BT Openreach Introduce 384 Port Upgrade for FTTC Broadband Cabinets

Telecoms watchers may be interested to learn that BTOpenreach has introduced extra capacity for their VDSL based Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband services by giving engineers the ability to upgrade their large Huawei street cabinets (H200) and increase customer capacity to 384.

At present the operator’s largest cabinets can handle a total of up to 288 active ports, but over the years we’ve seen a number of examples where even these can be rapidly filled as consumers adopt new superfast broadband services (here). As a result Openreach often has to build an additional cabinet, which is expensive and can add a long delay before new orders are taken again.

By comparison the new 384 port high-density Huawei DSLAM (384HD) means that an existing H200 cabinet can be upgraded, without any rearrangement of the existing customers, to support an additional 96 ports and that will make it easier, faster and cheaper to cope with rising demand in busy areas.

The new cabinet type comprises of 6 new 64 port line cards, which each maintain the existing 48 customers and 16 new customers per card. Customers are connected to copper terminations housed in a new side door on the right side of the cabinet. The new cabinet door is currently installed by Huawei along with replacement of the line cards as part of overnight planned engineering work.

A Few Key Technical Facts

* Requires 120 E and D pairs from the PCP (2X100, 2×20).
* Requires two DSLAM ducts using a top hat to ensure a quality duct seal.
* New side door extends the cabinet width by 14mm and opens 90° to allow easy access to the copper terminations.

Apparently it will only take two Openreach engineering visits to complete the upgrade and at least one large cabinet, PCP 199 in Basingstoke (pictured), has already been given the 384HD upgrade. Granted this won’t solve all of the capacity problems and in some areas more than 96 extra ports will be required to meet demand (i.e. build a new cabinet), but in many locations it should come as a big help.