Superfast is here!!! - Just not for 49T :(

Since been a while since the last update. Some interesting stuff has happened.

August 2015 - Openreach pull Coeff-96, a bundle of 96 fibre optic cables from Bedford Exchange(SMBF) to the cable chamber outside of cabinet 49T. They built an aggregation node for the Fibre Optic cables within the cable chamber. However it turns out that this is only for the folks that connected to cabinet 44T!! Which is approx 350m away. It turns out that people connected to cabinet 44T can now order FTTP!! Thats Fibre to the Premise with max speeds of 330mb/s down and 30mb/s up.

The picture shows the situation as it stands.

You can see Cabinet 44T and Cabinet 49T in the picture above. The areas that are enclosed green are the areas that are covered by cabinet 44T and the area that are in red is serviced by cabinet 49T. As it stand the fibre optic cable that is being used to supply the green areas with FTTP is being run from the cable chamber in front of 49T!!! As has been noted before ~70% of the properties serviced by 44T also have access to Virgin Media.

The roll out of FTTP for properties connected to 44T was done under the BDUK I project. Where as cabinet 49T falls under OpenReach NGA and we have told that it's too expensive to for FTTC or FTTP under BDUK II which has almost double the allowance per house!!! I'm not sure how this makes sense in anyones book, given that OpenReach are happy to run 200m of Fibre Optic cable to a house and not run to houses that closer.

Further to this the OpenReach superfast checker has been updated to show that cabinet 49T is being upgraded to Fibre probably within the next 4 months. It turns out that is was a erroneous update!!! We have found out from our local councillor, who happens to work for BT, that Openreach will be upgrading to Fibre by June 2017!!!!

Lets see what happens.

How did we end up in this mess?

This post will hopefully outline How/Why we arrived in the current situation regarding our broadband.

This is all information that I have pieced together from various places, including, local residents, local council, various online forums and BTs' OpenReach site. If you see a mistake please contact me and I'll correct it.

2004

NTL/Virgin Media
The Abbey Fields development by David Wilson Homes hit a dispute with Virgin Media at the time due to a number of outstanding payments from your predecessor corporation, NTL. Up to this point David Wilson Homes had been installing the cable infrastructure to enable every home to receive full cable service.

BT
At this point, one can assume that BT had run out of copper capacity at the Bedford exchange (SMBF) and started installing an alternative solution, Telephony over Optical Passive Network, TPON.

As you can see in the above picture TPON is the orange link on the right hand side. Due to BT using this 'Fiber Optic cable' setup, it was incompatible with ADSL.

2005 - 2012:

Virgin Media
Many requests were placed by residents who are located in the area where the Virgin Media service is currently not installed. The Virgin media service is installed at odd numbers 1 - 9 and even numbers 2 - 6, Croyland drive. In 2012 Virgin media said that it was not in a position to invest in any infrastructure installations and the service would not be extended to adjacent properties

BT
At some point  during this period BT started to overlay all there TPON infrastructure with good old copper. Some might think this was great everyone can now get ADSL connections, which is true however given the length of the copper cable from the Exchange the speed of ADLS is limited to a maximum of 3MBPS, with most getting less that, if any at all. It also turns out that cabinet 49T is a Secondary Cross-Connection Point (SCP). This can been seen on the diagram above as the green pillar in the center. It turns out that BT didn't quite calculate the number of lines correctly and they are unable to supply everyone connected to Cabinet 49T.

2013:

Virgin media
In a shock development, Virgin Media extended the infrastructure to supply odd numbered homes up to and including number 19 Croyland Drive.

BT
March/April BT erected a brand new FTTC cabinet outside No. 1 Sandleford Drive. This cabinet is fully equipped and powered to deliver FTTC including the fiber cable from the Duck Mill Lane.

Whats the story?

This is the blog of the residents from the Abbey Fields estate located in the Village of Elstow in Bedfordshire

Fundementally, this blog aims to disseminate information regard the continued struggle to get Superfast Broadband to our part of the estate