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Busman’s Holiday Touring FTTC Broadband Cabinets and FTTP Update

A little rugby, a FTTC broadband cabinet or two, all in a Sunday’s walk.

leaning against an FTTC cabinet in Leamington SpaOn Sunday morning I was walking with a couple of my kids from our hotel in Leamington Spa to my oldest son’s flat, where we went to watch the Rugby World Cup final. To my utter delight, I came across a  FTTC broadband cabinet and insisted we stop for a photo opportunity.

My kids are used to this kind of thing, and weren’t overly embarrassed when people passed by wondering what the attraction was with a metal green cabinet when there was a beautiful park and greenhouse in Jephson Gardens a mere stones throw away across the river Leam. My daughter, though, did once move to the back of the crowd when I stopped in front of everyone to take a photo of a Grandstream SIP phone during a guided tour of Southampton University student accommodation.fttc cab dslam label

There was no doubt that it was a FTTC broadband cabinet – there was a small yellow label on it containing the words DSLAM. Anyway we continued on our way to the flat to watch the rugby which finished with, from a Welshman’s perspective, a highly satisfactory narrow victory for the All Blacks. This was despite the fact that France probably had the best of much of the game, and the ref ignoring what seemed to be a number of high tackles, where in my view France should have been awarded penalties.

The other satisfactory result would have been a storming 70 point victory for New Zealand. No sour grapes at all here 🙂

Just to finish off with some BT FTTP tidbits, I note that as of last week there are now 35,020 premises that can gain access to FTTP. There has been a steep increase in the numbers being provisioned over the last few weeks, helped by the use of overhead cables rather than underground ducts to access the cabs.

This won’t mean much to the the general public as BT’s marketing seeks not to distinguish between FTTP and FTTP, with a harmonised product set due to be announced at some point. More on this schedule as I get the info.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

3 replies on “Busman’s Holiday Touring FTTC Broadband Cabinets and FTTP Update”

Yeah been there too!
My wife gets embarrassed when see Cisco hardware – i saw a pair of 3560’s and a 2960 in a comms box in Wilko the other month, i just had to have a peep. Even more she must hate the photo’s i show her of data centre visits – “Look sweetie a CRS-3!” Poor thing – you can see her will to live fade away as i ramble “16-slot, 40-Gbps-per-slot line-card shelf………”

A cat can have kittens in an oven, but that does not make them biscuits.

BE.

And I thought it was only me that got excited by this kind of stuff 🙂

I’m in an area where BT are trialling FTTP and was invited by my ISP to take part in the trial, the only reason I haven’t is that they’ve not been able to give me a monthly price post trial and I just know I’d not want to go back to ADSL.

One of the problems with FTTP relates exactly to the issue of what does the product look like. FTTP uses the same backhaul pipes as ADSL2+ and FTTC which means expensive per Megabit costs. Because of it’s speed FTTP has the potential to allow users to download much more data than ADSL which means it will either look a lot more expensive to the consumer or more loss making to the ISP – depending on that ISPs approach. It also has the potential to clash with other Ethernet products in the business market – FTTP is far more expensive.

BT’s answer is I believe to harmonise FTTC and FTTP as a single product and constrain the upload speed to 20Megs, at least in the short term. I would think average prices must rise though this all depends on whether the fall in costs outstrips the growth in bandwidth.

If it was me I’d sign up for the trial today.

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