The Curious Case of Hunslet 82 – G.fast Pod Waiting 3 Years to Go Live

Sometimes trying to figure out why a service, which was built a long time ago, hasn’t yet gone live is harder than it should be and that’s particularly true when the operator that did the work (Openreach) claims it doesn’t know the answer either. So begins the unusual saga of Street Cabinet 82 in Hunslet (Middleton, South Leeds).

Strictly speaking the story of Hunslet 82 (MYHLT 82) begins all the way back in 2012, after Openreach (BT) initially shunned the cabinet for an upgrade to their UK Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) broadband ISP technology. According to the operator, 82’s area had been deemed commercially unviable, which is despite local campaigners saying otherwise (here).

After a lot of campaigning the aforementioned decision was eventually reversed and Openreach (BT) finally completed the cabinet’s upgrade in 2013. Funnily enough all of its ports were almost immediately filled up to capacity (here), which just goes to show how wrong Openreach were about the area.

Since then cable operator Virgin Media has also expanded into the area and very soon after that (around June or July 2017) locals noticed that a team of engineers from Openreach had attach a hybrid fibre Huawei G.fast broadband pod to 82.

At this point we should say that it can sometimes take awhile (between build and activation) for a new service to go live and a wait of up to around 12 months is not uncommon (sometimes a little longer), although by the end of 2018 the G.fast pod on 82 still wasn’t live. Naturally we chased Openreach for an update and what followed was a lot of conflicting information, as well as more delays.

Initially Openreach responded to say that 82 was in the “final stages of commissioning” and they expected it to be “ready by the end of October [2018],” yet that date soon came and went. Adding insult to injury Openreach then told one local campaigner (Carl Thomas) in April 2019 – nearly 2 years after the G.fast pod was added – that he should seek a co-funded Community Fibre Partnership (CFP) instead.

Openreach’s Fibre Enquiries Team

“Thanks for getting in touch with us about fibre broadband availability in your area.

I’ve looked into your query and can see that the cabinet that you’re connected to hasn’t yet been upgraded for Gfast technology. And I’m afraid at the moment we don’t have any plans to upgrade it.

An option that many local groups – who want faster broadband – are taking is a Community Fibre Partnership (CFP). A CFP is where we work with a local group representing two or more premises to bring superfast, or ultrafast, to an area. Where possible we bring together funding from local authorities, Government voucher schemes and other grants to help make things affordable – plus we contribute toward the cost in line with our own commercial model too.”

Shortly after that ISPreview.co.uk began chasing Openreach for some clarification, again, although it took us several attempts over a period of several weeks before we actually got an answer –”cab 82 will be ‘live’ within a few weeks“, claimed the operator, but they were “not sure” what had delayed it for so long. Once again this prediction came and went with no progress.

Fast forward to this month (July 2019) and locals have just been told by Openreach’s twitter team that “the work is still on going which is why it’s not live. The estimated delivery for this will be between July – September next year” (2020). So just to be clear, a G.fast pod that was built in the middle of 2017 is not now expected to go live until over 3 years later! We think that must be a record.

Once again Openreach has not explained why such a record delay has occurred and in the absence of an explanation we can only speculate. One possibility is that since the build G.fast’s future has been thrown into a high degree of uncertainty by Openreach’s increased focus on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) deployments (here), which have already reduced the original build target for G.fast (here) and may do the same again soon.

On top of that Cityfibre plans to rollout their 1Gbps FTTH network across almost the whole of Leeds over the next few years (here), which may have further reduced any incentive to build more G.fast. The catch here is that 82’s pod is already live and the fibre feeds are present, thus the cost of completing that build should not be so problematic as to prevent its activation.

Whatever the reason 82 seems to have set a new upper limit for activation delays and if the above is anything to go by then we have our doubts about whether the pod will ever go live. We’d love to hear from others who have suffered a significant delay like this (either in the comments below, on our forum or via email).