"Small Broadband Exchanges"

I've been seeing a number of small standalone cabinets being installed in rural areas near me in the last six months as part of the NI Broadband Improvement Project. The page specifically says: "The broadband scheme will lay new fibre optic telephone lines from existing exchanges to new small broadband exchanges in remote areas."

Does anyone have any information about what these "small broadband exchanges" are? I'm making the assumption that they are the cabinets I'm seeing, but I'm particularly interested if anyone knows what kind of hardware they contain.

Cheers,

Maurice

Probably all in one PCP/DSLAM cabinets

My understanding of NI demographics is that there are a lot of people in rural areas, and not that many existing PCP cabinets to site FTTC cabinets next to. The result is that a fair number of rural lines are too long to benefit from FTTC.

The original DETI project helped support a lot of rural cabinets, so what you are now seeing is likely to be one of two things...

- More cabinets like the previous ones, sited next to existing PCP cabinets. This puts coverage into new areas that haven't been touched before.

- Entirely new cabinets (perhaps all-in-one, as Ribble says), aimed at putting both a PCP and an FTTC cabinet closer to the end-users than the previous type. This style of deployment might match the ones being trialled as "FTTRN" (fibre to the remote node), where the new node is a deliberate way to extend the coverage range of an existing FTTC cabinet.

The hardware within the cabinet is a DSLAM or MSAN (which are the technical abbreviations for "small broadband exchange"), and might differ in these new cabinets. You can see the existing types of DSLAM in this old post

Your understanding of NI demographics seems fairly spot on

Everything I've seen in the last 7-8 months seems to be of the "all-in-one" variety. The common pattern I'm seeing is that at some spot on the roadside, a single new cabinet is sited. There are no nearby cabinets to be seen. There's often a trench dug across the road to an existing BT "manhole" where I suspect the existing telephone lines are buried and the new fibre has been installed to.

I spoke to a couple of engineers (Openreach I think) who were down the road from my home, measuring some stuff out. They confirmed that they were planning to install a single cabinet across the road from the existing ducting. I just wasn't sure if the new cabinets contained the traditional PCP equipment, as well as the new fibre equipment or not.

Thanks for the responses. Some nice acronyms for me to waste Christmas googling

Cheers,

Maurice

I've seen a couple of these cabinets recently, and had thought about posting a picture on here. One of them is sited about 1 mile from the nearest PCP box, which also has a Fibre cabinet next to it. It was the 'Faster Broadband is Available Now' ( or something like that) posters on them which caught my eye.