In reply to a post by LakesGeek:

Town's not moving much, to be fair it's only been a few days though and we still have a date of 31st December so there's every chance resources will be moved to exchanges under tighter deadlines. Just after seeing ours being worked on non-stop, a breather takes a moment to get used to

Same here, watching the way they install the cabs and how quickly they got the first cabs actually rolled out for fibre, it sounded like they'd have the rest done in no time at all bar a few exceptions. Massive slow down at the moment, but I know they can do it when they want - several cabinets have got roadworks notices and to all intents and purposes they're straight out within a couple of weeks it seems fixing the problem ready for the fibre again.

Looks like the fibre blowing and the duct blocking occurs at the same time around this neck of the woods. So when I see a few cabinets with problems and no information or activity what soever, I get a bit grumpy

Ooooooooo, I notice that Connecting Cumbria, after tweeting about Yanwath being the first activation under the scheme a couple of days ago, has mentioned rapid progress in Ulverston. We're only a l'il town, but a very noisy one when it comes to shouting about broadband so clearly it's paying off (We're the only place they've mentioned apart from Yanwath, Carlisle and Penrith). I have a feeling mayyybe next week might see us up and running. Just a hunch.

Annnd as of this morning it's available and ordered Yippee!

Edited by deleted (Sat 05-Oct-13 10:52:35)

Congrats. Two more cabs in my area have gone live in a month. So far with one cab every two weeks, and no road works notices.... I think the October date for six cabs is decidedly dodgy, and Im not holding out hope Im going to be live before the end of June (even thought they say December). Not because of any major problem, I just think because there's a problem, my cab is now back of the list and the planning is none existant. There'll probably be five months planning for one days work. Or they'll probably squeeze my cabinet in when the're not doing anything else.

I think I'm so peeved off, Im not going to order FTTC when it's available just to spite them. I've had enough of the whole ridiculous charade. Seriously, there is nothing happening around here. Apart from those two. I wouldn't mind if I started seeing grey spray paint on the road.

Rats to the lot of em.

It's your choice what to do. As has been explained many times, the planning takes place over wide areas and can be affected by factors that are not readily apparent on the ground, such as wayleave and section 58 issues arising when ductwork problems are discovered.

BT Openreach and their contractors will target their efforts to where it makes the most difference. This may mean a particular cabinet with issues sits for a while, but it doesn't mean a complete lack of progress. The six cabinets you mention may be affected by a common issue remote to the immediate area. You may not see any more paint on the road, because new roadworks may be unnecessary.


We had cabinets sitting on the ground for over a year in this town before anything was enabled. I don't know why - but it's best simply to accept it's ready when it's accepting orders. What's best - ordering a service that has been tested and that BT Openreach are confident will work to specification, or having a service installed (potentially in place of a working ADSL connection) that is unreliable?

In reply to a post by David_W:

It's your choice what to do. As has been explained many times, the planning takes place over wide areas and can be affected by factors that are not readily apparent on the ground, such as wayleave and section 58 issues arising when ductwork problems are discovered.

Not this again. There's no wayleaves, no s58, no power issues, cabs are just idle waiting for someone to kick into gear to sort out the duct issues, survey, paint lines, post a roadworks notice, dig up and sort everything out. Why my cab is being left to being one of the last to resolve the issues with I don't know. I can only hope they at least know WHERE the problems are, otherwise it could be much much longer.

In reply to a post by David_W:

BT Openreach and their contractors will target their efforts to where it makes the most difference. This may mean a particular cabinet with issues sits for a while, but it doesn't mean a complete lack of progress. The six cabinets you mention may be affected by a common issue remote to the immediate area. You may not see any more paint on the road, because new roadworks may be unnecessary.

Eh? Lack of paint means roadworks are necessary? You realise you also contradicted yourself? If a cabinet is sitting with no action, how is that anything but a complete lack of progress? Sure, I do realise things happen in the background, but currently, very little progress is actually being made. It would be nice to see a few marks on the road indicating where to dig in preparation.

The one cab that they have worked on recently and should in theory be good to go, is not going to be enabled before mid-November.

The six cabinets are dotted around the area, no commonality as far as I can see, different locations, just individual issues affecting the rollout. More likely as others say they ran into problems and went onto other areas that weren't so problematic. Which is fair enough, but if they're working on other areas, then they aren't working on mine.

In reply to a post by David_W:

We had cabinets sitting on the ground for over a year in this town before anything was enabled. I don't know why - but it's best simply to accept it's ready when it's accepting orders. What's best - ordering a service that has been tested and that BT Openreach are confident will work to specification, or having a service installed (potentially in place of a working ADSL connection) that is unreliable?

I can accept financial priorities elsewhere, again, it's just annoying the lack of progress even for the simplest of tasks. NGA say my cab is due for the start of 2014, so Im guessing my cab probably won't be upgraded much before February when originally scheduled for September.

Im not complaining about the delay, but quite clearly that original estimate (September 2013) was wrong and they were only prioritising a subset of cabinets in the area. Therefore it is fundamentally incorrect to advise September. While I accept ducting issues, if all the cabinets were prioritised, wouldn't they have known about the ducting issues back in August? If they knew about them back in August, much of the work would underway by now? Clearly not. There's not even a hint of any work roadworks notice, or paint on the ground. Therefore this cabinet is one of the last on the list and the planning process appears to be very disjointed.

If it takes six weeks just to activate a cabinet, Im not surprised a cabinet with issues would take at least four months from now! They got to survey, plan, get permission, there's probably two to three months, the work will probably only be a few days, then another six weeks for activation. January/February.

No, I I think the drawn out process is unacceptable given how fast they can work and I still only get the impression BT work on prioritising a subset of cabinets, activating 10 cabinets then fit in the rest as they can.

In reply to a post by sjdean:

No, I I think the drawn out process is unacceptable given how fast they can work and I still only get the impression BT work on prioritising a subset of cabinets, activating 10 cabinets then fit in the rest as they can.

You really need to chill out and calm down a bit. BT is a large company carrying out thousands of installations of which your cab is just one. As has been repeatedly stated there can be many reasons why a cab is delayed few of which are apparent or obvious to anyone not having an inside knowledge of the project.

Think yourself lucky rather than hard done by even if your connection appears to be towards the end of the queue. There are many users for whom an FTTC connection is but a dream including many in the larger cities with EO connections where BT is doing nothing and no BDUK funding is available.

Yeah I completely agree with MCM. It's been a long wait for lots of people, for lots of different reasons, and loads of people desperate for fibre still have nothing.

I think the "lack of paint might still mean roadworks" comment might have meant that "roadworks" may have been necessary elsewhere, so you wouldn't necessarily have seen anything visible. Or they could have just been installing fibre in another area where people felt exactly the same as you.

Ordering late won't spite BT at all, IF the timing of your order has any effect at all (which it probably won't), then ordering late might simply show BT there is a relative lack of demand/enthusiasm in your area and it'll discourage them from rushing FTTP or whatever other future stages of internet development may take place.

Edited by deleted (Sun 06-Oct-13 06:57:56)

We're very complacent in this country and like to moan about people "unfairly treated" instead of the people that mess everything up in the first place. I use that term in absence of another metaphor.

When I've moaned about the hospital delaying my operation, people like to complaing that Im expecting preferrential treatment. Im not, I just want to be scheduled at a normal time and not have my appointment cancelled again. I would just like to be scheduled properly.

The same argument here. Im not after preferrential treatment from BT, and Im not expecting unrealistic timescales. But I think their initial estimates for availability dates are woefully flawed and aren't able to activate 30 cabinets within a month and therefore shouldn't be showing that.

They obviously are aware of the issues with my cab, and December 2013 may be a realistic deadline yet it is annoying as they appear to not be doing anything on it during the short term (we're not covered by s58, power issues, conservation or wayleaves and it appears Birmingham are fairly flexible with roadworks!).

But again, I get the impression, as do many other people, that BT just prioritise X number of cabinets in an area to be able to mark the exchange live, while the rest can wait as they move onto other areas. It is misleading. Fair enough there are problems but the roadworks teams should really deal with them before moving on.

But you know what, the people who have been waiting two years should be seen first.

If you want scheduling to be perfect then the only way is to build a huge amount of slack into the system.
You can either do that by having a large number of staff doing nothing waiting around for the snarl up to occur whereupon they can jump into the breach so to speak and prevent the bottleneck occuring.
Alternatively you can do it by putting huge gaps in the schedule knowing that things will go wrong and then these gaps will get filled up by the over-running jobs.

But of course no one want to pay for that sort of thing, so we have "just in time" which works fine until there is a snarl up. JIT works best when you(BT) can control the process and the inputs into that process: like a production line.

When you moan about your treatment/schedule and get it sorted you do realise I suppose that YOUR problem gets sorted at the expense of someone else getting their schedule messed up? Or that maybe their need might have been greater than yours?
There is no longer any free/slack available these days, so they just muck up someone else's schedule to keep you happy - so yes you are asking for preferential treatment.

Frankly I think BT should never have put out any schedules at all they should simply say we will do it when it gets done, we will do the easy one first and the difficult ones last and we might have finished by 2020. But I suspect they were pressurised into it so simply invented some numbers off the top of their heads.
I'm sure they could have spent a lot of time analysing everthing and coming up with the correct(ish) numbers - and how much time and staff would have been wasted on all this analysis rather than just getting on with the job instead.....

Doing this job is not like buliding cars. There are endless things totally out BT's control that can go wrong in each cabinet installation - and each one is therefore in effect a bespoke jobs rather than the mass market production line.

I likewise am 6 miles from a citycentre in southern UK. I'm not fibre enabled and the BDUK maps recently published by the county council have shown my and the next door cabinet is not being done though others nearby are. So there is no possibility for me or the other 400 people on these two cabinets getting FTTC for the forseeable future - meaning before end of 2017. Yes possibly in 2018 to 2020 and beyond another HMG/EU subsidised program may come along to infill remaining cabinets in the UK.

I would finally add that to many poeple/families faster broadband is not really that high up on their priority list in their lives.