it makes sense if you care about short term expenditure only.

Typical accountant thinking to think its a good thing to have customers waiting rather than over provisioning.

more line cards are a very small % of the cost of rolling out a cabinet.

The expensive part is done regardless of how many cards are in place.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

it makes sense if you care about short term expenditure only.

Actually, it makes perfect long term sense as well.

As WWWombat posted there are relatively few cabinets at any one time with their line cards approaching capacity/full - and even though many cabinets will have been deployed for years they are still on their first line card-so gradually filling them makes sense

Off the top of my head, the advantages of doing it for Openreach include:

- they can deploy newer/better line cards when available (i.e. those supporting G.Fast or vectoring) for faster/cheaper rather than having a lot of older generation cards ones unused and lying around;

- it allows them to use their or the BDUK funds to ensure fibre passes more premises for the same budget;

- if the CapEx figure is lower, this makes it easier for Openreach to eventually write it of and upgrade to G.Fast or FTTP

- it makes their business case more affordable so more cabs are commercially viable.

- installing excess/unused capacity would probably mean their charges to customers would have to go up

You make a point about over provisioning but that is effectly what Openreach do by installing capacity for 48 lines to start with not knowing what demand there will be - and unless there has been 'high demand' etc. the process of fitting the extra cards should be transparent to the end user

Taking your argument to the extreme would mean them provisioning fibre for ever single landline customer even though they know take-up is not going to be 100%

Edited by gt94sss2 (Sun 20-Dec-15 05:06:38)

The expensive bit is the labour costs involved in getting fibre to the cabinet, power, copper links re-instating any pavements, building plinths etc

While I disagree on the percentage issue (each small % can be the difference between commercial viability and otherwise), I'll still point you to BT's new longer-term targets: a maximum of 30% take-up.

With a largish 400-line PCP, they're expecting 133 lines to take FTTC long-term. That is still only half of the capacity of a full-size Huawei MA5603. The statistics showed 93% of 5603's were at less than half capacity, highlighting this very clearly.

Their belief is that, not only are some of these line cards not needed yet, but they're not ever going to be needed. Why pay for those?

An PCP sized with the average 300 lines is only expected to take 100 FTTC ports long-term. In that case, it wouldn't even need additional tie-pairs plumbing in.

And that brings us to the part you ignored - the other resource that needs to be added: tie pairs. That is much more labour-intensive than the line card, even if they don't need to dig more duct into the ground, and will be one of the critical paths in bringing capacity to an area. I think it is key to keep the jointing teams working in areas where the demand is, rather than where the demand isn't.

How is this different to providing electricity, water and gas?? Sorry, but this seems a copout to me.