Telent

Hi All,

There is a cab near to where I live that has had FTTC live for nearly two years, unfortunately not the cab I'm on. For the last few months there has been a steady stream of Openreach, Kelly's and for the last few days Telent vehicles parked at it. For 4 weeks from around mid February, 2 Openreach vans were parked at it every day. Both the PCP and the DSLAM cabinets appear to be being worked on.

The BT Wholesale checker gives this message if you check an address served by the cabinet;

FTTC is currently not available on this cabinet due to following reasons:- Sorry your cabinet is temporarily unavailable, capacity will be restored as soon as possible.

As there is no sign of a new base for a second FTTC twin, anyone care to suggest the most likely reason for these works?

Cheers

Del

Some of the works you noted might have been routine work in the PCP. However, the lengthy period of works involving both cabinets implies that at least part of the work was installing additional tie cable capacity between the PCP and fibre twin.

As there is no sign of an additional fibre twin, it suggests that the additional tie cable capacity can be served by adding one or more additional line cards to the existing DSLAM.


Openreach don't build an installation at maximum capacity to start with. It's cheaper to come back later and add tie cables and/or line cards as cabinets reach the limit of installed capacity.

Thanks for that. I was wondering if that was the most likely explanation or if this cabinet was going to have an aggregation point near it.

I think your explanation is more likely.

Cheers

Del

FYI Telent are just another subcontractor for Openreach.

My local FTTC is about 10 M from my front door.

It has a socket back-plane for 288 Links, in the right-hand side.

The DSLAM, Power Supply, Batteries etc are in the left-hand side.



When first activated in March 2014, only 48 sockets had the Link/Filters inserted.

The PCP had very few visits over its first year, about one per month.



It was about 5 weeks back, April 2015, when the next 48 sockets were similarly loaded. I saw this being done.

Subsequently there have been more frequent visits to the PCP, about one or two per week.