In reply to a post by sjdean:

I realise your post is tongue in cheek. However the delay on my cabinet is actually, when you look at the facts, completely absurd.

Annoying (when you are on the receiving end), certainly. I know because I was on the same receiving end myself. Absurd? Hard to know without the facts.

Come up with some meaningful explanation rather than the standard cut and paste and I'll probably agree with you.

The problem here is that you don't actually know the facts. You only know the outcome of various plans, as visible in the street or on a roadworks website - and plans may have shifted enormously hidden from view. And you don't know what went wrong on each occasion some workers tried to do something, either on the ground, or in the planning dept.

Fastman's explanation is right - that BT's rollout is planned on the basis of minimising rollout costs. It seems that 50% of the costs are labour costs, so it makes sense to be absolutely sure that every worker is as fully employed as you can make him. Not one moment spent twiddling thumbs because power couldn't be connected, or because a duct was blocked, or an existing duct turned out to be full.

BT know that some percentage of cabinets - perhaps 10% or 20% - will have problems. And that the problems cabinets won't always be known in advance.

The key to keeping every worker fully busy is to over-plan the cabinets by that 10-20%, knowing that a % will go wrong. Leave them to one side, and let workers come back at some future time to fix things - in a later iteration of the plan.

If things go wrong a second time, then this policy gets repeated. And perhaps again and again.

That, overall, provides a good reason as to why, when a problem is hit, a cabinet gets put back for a considerable period. It needs a new slot in the local manpower plan.

Other reasons include delays caused by things that BT have no control over. Delays caused by weather, by the power companies, by planning dept's, and by roadwork notification delays. Councils can place an embargo on roadworks to force overnight working, or to avoid schooldays.

There is also the fine that councils can give out if roadworks take longer than planned. That also incentivises BT to fill in a trench with work unfinished, and come back another day - but only when new roadwork plans and new manpower plans are in place.

In some places, the cost to connect a power supply is taken to absurd extremes. The normal figure should be around £1,000 but the power companies do not charge "average" amounts; instead they charge the actual incremental cost... and if your connection takes a transformer out-of-spec, then you get to pay for a whole new transformer upgrade. Three cabinets in North Yorkshire became unviable because the cost for power suddenly went to £90,000. A change like this from the power company puts a real dampener on your rollout... but you won't see this mentioned on roadworks.org

BT would behave differently if they followed a "minimise delays" doctrine to the rollout, but they aren't. They aren't even following a "minimise costs for each cabinet" doctrine, which is why it doesn't matter if the odd cabinet is left unconnected for 7 months. Instead, they are following a "minimise costs nationally" doctrine, which tends to favour "easy" cabinets first, and "hard" cabinets later and slower. At 1,000 cabinets per month, there are plenty of easy ones to get through.

Annoying when it turns out that your personal cabinet is a "hard" one, left by the wayside. But not, in the national sense, absurd.

My first cabinet was delayed by power problems. Every other one in the area went live in November/December 2010, but mine didn't. It took 3 attempts to dig and find power for it, with roadwork notification causing a delay each time - and each time, the end result was a new set of tarmac going off in a new direction. I finally went live in June 2011.

In truth, there is so much that you don't know and don't understand, that makes it difficult to draw any real conclusions. Except that I can be pretty sure that it isn't a conspiracy to delay your cabinet alone.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Fastman's explanation is right - that BT's rollout is planned on the basis of minimising rollout costs. It seems that 50% of the costs are labour costs, so it makes sense to be absolutely sure that every worker is as fully employed as you can make him. Not one moment spent twiddling thumbs because power couldn't be connected, or because a duct was blocked, or an existing duct turned out to be full.

Sure, technical issues do exist. No argument there, but what Im saying, when checking the ducts 250 metres to the east for those two cabinets, why didn't they check the ducts in the other direction? And why does it appear that they stop at one duct instead of checking the whole planned stretch instead of find one blockage, clear, find another blockage, clear, find another blockage....

Sure, engineers are "always on the job" but there's surely going to be an enormous amount of driving round from one location to the next.

In my perhaps naive mode, it would have made more sense to check the ducts in either direction from the manhole cabinet, get the work scheduled in on all three given their physical proximity for duct clearances, and then get the FTTC enabled on all three. Or, is that too simple?

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

The key to keeping every worker fully busy is to over-plan the cabinets by that 10-20%, knowing that a % will go wrong. Leave them to one side, and let workers come back at some future time to fix things - in a later iteration of the plan.

If things go wrong a second time, then this policy gets repeated. And perhaps again and again.

Though strangely, there even seems to be an order here, so there's a percentage of those cabinets with problems that get immediate fixes, others get mid term fixes, others just get put at the back of the pile.

And those fixes range around here anywhere from 100 metres of trunking, to 2 metres of one way poly duct. And the amount of trunking and blockages do not seem to indicate whether a "problem" cabinet gets a quick fix a has to wait.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

That, overall, provides a good reason as to why, when a problem is hit, a cabinet gets put back for a considerable period. It needs a new slot in the local manpower plan.

No argument there, that's to be expected. My point is when there are cabinets with 500 metres of each other not sorted at the same time. And of course the considerable period varies, so some wait a considerable period, others a consderable period and then some!

Again, my cabinet hasn't suffered with power or wayleaves. They had to find an alternative route which they found pretty quickly once identified. Their main time was spent waiting for an aerial solution which didn't materialise. Things then seemed to be in progress when they installed the trunking between the PCP and the FTTC across the road in under a day. Now there's an additional two metres of trunking to install and Im left wondering why they didn't bother checking the trunking when they were checking their neighbours!

Gah.

Pathetic.

I was even told by the fibre engineer where they were bringing the fibre to... so it has got to within 200 metres of the cabinet, by they just didn't check Cab 13's route, but checked 11 and 12 300 metres away.

Silly.

In reply to a post by Fastman2:

sjdean this is around logistics and milestones if you need to find x number of cabinets by X date you do all the one with no hold up that dont miss their slot - add to the the milestones around BDUK and a fully scheduled workstack that booked months in advance any problems such as duct , pwer or permission issud and you miss a slot on a cab it migh ttake 7 - 8 months or longer to find another slot -- this is around the scale of the programme that seen in excess of 45,000 cabinets installed over the last 4 or so years (also the commercail programme is completing 2 years earier than originally expected

More ridiculous chest beating. You don't work for BT do you?

I've always said, I can understand if they'd had multiple blockages, or road works on the way, but, nope. Nothing like that here. There is very little reason I can see why it couldn't have been processed at the same time as at least, cabs 11 and 12. The fibre has made it to a manhole cover 200 metres away. Further on from there, that same fibre 300 metres to two other cabinets. They were working through the night through to 9pm to get those two done and find the blockages, but for some reason they couldn't come the other way? Nah. That's just poor planning.

The trouble is you don't have all the information and probably never do.

Either, BT cocked up and wasted money and time or BT had other issues/priorities as to doing the work. Without the full internal understanding of priorities, challenges and costs you will only ever be guessing. We can all point of things in all walks of life and say "why didn't they just..." - in some cases "our" way would be better but in others they did the most sensible thing we just don't have the info to understand it.

If BT had to do a full report on every cab about why there are delays to satisfy the general public then the programme would run for a lot longer than it is.

I know it is frustrating but in the end it is their job and their choice. They don't have to provide broadband and they can do it in any way they like - whether it makes sense to everyone else or not.