In reply to a post by candlerb:

In the long long term it could be more expensive, as it involves maintaining a powered cabinet indefinitely.

I imagine Openreach will regret deploying them in the long run.

I suspect they will be only rarely deployed, in those cases where the optical budget (i.e. distance) doesn't allow direct PON.

Otherwise, the network will be better, more reliable and cheaper to run by taking the one-off cost of pulling cables to the aggregation node. To serve an area of ~1400 properties with PON requires only a 48-fibre cable.

The topology of FTTP doesn't always follow the topology of the copper network anyway. FTTP spans outward from the fibre aggregation node; copper spans outward from the exchange.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I suspect they will be only rarely deployed, in those cases where the optical budget (i.e. distance) doesn't allow direct PON.

Can see the real benefits of a subtended head end when the distance limitation of fibre are reached, just hope they don't decide to use them for other deployments where pulling in some fibre would work fine.