In reply to a post by teabelly:

In my local area BT have fibre enabled some cabinets. They are refusing to do the one I'm attached to for 'commercial reasons'. I'm assuming that is because VM cable is available for some of the houses.

Wrong assumption.

It usually means that it is either too expensive to get the fibre to your cabinet (the least likely option), or that getting power for the cabinet is expensive (this charge is usually £1000, but can be a lot higher on occasion, forcing BT to stall), or the cabinet serves too few people (most likely), or insufficient people will take up the service (eg too many of the lines on the cabinet are too long to benefit).

I haven't come across a case where BT have failed to install a cabinet because Virgin are in the area.

Within the commercial rollout, we've seen that BT will install FTTC where a cabinet supplies more than 300 properties, but may not if there are fewer properties.

Take a look at this thread, particularly where I work out there are 240 homes connected.

I don't think this situation is fair

It is all business today. If you are profitable, BT will offer the service.

Unfortunately, you'll only be considered profitable if there are enough other people on the same cabinet - the fibre solutions for the mass market are only viable where there is actually a mass market.

Is there a way of making BT provide the service

Not directly, but your next hope is with the BDUK projects currently running.

With the additional subsidy to install FTTC, those cabinets that weren't profitable under normal circumstances suddenly become worthwhile.

We've recently seen some mention of a cabinet with 100 lines being done in a BUK project. Can't remember where though.

However...

There is indeed the possibility of paying to get BT to install a cabinet. An Oxfordshire village paid around £60k to get 2 cabinets installed, with donations from residents paid via the parish council.

or are there third party providers that can shove their fibre in the cabinets if there is sufficient demand?

There is that kind of possibility - after all, this is what Digital Region has done in South Yorkshire, and was done in Rutland.

Your local BDUK project will have determined what plans are for your area, so you should be able to see if any operator has told them anything.

I've investigated a few areas, back from when I was moving, but my current technique looks like this:

- Use Google Maps to identify a few streets - particularly those that lead off the main road where cabinets can be found
- Use Royal Mail's postcode finder to identify the postcodes on the street (and a snapshot of the address numbers or names)
- Use BT's Address Checker (not the postcode one!), into which I put the postcode alone
- The checker gives a list of addresses at the postcode, and I select one.
- The checker tells you the cabinet number and speed estimate for FTTC

In this case, where a cabinet is in an area of cabinets that are being converted, the likelihood is that it is a fill-in cabinet, added when previous ones ran out of capacity. It will probably have been added when a new housing development was built, so is likely to be restricted to the streets of that development.

Once the coverage area has been worked out, you can use either the checker's list of addresses, or use Royal Mail's postcode results to tell you the exact number of properties - and, if needed, a complete list of people to survey.

Alas don't have all cabinets on the spreadsheet.

The cabinet level data is a closely guarded list from Openreach

BT have apparently signed a thing today to do some sort of deal:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/05/bt-sign...

Hope may not be all gone. Seems daft not to finish all the cabinets in an area while they're there though.

If that means a team staying in an area idle for a week or two while the power company do their part does it make sense?

It is speculation that it is power related. It might not be at all.

They wouldn't leave anyone idle as there are plenty of other cabinets they could be installing locally anyway. It's not like I'm in a rural area. I'm on the edge of a massive housing estate!

So how do you know that is not what is happening?
Just because we don't see people installing a cabinet does not mean they are not busy doing that?

Or should Openreach do 100% of cabinets on an exchange before moving onto the next one?

Ah, Mr Saffron,
You have an impossible task if you are going to start trying to explain the theories and practices of large scale project management to the average forum contributor.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by teabelly:

In my local area BT have fibre enabled some cabinets. They are refusing to do the one I'm attached to for 'commercial reasons'. I'm assuming that is because VM cable is available for some of the houses.

Not directly, but your next hope is with the BDUK projects currently running.

Nope, he's stuffed. His area would be considered grey due to the presence of VM, hence no BDUK as that can only cover white areas where there's no NGA presence.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Nope, he's stuffed. His area would be considered grey due to the presence of VM, hence no BDUK as that can only cover white areas where there's no NGA presence.

It depends whether there are houses that aren't covered by VM at all - as FTTC would be allowed for them. Then he'd be covered as collateral "damage".

True that BT may (should) only get subsidies for the white areas that such an upgrade covered, but it might be enough to tip the cabinet into viability.