Embarrassing Lack of FTTC Broadband Capacity Hits BT in Whittington

The Deputy Leader of Shropshire Council, Steve Charmley, has accused Openreach (BT) of embarrassing itself after their new FTTC “fibre broadband” Street Cabinet in the village of Whittington ran out of capacity sooner than expected. It wouldn’t be so bad, except BT have a base in the same area.

We recently ran an article on the issue of full FTTC (VDSL2) based Street Cabinets (here), which is especially common in areas where Openreach installs a new cabinet and then underestimates local demand. On the surface it’s a nice problem to have because it confirms that more people want your service than originally predicted.

However if the upgrade requires an additional or larger cabinet to be built then it can sometimes take several months or even longer to resolve (assuming there are enough customers in the area to even warrant an upgrade) and that may result in frustration and confusion for consumers, many of whom could have been told that superfast broadband is available and yet they can’t order it.

An Openreach Spokesperson said:

“The cabinet in question has exceeded all expectations in terms of take-up, and arrangements are in hand by Openreach – BT’s local network business – to increase capacity as soon as possible to enable more local people to be able to order faster fibre broadband.”

The issue in Whittington is particularly interesting because BT, which happens to be one of the biggest employers in the area, are also based out of the nearby Whittington House on Whittington Road. Despite this the village, which is home to around 2,600 people, was not included in the operator’s original commercial roll-out plan for up to’ 80Mbps capable FTTC technology.

Councillor Steve Charmley claims he “campaigned hard” to get the village included into the programme, which he views as being a bit silly given BT’s base in the area. Needless to say that Steve isn’t best pleased at having achieved this, only for the cabinet to fill up and run out of capacity in double quick time.

Cllr Steve Charmley said (here):

“Why aren’t they building capacity into the system to allow for surges in take up in local areas? That’s my big problem. I’m not comfortable promoting super fast broadband, running around like a headless chicken trying to get people signed up to the service, if there’s no capacity in the system.”

In fairness, most of the time Openreach do get it right and additional capacity can usually be added quite quickly by simply installing some extra kit into the existing cabinet, but if the cabinet fills up completely then more effort is often required. It’s a difficult balancing act and decisions might be constrained by economic models.

Some recent data supplied by Openreach to ISPs revealed that roughly 1,970 out of 77,033 live cabinets were full to capacity and awaiting upgrades (around 2.6%). At present Openreach’s FTTC/P network is available to roughly 26 million premises across the United Kingdom.

It’s worth pointing out that the biggest FTTC cabinets can handle up to 384 active ports, although by comparison Openreach’s forthcoming roll-out of G.fast technology is still struggling to achieve its eventual target of supporting 96 ports via 4 cards (each with 24 ports). So we might see a repeat of the capacity issues when G.fast arrives.

However the initial demand for G.fast may be lower than it was for FTTC, at least until more people start feeling a need for the extra speed it offers. Remember that ISPs will also charge more for G.fast than FTTC to compensate for the heavier requirements, but most people may initially prefer to stick with a cheaper FTTC solution (provided FTTC / VDSL2 offers them decent speed of course).

Meanwhile the people of Whittington will have to wait another 4-5 months before local FTTC capacity is given a boost.