Street Cabinets

Walking back home this afternoon I saw a dark green cabinet being lifted from a lorry to the path. The doors were open and being of a curious nature I asked the guys installing it whether it was BT or cable. BT they replied. I also noticed it said Huawei on it (inside IIRC). It was a bit taller than the normal streetside cabinet, I assume it was for FTTC. Anyone able to confirm?

Also, walking around here there seems to be (currently) two types of cabinets, albeit very similar. The majority of those I've taken notice of have an 8-digit number on each end, round here it's of the form 5040xxxx. There's one very near our house, the cabinet has a pitched roof, for water drainage I assume. Are these BT or cable?

Indeed, can one readily distinguish BT from Virgin (or predecessors) cabinets? They don't seem to have any company name on them these days.

Also I've seen one (they may well be others around) that have, after the 8-digit number, the letters DNS. Is this a 'special' cabinet, if so what does it do. Does DNS have another meaning rather than Dynamic Name System/Service/Server?

Just being curious in my meanderings around the locality.

[Edited to correct appalling grammar]

Edited by cheshire_man (Tue 13-Jul-10 17:55:15)

Yes, that's BT FTTC. There will be a 1G fibre connection back to the exchange and also a copper cable to a nearby cabinet which will connect to customers lines.

If it looks like this, then it's a fibre cabinet

The majority of those I've taken notice of have an 8-digit number on each end, round here it's of the form 5040xxxx. There's one very near our house, the cabinet has a pitched roof, for water drainage I assume.

that form of numbering is cable bt would be PCP 17 ect or on old ones CAB17 ect

pitched roof is to stop kids sitting on them as they drink zider ect lol

1G fibre connection back to the exchange

That's quite a small capacity. Good for for 20 or 30 customers, nothing future proof.

Pretty good for 50-75 if you want better than ADSLmax, and a couple of hundred if they've been on sub-4MB.

In reply to a post by JNeuhoff:

1G fibre connection back to the exchange

That's quite a small capacity. Good for for 20 or 30 customers, nothing future proof.

What's your calculation for what's needed for say, 100, customers? What bandwidth is there out of a exchange into the core network?

So village of 1000 customers would need 30G?

You do realise that not everybody is moving data at the same time.

Future proofing comes with increasing the fibre speed. Surprise, surprise, people do not use thier interent connection at full speed all the time. If they do they have the wrong product.

Edited by deleted (Wed 14-Jul-10 19:44:36)

In reply to a post by JNeuhoff:

1G fibre connection back to the exchange

That's quite a small capacity. Good for for 20 or 30 customers, nothing future proof.

It's used for up to 200 customers from what i've been told. 5Mbit per customer assuming the full 200 are on it and using it.

Given the FUP seems to be about 100GB/month on the "unlimited" package, 1Gbit sitting there seems fine for the moment.

Edited by orly (Wed 14-Jul-10 18:26:06)

In reply to a post by JNeuhoff:

1G fibre connection back to the exchange

That's quite a small capacity. Good for for 20 or 30 customers, nothing future proof.

There are enough 1Gb links supplied to the cabinet to ensure there is zero contention on the cabinet <> exchange link.

In any event 1Gb would serve an entire cabinet of over 200 customers perfectly satisfactorily, over 4Mbps each is easliy enough and well in excess of what either LLU backhaul or BTW backhaul will deliver, however OR want to keep it uncontended for business services as much as anything else.

Edited by deleted (Wed 14-Jul-10 19:28:36)