FYI

dates for wilstead will be drived by Beds BC -- its not only govermentt by BT monies in BDUK contracts (most choose to ignore that) -- so check to see when the actual date as all decisions aroud any BDUK cabs you shoudl be speaking to the the LA -- Please note that is the exchange being enabled 0-- you will need to check with La to see your postcode actually gets any beneift there are anumber od reasons -- actually getting permissions to do street wiorks and TMA requirement is getting harder and harder

LA's are very careful about what they tell residents around BDUK -- dont forget this an excnage enablement -- you will need to find who actually benefits from the enablment

Mine exactly the same 31-12-2014. I am not holding my breath despite my cab being wired to the adjacent new fibre cab over 4 months ago. Every engineer I see working on it seems to thinks months still. Probably a little like a hospital booking everyone in at 2.00pm, making you wait all afternoon while they work through everybody.

In this case I have a contact in the Council, he tells me that the initial batch of cabinets for SMWLS are all installed and ready but there is a blocked fibre duct that is preventing it going live before the end of 2014. He said the blockage affected all FTTC cabinets on the exchange so I assume that it must be a common duct from somewhere. roadworks.org shows work to fix a blocked duct is scheduled for 3 days from Tuesday.

My village is all served from Cabinet 5, a new Huawei 288 line FTTC cabinet was stood in early October and power was connected the same week. I saw the copper links through to the D-side lines being put in about a week later. There are 4 other similar cabinets that were stood and connected up in the same month in 2 or 3 other local villages and a couple on another exchange just a couple of miles away. All are shown as Phase 3 of the local BDUK plan, available in January to June 2015.

As far as I can tell the power is off inside the cabinet, no fan noise with my ear against the vents.

Edited by rippedcotton (Sun 14-Dec-14 23:47:01)

The other day our exchange WHALEY BRIDGE was listed as December 2014, now it's listed as March 2015. It's really annoying considering the next exhange over has had Fibre for over two years.

The only real valid one there is blocked ducts. Wayleaves should be sorted out before you have a scheduled date as should cabinet siting and power. If BT do not do that they are not doing any proper planning which my explain why their rollout is frequently a mess. There should be a site survey to look at any potential issues before putting into a project rollout plan

If you think blocked ducts are the only cause of delays you really do need to think again. Delays in the provision of power are one of the major grounds for delay. In addition the cost of a power connection can sometime wildly exceed the initial estimate resulting in the commercial viability of an upgrade becoming unviable. Negotiation in this area can take many many months before a resolution is found or BT feel they need to walk away and abandon the upgrade.

A good example is when the trench for the power is opened up and the records do not match what the ground looks like causing confusion/delays.

Have heard of one cabinet where all the surveys said fine, but on digging and unmarked utility and not found with the usual testers was encountered, meaning a cab may not fit.

The scale is such that there are approx. 1000 cabinets going live each month. So if we are seeing just 20 with delays each month, that is pretty good management, not perfect but perfection to reduce a 2% error might involve more expense, e.g. building more slack into the programme or employing more people.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps no information until the cabinet is ready to take orders is the way to go.

This is what Superfast Cymru do, but this also generates much frustration and complaints.

It seems companeis can only do either:

a. give no information out at all, or
b. give a single etimated date which can then change without warning or explanation.

It's like they exist iin an information black hole and using technology from the sixties to manage their information, and gives the impression of complete dispogasation and not knowing what they are doing.

No-one's taken an approach that says "What information would I like if was a customer and waiting for a service?".

Something I've suggested before, here I think and to Superfast Cymru (but they are far too stubborn to listen).

Upload a list of cabinets with current esitimated dates and a brief status message.

It's not beyond anyone in their IT team to do this, considering the impressive interactive web sites that they have already done that are also extremely uninformative and useless, and the information must be there somewhere sitting in some electronic format, maybe even as low-tech as a spreadsheet as I can't believe they do everything on pen and paper.

Even if a brief status message does not exist in a format that is publicly displayable, it is a really simple matter to create such a field and whoever then updates the date in the system can just type in a brief summary. Or would this take up to much of their time?

This would help to resolve all the dissatisfaction and perceived lack of information and action.

I'm an an analyst/programmer myself - therefore that's why I can analyse this problem in great detail and produce a techincal specification that will satisfy the customer....but it's not rocket science is it?

Superfast Cymru dont concern themselves with accurate information or facts or anything so mundane. They are far too busy generating positive PR spin on a chaotic and patchy roll out.

This is the organisation that informed my AM that new planning consent requirement was delaying a resiting of a fibre twin some 2 months AFTER the new siting was agreed between Openjoke and the Local Planning Authority - AND several weeks after the planners told me that there were NO planning issues preventing the cabinet being stood.

At best Superfast Cymru is an incompetent waste of money, I will keep private my personal view of them - suffice it to say I consider them an expensive gravy train that should be disbanded.