Work starting this Wednesday to put new ducts under road so old and new FTTC cab can be connected with copper. Hopeful cab 24 will be up and running very soon now

Good news that people are finally getting fibre installed. Does anyone have insider knowledge? Any news on cab 16 would be most welcome!!

I started this thread way back in 2012, to prompt discussion of the rollout of FTTC in the town of Widnes. Seven years on (wow!) I am bumping this thread to mention that yesterday, I noticed a team of contractors working on Cabinet 43 & upon checking this morning, I can confirm that a Gfast cabinet has been installed (definitely Gfast, not a PCP expansion POD).

This is the 1st Gfast cabinet I have seen in Widnes. Has anyone else in Widnes seen any sign of Gfast? Is it now likely that the same cabinets which were upgraded to FTTC as part of the Commercial rollout, will also be upgraded to Gfast in the coming weeks/months?

I have mixed feelings about this development. Part of me had hoped that Openreach would skip Gfast in Widnes & deploy FTTP in a future phase of Fibre First...but then the prospect of receiving Ultrafast speeds in the near future is appealing.

Assuming I am close enough to benefit, if my cabinet is upgraded to Gfast? I am connected to Cabinet 82 & believe that my line length is probably around 150m to 200m. When connected to FTTC in March 2013, I synced at the full 80mb, but over the past year, this has dropped to 77mb (probably due to crosstalk?)

Edited by NGA (Sun 25-Aug-19 20:48:07)

Widnes has always been a curious one. Very, very long E-sides (many miles) for quite a lot of the cabinets. So FTTC really benefited a lot of people there. Also some crazy long D-sides too, in some cases. So they wouldn�t benefit from G.Fast.

If you have G.Fast you likely won�t get FTTP for a long time, I was told that anyone that can get G.Fast is to be skipped for FTTP, even if it comes to the rest of the exchange area.

You may have been told that but reality in Fibre First areas where G.fast was available is different,

We see some premises have both G.fast and FTTP available, and some where the G.fast vanishes and FTTP/VDSL2 become the choice and this is not just at the fringes but can be right on top of the pod