Check with the connecting devon and somerset project ran by council

Did it say you are connected to a cabinet?

There's no such thing as 30 Meg fibre by the way

Tawstock and Eastacombe are on cabinet 43 (where is it?) and seem to be blue on the CDS map.

In reply to a post by somerset:

Tawstock and Eastacombe are on cabinet 43 (where is it?) and seem to be blue on the CDS map.

I'm really sorry, but I'm not sure what you are referring to! If you mean the broadband terminal (green box), I believe it's in Eastacombe. It's the last terminal before reaching Tawstock, about 1 1/2 miles away. I was lead to believe that the fibre would go as far as this, but not continue through to our village.

I don't think the engineer's comments are accurate.

99% of the fibre rollout is fibre to the cabinet ie green box

But it's another cabinet - the fibre twin

Unfortunately connectingdevonandsomerset are not very helpful in giving away much info at all, what I did read from them though is if you're in an area that is being upgraded and your cabinet is a long way from the exchange then they look at making your connection FTTP instead, although it's not always the case.

I live in Exminster but I'm connected to the Kennford exchange (there is a much newer Exminster exchange that's been put in since).
Exminster and Kennford are both down for the fibre upgrade but CDS still will not say which cabinets are being done (even though I can see on roadworks.org site that there are 2 cabinets due to be installed at the end of the year/early Jan 2014), I just hope that my connection is upgraded to FTTP as I thought I was on a cabinet 500m away (one of the 2 cabinets that are on the roadworks.org site) but I'm actually connected to one 900m away that is not on the list although someone within BT that I know claims that currently it's down that connections to that cabinet will be FTTP instead which would be very nice, knowing my luck though it won't be done and i'll be left without an upgrade while the much closer cabinet that I thought I was connected to gets upgraded to fibre and I'm stuck with a flaky internet connection that tends to go down when the phone rings.

In reply to a post by somerset:

Tawstock and Eastacombe are on cabinet 43 (where is it?) and seem to be blue on the CDS map.

Apologies for not understanding the system too well!

I've checked my phone number and we are connected to Cabinet 43 from the Barnstaple exchange. If this cabinet is to be connected to the fibre system, does this mean that we'll be able to access it at our house, even if it's 1 1/2 miles away? The Barnstaple exchange is indicated as Accepting Orders, but is it possible to find out roughly when our cabinet will be upgraded?

It's possible that the engineer that I spoke to mean't that when this connection is made, we'll be able to get fibre broadband, but because of the line length from the cabinet that we won't be able to get the top speeds, but we should be able to get 10-15 meg. Would this sound more plausible and I've misunderstood what he meant?

In reply to a post by Timmy_T:

I've checked my phone number and we are connected to Cabinet 43 from the Barnstaple exchange. If this cabinet is to be connected to the fibre system, does this mean that we'll be able to access it at our house, even if it's 1 1/2 miles away? The Barnstaple exchange is indicated as Accepting Orders, but is it possible to find out roughly when our cabinet will be upgraded?

Often the numbers of the cabinets are painted on them. You could drive round (physically, or on Google Street View) looking for a green box with 43 painted on it. Obviously, this won't work if the cabinet doesn't have its number painted on it.

If no fibre details are showing on the checker, you could e-mail [email protected] to ask if they can give you any information about when you might get fibre. Include your phone number, address and postcode.


If the cabinet is really 1.5 miles away, you are getting towards the limit of operation of the fibre based system. Hopefully others can chime in with some experience on maximum working line length.

Some ISPs won't allow you to order their fibre products unless the predicted speed is at least 15Mbits/s. Other ISPs will let you place an order at any predicted speed.

In reply to a post by Timmy_T:

It's possible that the engineer that I spoke to mean't that when this connection is made, we'll be able to get fibre broadband, but because of the line length from the cabinet that we won't be able to get the top speeds, but we should be able to get 10-15 meg. Would this sound more plausible and I've misunderstood what he meant?

That could, indeed, be what he meant. If this is the case, you'd have to subscribe to a fibre service, but if the fibre system is capable of providing a stable 10-15Mbit/s connection, that sounds like it would be a huge increase over what you have.