Our town's (Bexhill in East Sussex) fibre cabinets were installed and power connected in February/March of this year - the BIS date on the web site was June. This then changed to September and, the way it's going, I'm expecting it to change to December shortly.

I suspect, but have absolutely no evidence, that it is the customers installation side of the upgrade that may be causing the delay. The adjacent town of Hastings recently started accepting orders and I wouldn't expect OR to open up Bexhill if they knew all the CP staff were still fully occupied in Hastings.

So to answer your "Good sign?" - possibly not as good as you might imagine.

Ian

THe real difficulty is BT do not schedule anything. The rollout dates are just a list. They publish a date but clearly the dates are not realistic at all and they dont even refine the dates as the rollout progresses, they just push everything out 3 months when they miss it.& push them out again when they miss it again. So if as will hapen most of the exchanges scheduled for end of September are not enabled by then they just push them out again.

In theory at the current rate of progress almost all the exhanges with September dates are likely toi be enabled by the end of December.. Because of the winter weather and Chistmas/New Year a small percentage will probably go out into Q1 2013.. The current ones with a December 2012 date are likely to go out to Q2 2013 with only about 40% of thembeing enabled by that date. It may speed up a bit when they get the additional 400 engineers on stream.

Rock and a hard place.

Do we really need daily changing dates, as a delay on one cabinet ripples down the list...they appear to have elected to go with 3 monthly dates. Having a date means that at least you know something is happening, unlike many parts of the UK that know nothing about roll-outs.

If there is a proper and realistic schedule the changes should not be that great. About 5% slippage at most but we all know that these lists are not a scghedule at all. They are just a list.

Other companies can keepto schedules and much more complex and demanding ones. Quite why BT has such big problems with schedules remains a mystery.

If a Site manager for say a Housebuilding company kept slipping the schedules several months at a time he would be likley to get a stern talking to if not fired

It may speed up a bit when they get the additional 400 engineers on stream.

The engineers they are taking on won't be employed for the FTTC roll-out. They are tying to keep on top of the fault volumes created by the poor weather, and and keeping up to date with FTTC (customer) installs.