Because BT perceives the data to commercial value to its competitors and wants them to have to work at figuring things out, rather than hand it to them for free.

The rate you can hand check is nothing compared to what rate would be needed to build a 27 million phone line data base, 3600 seconds in an hour...

You wouldn't need to check every property, only one property per cabinet. It all depends on how much information was required. Gathering the information to feed the robot to start with would be a problem though.

There is bound to be an "outsourced" solution for this, question is, is it more or less boring than solving captchas?

I wonder do BTw customer providers get any more "bulk tools".

I think they do (or at least did) have a bulk tool.

There was an item in the ISP Forum a while back that BT was offering a discount on bulk lookups for fibre.

I've just created a little app that takes a house number and postcode and screen scrapes the results, at the moment I've only extracted the full address, exchange and cabinet number (for proof of concept as it was easier), but everything else is in the string returned

Takes about 3 to 7 seconds to retrieve the web page, which is the slow part.

I may well fully automate this to check the rest of our local cabinets on a regular basis, although I might build in a delay between checks so not to upset any systems, then it can run on my server and send me an email when something changes

Edited by R0NSKI (Mon 07-Apr-14 23:49:00)

Very nice indeed.
I personally would LOVE an app like this
Nice work R0NSKI though, nice to hear it is possible!

I did the same thing, back when I was moving house.

At the time, the postcode coverage lists existed, and the DSL checker worked with postcode lookups.

I managed to scrape all the results for the town, group them, and map them on the batchgeo.com website. Very handy...

Very very nice WWWombat, you see, Am I crazy or should something like this not be provided for all BDUK projects involving BT (infact any provider getting public money, oh wait, that pretty much is only BT).
I know "commercial" information like this is "protected", however I DO NOT agree that publicly funded deployment can be kept under the same level of secrecy not completely transparent availability information.
I think everything gets buried under these percentages, has anyone actually doubled checked that each and every premises in a deployment area can ACTUALLY get what is being promised?

Edited by deleted (Wed 09-Apr-14 09:22:38)

Well some businesses and home's have received it here in Malton i don't know if they can order it but its available.

http://i.gyazo.com/e188e817ba9c7d8fbe35c9d2eedb0012.png

To manually check each and every premise will cost a lot of money to assess likely cable routing.

I can do automated stuff and we are doing this in our news, there are caveats to it all, but generally things are in line with what is being said.

NOTE: No one is promising that every home on a cabinet will get faster than 24 Mbps.

The issue is one of time and money, to sanity check my own figures for an exchange can take me an hour, and that is after having spent a good chunk of time pulling data together into a meaningful system. The reward for doing all this is minimal beyond so far being able to say that published figures are close enough to our estimates to not be the total fabrications that some consider them to be.