Most people have either VDSL or ADSL, not both and for many rural cabinets ADSL will really not be an option. Aluminium is an irrelevance. It will affect both VDSL and ADSL anyway.

Given that there are tens of thousands of cabinets, then there are bound to be the very occasional catastrophic losses, but any one failure is a very small effect nationally (really had if you are affected of course). But the number of properties affected will never be in the tens of thousands as we are with the rcurrent floods. Even the phone network isn't fully protected. There are regular incidents of diggers damaging lines, telephone poles being brought down through accidents and so on. This is a matter of cost/benefit.

FTTC cabinets have limited battery backup, but there are processes to swap these out with fully charged ones if the power outage is extensive. Rural exchanges only have limited battery backup too. A mobile generator is required if an outage is prolonged.

In any event, xDSL services from cabinets are quite widely used in the rest of the world, often in the US where exchanges ("central office" in their parlance) are much further apart than in the UK.

Exchange in towns have Generators built in, and the rural exchanges yes, have limited battery backup, but BT has planned a lot more battery backup time in these small exchanges (due to not being able to have a generator), than the FTTC Cabinet, so ADSL from the exchange still has its benefits.

Plus if ADSL was phased out, people who only want broadband for small usage would have to pay more, and BT would have wasted their money on deploying 21CN!

Oh and Two phone lines is how you achieve FTTC and ADSL!

I can't find the stuff about the ADSLx from cabinets trials Andrew. I'm sure you wrote about it.

That could help a lot of slow lines if it comes about.

21CN is/was about a lot more than ADSL2+ provision from BT Wholesale., and Sky/TalkTalk LLU doesn't use it. Often present and sold before 21CN was available.

The broadband part of 21CN is WBC, and it's ride-along WBMC that most BT Wholesale ISPs use.

In reply to a post by TheEulerID:

FTTC cabinets have limited battery backup, but there are processes to swap these out with fully charged ones if the power outage is extensive.

If extensive and prolonged, which is when the limited capacity would run out, there wouldn't be enough standby batteries. I think they only apply to localised power losses.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 07-Dec-15 11:41:09)

And no SLA that requires consumer broadband to be a available to five 9's or better standard

Of course, but if there's a widespread power failure then surely it's a complete irrelevance as to whether the cabinets in the area have power or not. Almost nobody will have any domestic power either and, presumably, those which are truly mission critical and have auxiliary power supplies (hospitals, major business etc.) will have proper resilient business networks.

Ummm.

There seems to be rather a large amount of truth in that.

This needs to happen, and would give a much better service for everyone.

But it won't because OFCOM are obsessed with fake competition with everyone reselling the same service. Hence, there are LLU providers with kit in the exchanges that would then be pointless. The LLU providers will want to keep their kit so it won't happen.

Of course it would depend on the area but in urban areas most PCPs would require more than one FTTC cabinet.