Eeeee. It started well afore 2001 milad!

In the North West my wife spent many years from 1966 GPO >> BT buying buildings and land for expansion, then a complete change of tack to sell and lease-back. It may have been ongoing or completed in 2001 I grant you. She retired well before then.

How did you work that one out?

Broadband served from a cabinet will always have a shorter length than from the exchange, unless openreach do something weird like replace a close exchange with a distant cabinet. Then again openreach are known to do such weird things to save some pennies.

The main reason why really long FTTC lines are bad now is that most if not all of their usable FTTC frequency is wiped out by adsl power cutback.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 17-Sep-14 18:02:46)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

How did you work that one out?

Isn't he simply saying that a cabinet with 5 lines is unlikely to get a fibre upgrade?

There was a big spin-off in 2000 through a company called Telereal (now Telereal Trillium) for BT property including exchanges, offices, etc. Telereal manages the property but does not own all of it. I suspect that it had no interest in small rural exchanges - the ones I was referring to, so that most of those will remain as BT property. If BT were paying rent for such exchanges the management would feel much greater pressure to get rid of them.

Suppose that the land and building potential is worth £40-50K. With current commercial rent yields that is ~£2.5K per year plus upkeep and operating expenses. That absorbs more than 20% of what Openreach can charge in basic annual line rental for an exchange with 200 phone lines without any contribution to the copper loop. Anyone would want to get rid of the property if they were allowed to.

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Obviously only applies to exchanges that have fibre, but with the push now towards fibre products and more exchanges having fibre, how long before adsl2+ stops getting offered by ISPs and before the adsl signal gets "switched off" simliar to how the onld 20CN was?

Simple: It will last until BT Wholesale provides the next generation of broadband services (E.g. ADSL2+ or likely FTTC) at each exchange .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

How did you work that one out?

Isn't he simply saying that a cabinet with 5 lines is unlikely to get a fibre upgrade?

Yes, and also that VDSL will not provide a service on a 4km line even without and power restrictions. Well, it might, but the speeds with probably be sub-1Mbps!

my point is a 4km line from the exchange with the cabinet at 500m becomes a 3.5km line.

So the question I put to you which is better.

4km on adsl
3.5km on vdsl with no power cutback
?

In that case 4km on ADSL.

And the LLU operators also turn off their kit currently around 9 million lines

But OR's point is there would never be a return of the investment of an FTTC cabinet, so they won't do it. Five lines max?