Has Openreach stopped enabling any more cabinets?

We live on the edge of a village that has a fibre enabled cabinet at its centre, but our end of the village is connected to an exchange in the next village, about 3 miles away, and we are about 2 miles from the fibre enabled cabinet. There is a local sub-cabinet that feed the 95 properties, most of whom get sub 2Mbit.

The local councillor, with the support of about 40 households who agreed to pay the required £200 applied for CFP funding to improve this area, and received Openreach quotes of £46k to Fibre enable this sub-cabinet or around £330k to provide full FTTP to the area.

The council gave a provisional go ahead for the FTTC approach, and Opernreach were tacked to carry out a full survey. For moths the feedback was that the scheme was going ahead and just awaiting a final sign-off.

However recently we have learnt that the scheme has been turned down with no official reason, but we have been told that it is now Openreah�s policy not to plan any more FTTC, and the council won�t fund FTTP, so it has hit an impasse.

Is this really Openenreach�s current policy?

If so how will it effect us and probably many other communities in a similar situation when USO comes into effect?

Thanks
Tim.

No. Openreach are still expanding FTTC with new cabinets.
Sometimes cabinets schemes fall at the final costs hurdle and are shelved

Edited by witchunt (Sat 01-Dec-18 15:06:23)

In reply to a post by witchunt:

No. Openreach are still expanding FTTC with new cabinets.
Sometimes cabinets schemes fall at the final costs hurdle and are shelved

I totally agree, there is a cabinet on our exchange that was suppose to go live back in July, and was all on track but due to it being placed in an unsuitable location it have to be removed and re-surveyed and they are once again installing the cabinet in a different location that is more suitable.

So yes, there can be issues when installing cabinets, so do get shelved for a little while, but BT are still defiantly installing FTTC cabinets.

Also where its such a huge job, it is very easy for BT to forget and loose track what has and hasn't been done, and sometimes they need to be politely reminded of this.

Paul

Still plenty infill FTTC cabinets being installed in North East Scotland under BDUK.

If the funding was part community and part vouchers this would be correct, it�s not Openreach it would be the DCMS funding. Only allow funding to be spent on FTTP now.

In reply to a post by witchunt:

No. Openreach are still expanding FTTC with new cabinets.
Sometimes cabinets schemes fall at the final costs hurdle and are shelved

That's what seems to have happened to the cabinet on my road - Cabinet 114 (Slough). There doesn't seem to be any plans for it to be upgraded and it's now 7 years since all others in my area have FTTC.

I'm stuck with Virgin's fibre.

Edited by Khan (Fri 14-Dec-18 10:41:22)

Same here in Welwyn Garden City. All the cabinets round me were upgraded years ago but my cabinet has no plan in place and can only deliver 2.5Mbps ADSL. Fortunately I have Virgin available but it would be good to have FTTC as an option. Its difficult to negotiate a good deal with Virgin when they know they have no competition!

Openreach after continual nagging from me did admit that an upgrade wasn't commercially viable but suggested that the cabinet might be upgraded if enough potential users were prepared to part fund it. Little chance of that with Virgin readily available.

Virgin is most likely the problem. Openreach may not deem it viable to install FTTC if VM is already present.

Unlikely in this case I think. Welwyn Garden City has almost total Virgin coverage and nearly all of it is duplicated by FTTC, so I would expect subscribers to be swapping from one to the other to get the best deal. Streets round me are on various FTTC enabled cabinets and all are also served by Virgin.

"I'm stuck with Virgin's fibre. "

Spare a thought for the millions of people who still dont have even one "superfast" service provider!

Edited by deleted (Fri 14-Dec-18 18:53:13)