.

In reply to a post by Croftie:

Why would you let them sit idle? Deploying resources to the work which can be moved forward on any given day/week/month would make everything happen quicker and more efficiently. That's just good resource management. Having them sitting idle is what will cause dates to be missed!

Indeed, and that's what they do. Having them sitting idle wouldn't cause missed dates because they could complete the work as soon as the delay was resolved, rather than them be in a different area doing other work unable to return.

I can see how "too many variables", "lack of resources" can seem like vague excuses when you don't fully understand the situation, phrases like that are really the short answer, hopefully the replys above provide the long answer and it's now clear, WWWombat's, I think, is especially good.

everyone is using http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/

its a pile of pants the info there given there mine was rolled back to 30/06/2013 according to samknows as well this would be the 3rd roll back. but and here is the but a big but at that.
i could order fttc back in Feb i haven't bothered yet as job is dodgy atm redundancies

you should all just be checking with your phone number on
https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html

i can get WBC FTCC DOWN UPTO 48.8MB AND UP UPTO 8MB listed as AVAILABLE and am on cabinet 41

where it will give you whats available and speed estimates and cab number as well just have to keep checking regulary but as i have said in my case the info is still wrong on
http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/
https://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/SDGSPRT

shame the info was wrong and still is wrong my advice check link i have given you, you may be able to get it you never know!
hope this helps some of you
basil