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.
