I think you misunderstand. I'm not looking for 100% accuracy. I fully understand delays may occur. If my cabinet had been put back by e.g. three months I would have just shrugged my shoulders and hoped for the best. But can you not see the different frustration levels an 18 month delay will cause, especially when only announced a week or two before expected go live?

I understand the frustration, but given the scale and speed of roll-out and the limited resources that seem to be employed, I am not sure without lots more resources that things will improve.

There is a distinct feeling that as with some of the council sides they may just clam up and give no information, since its easy to field off no information moans, than it is wrong information moans.

In principle you are right, but the time it takes, which costs money and detracts one or more person from actually getting things done, to deal with the questions and criticism from the many people that do not like the explanation is where the costs/resources become drained.

Back in 2010 and 2011 the Openreach overall schedule planning spreadsheets were leaked two or three times. I expect up to date ones exist but the leakers were shot at dawn.

It was clear from those that the planning was by area, where an area comprised many postcodes.

Each area was given a "Phase" in which it was expected to take place. There were no dates given for the phases, though I assume somewhere there were provisional dates for those.

The rollout did prove to follow the phases reasonably well. However, occasionally an area would not be done at the same time as others in the same phase, and although it retained its phase number several later phases could complete before this one. It didn't get a new phase number.

The quarter end dates we see I think initially arose from the phase dates. That would explain the quarter by quarter slippage we used to see, as the re-scheduling of incomplete areas/postcodes, (as some of any particular area might have been completed), would sensibly occur near quarter-end.

Scheduling plus detailed research and planning at the at the cabinet level would not occur until close to the start of the relevant phase. There is no way a national cabinet schedule could ever have been created, due to the unknown unknowns.

... there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

I imagine the reason so many dates, it seems nearly all, have now slipped so much is because of the number of infill and BDUK projects now running. That makes it even harder to give reasonably accurate dates than during the bulk rollout.

I don't know about that. They already have a Twitter feed. How hard could it be to provide cabinet updates? I agree Q&A would be very time consuming, but releasing info is the matter of a moment and should take barely any resource.

so, in the latest twist, the site has been updated again to Coming Soon within the next 6 months. So in the space of three weeks we've gone from imminent, to not happening for 18 months, to going live in the next six months.

While I'm happier in principle with the thought that we may go live within half a year, I can't help but be more than a little sceptical, especially as according to Superfast Northamptonshire the information they have from BT is that it will be July at the earliest. So that's 7 months minimum, then.

I won't hold my breath

Thanks for the info RobertoS.

Believe it or not, I do understand the issues BT may be coming up with and I don't blame them for circumstances beyond their control. But I also think that once they take the decision to publish dates then they have an obligation to make them as accurate as possible. And this includes giving explanations for serious delays. It's all about being professional and managing expectations. I also don't think it would be that hard to do. An extra field denoting reason for delay is the work of a moment.

have you spoken to your local authority as this is a BDUK cab and not commercial nd all updates a re managed by the BDUK local project

for an BDUK enabled ares you shoudl be looking at the Local authority broadband website

I have spoken to the Superfast Northamptonshire team. They get their information from BT, who told them it would probably be end July 2015 at the earliest, which doesn't tie in with the dates on the website, of course.

They also told me they have no control over the schedule. That lies with BT.