After a small delay some 16 premises in the tiny North Yorkshire village of Ulshaw have become the first in Northern England to get access to superfast broadband (24Mbps+) speeds thanks to BT’s trial of a new broadband technology called Fibre-to-the-Remote-Node (FTTrN). Now if they could just get the power supply issues fixed.
As a quick recap, FTTrN is similar to BT’s existing ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable and VDSL based Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology. But while FTTC takes a fibre optic cable from the telephone exchange to your local street cabinet (note: your existing copper line is used between the cabinet and homes), FTTrN sees the fibre optic cable being taken to a significantly smaller Remote Node (“mini fibre cabinets“) and these can be positioned on nearby telegraph poles or inside manholes even closer to homes etc.
The approach taken by FTTrN is ideal for situations where it might otherwise prove to be prohibitively expensive or too difficult to build the infrastructure for a new street cabinet or a pure fibre optic (FTTP) network. A network diagram for FTTrN is shown below, albeit edited slightly by us in order to make it fit.
It’s also possible to use this method in urban areas as a solution for tedious Exchange Only Lines (EOL). Several other trials, such as one in London, are already looking at addressing that problem.
Meanwhile the trial itself forms part of the wider state aid fuelled Superfast North Yorkshire project in England, which has already deployed BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) services to around 90% of local premises.
An additional £8m is now being invested to push the deployment even further with the aim to make the technology available to another 11,100 homes and businesses across England’s largest rural county by 2017.
Paul Carlo, Senior Project Manager for Superfast North Yorkshire, said:
“Using FTTrN was the ideal solution for Ulshaw. With such a small number of premises we couldn’t really justify the cost of building and installing one of our more common green fibre cabinets. Instead we have installed this node in an existing joint box and it will serve the whole village.
Customers’ premises are connected up to the fibre node in the same way as they would be to a green roadside cabinet, so there is no need for any special equipment in the home. The increase in speed and subsequent benefits are exactly the same.”
Luke Pearce, Local Resident of Ulshaw, said:
“Without the remote node technology we and everyone else in the village would have been scuppered. For me the great advantage is the sheer bulk of things we can now do online at the same time without ever having to worry about the connection falling over. I have four children between the ages of five and 13 and they’re all pretty tech savvy. At any one time there’s a huge amount of streaming and downloading going on – everything from online music services to iPlayer and Netflix.”
The FTTrN approach looks like an excellent solution, although reaching this point hasn’t all been plain sailing. A council report published last year (here) stated that BTOpenreach were facing a “challenge … in terms of training engineers and ensuring continuity of power supply“. On top of that any plans for the wide scale deployment of FTTRN were delayed by up to a year, which is due in no small part to the cost of powering the trial (the trial uses the same power as would serve a cabinet with 200 premises or more).
At the time BT suggested that the solution was to find a way of aggregating multiple FTTRN nodes to a single power supply, but this is expected to take a bit longer and wouldn’t make it in time to benefit phase 2 of the local deployment. It’s likely that BT will test some solutions for this as part of their trial.
We should mention that FTTrN could, in theory, also adopt a different power approach that would suck electricity from local homes. But this has drawbacks in other respects and as yet we’ve not seen any firm plans to test related kit.
Separately another North Yorkshire village, Hirst Courtney, has just got access to 330Mbps FTTP.
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