21CN and Exchange Activate

Will 21CN mean that the Scottish Exchange Activate exchanges will get ADSL at faster than the current 512Kbps?

Steve

What exchange are you on? Most people can get more than 512k already!
Put your number in here and see what it says

http://www.bt.com/broadband/bb_info.jsp

Also, have a look for your exchange on www.samknows.com and see what info you can find.

I'm on the Sanday (01857) exchange, which had broadband enabled under the Exchange Activate scheme paid for by the Scottish Executive. These are currently limited to 512k. I'm wondering if a side-effect of 21CN (when it eventually gets here in late 2011) will be to give us increased speeds.

Steve

I'm guessing Sanday covers a wide geographical area so average line length could be an issue here. I see it has less than 200 residential and 15 non-res customers!
I didn't realise that the Scottish Exec funded exchanges were limited to 512. Is that all of them or just the really remote ones? Maybe they are reckoning that with such a small user base it would not be cost effective to do much more. You'll just need to compensate that with the fact you live in a great part of the country...and exchange contention is never going to be an issue is it

I think the backhaul links used for EA are fairly small so contention is still going to be an issue to some extent.
http://eco.btwholesale.com/broadband1/availability/exchangeActivate.asp

I imagine it's the provision of only a small backhaul that's the reason why only 512kbps is supported. Contention may even be worse than a large exchange with large backhaul.

Re-interpreting the OP's question though, will 21CN involve upgrading the the backhaul to even the smallest exchanges? Presumably it involves migrating to a single backhaul for all exchange services (phone, broadband, business comms, etc). If this requires physically recabling then the answer is probably yes. My guess is that BT will make the decision on a per exchange basis, and that the specific information is as usual company confidential.

The size of the VP will be appropriately smaller to compensate though.

They are not going to put a 100mbit pipe in for 50 users for example.

Not all exchanges were upgraded to Exchange Activate, only 148 smallest:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/BroadbandforScotland/Technical-Overview#a4

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/BroadbandforScotland/SEBroadbandInitiatives/History

As for the future....Exchange Activate product will be removed with 21CN.