21CN to the small exchanges

My exchange (1600 residential, 50 business) back in 2007 or so was scheduled for a 21CN upgrade in 2008, this got pushed back to 2009, then late 2009, and now the data has gone off samknows completely.

Are Zen able to check and give a more accurate figure, or does anyone else know of a date small exchanges like mine may be upgraded to allow greater than 8Mbps?

The thing is the exchange is in the middle of the village and I am probably the furthest away yet my line will easily support the full 24Mbps. It seems stupid that so many lines connected to it can get good speeds yet there is no upgrade date.

No LLU providers on the exchange so surely makes a good case for BT to upgrade it.

Sorry don't want to post my exchange in open forum as it gives away where I live too specifically.

Edited by Pipexer (Wed 05-Jan-11 17:59:48)

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

No LLU providers on the exchange so surely makes a good case for BT to upgrade it.

My view is just the opposite.

No competition, so why should BT even think about it.

I live in another backwater - very pleasant in most respects, but Internet services are firmly fixed in the 20th Century.

essentially 21CN upgrades have gone on the backburner and been superseded by FTTC installations. BT quietly dropped the 21CN PSTN telephone service conversion completely months ago and was only doing DSL work at the exchanges.

Now that they're installing FTTC there are some exchanges where to upgrade to 21CN technology would not give much, if any, speed improvement between ADSL and ADSL2+ as line distances mean the technology is at its limit, and if you can't, in practice, provide a better product to your customer should you spend the money on that particular capital investment project?

Commercially, some exchanges may also be at the margins in terms of customer base and viability of FTTC provision, something that might be affected by existing ADSL2+ service availability. An upgrade to the much more expensive FTTC services looks an attractive proposition to customers if their existing service is a very poor ADSL line, however if your area already has good, cheap, ADSL2+ services getting 16Mbps down the copper wire, fewer people, proportionally, are likely to be interested enough in a 34MBps FTTC service to pay 3 times the cost.

If you can get 16MBps ADSL2+ for £12 a month, is paying £40 a month for 3aMbps FTTC really the best VFM choice? If you have a pretty fast connection now, would you bother with (currently expensive) FTTC? By artificially restricting some exchanges to the lower end products, BT may be boosting the likelihood of those exchanges getting FTTC installations later, as customer demand for what is in effect a bigger upgrade will be higher.