After years of waiting for the power to be connected to the cabinet it's finally happening.

"Install 1m of 1 way power duct in Footway,Performing an 1excavation to expose existing power cable in Footway" - from roadworks.org.

The local power company are working there at the moment - small trench dug next to the new cabinet.

I saw the works were starting on Wednesday, lines were chalked onto the pavement with LV (Low Voltage?).

I have taken some pictures of the work this morning and will upload to the G+ group. I would imagine as long as no further issues found then the Cabinet will probably be RFS for June 2016 (as per the BT checker).

Finally some good news for you. It would be interesting to know what the delay was caused by. I know that there are often things in the local power distribution network about which we are unaware (things like local capacity issues), but this is a long time with no information. OR ought to be better at giving information about this stuff, even if it's down to circumstances beyond their control (as it is, presumably they have an asset from which they've earned no income which is hardly good).

All the work has been completed and the contractors have gone - have uploaded some more photos of the completed work.

Thanks for the replies, chaps.

That didn't take long - am amazed at what a small amount of work was involved in connecting the power. Given the multi-year wait I'd assumed that there was some pretty major infrastructure work involved. Clearly wrong about that.

Good news is that on the Cabinet Fibre Journey tracker it's now flagged at Activate.

There could have been major work in other areas. Local distribution networks all have capacity limits and it's very possible that this was the case here. It would have been some part of the cabling from the substation, or the substation itself or anything in the distribution chain to the actual cabinet. The local electricity distribution company will have capacity rules and it may be this is at the heart of the issue. Work to upgrade capacity in the distribution network could be at some distance from the cabinet. It's not that a cabinet is a particularly heavy drain, but eventually something will be the straw that breaks the capacity rules.

This is the Ofgem paper on their policy on the costs of upgrading distribution network uplifts.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/87259/gu...

Thanks for that insight - let's hope it was that the 1m trench was the tip of a much bigger iceberg! It's unlikely I'll ever know and I'm very glad things are now moving on. Now just need some decent fibre offers to come up in June.

Thanks again.

There must surely have been some significant reason known only to the project managers involved.

It would have been nice to have had some sort of national reporting system showing the progress of every cabinet being upgraded (and any major hold-ups). The project managers must surely have to maintain this sort of stuff, and it would surely be on a common system as management will want all their progress reports, red flags and so on.

I nice little extract for public access would have been nice, but I guess there was no budget for such developments.

In reply to a post by TheEulerID:

This is the Ofgem paper on their policy on the costs of upgrading distribution network uplifts.

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/ofgem-publications/87259/gu...

Really good find.

That document tells us that 95% of new connections happen without requiring any "network reinforcement" ... which means that 5% of new connections do! The costs they trigger end up at £30m per year ... and the customers of the new lines ends up paying roughly two-thirds of that - £20m per year.

Elsewhere, I could find that in the 2010-11 period, there were roughly 300,000 new electricity connection requests in the year.

That means some 15,000 electricity connections end up paying that £20m - an average of £1,333 extra, on top of the £1,000 - £2,000 that is the standard charge for a new supply.

Openreach have installed roughly 75,000 cabinets since starting in 2010 - about 12,000 cabinets per year. If 5% of intended cabinets turned out to need to pay extra supply charges, and were dropped by the project, there could be 600 cabs per year, 12 per week, being left out.

Just drove past Cabinet 10 and the pavement has been closed an engineer has a load of kit over the pavement and laptops connected into the DSLAM , I presume this is the "Activation" stage.

Unfortunately couldnt stop in traffic to grab a photo