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The UK Impact of Full to Capacity FTTC “Fibre Broadband” Cabinets

Monday, Jan 23rd, 2017 (3:27 pm) - Score 5,496

A new piece of research estimates that around 3% of premises in the United Kingdom could be affected by a full to capacity FTTC (VDSL2) “fibre broadband” street cabinet on Openreach’s (BT) network, which might prevent you from ordering a faster service.

Last September 2016 we ran a special article on the subject of “full” street cabinets and their impact upon consumers (here), which explained why such cabinets fill up and the problems that it can cause. Back then we understood that around 2,000 of the 77,000 live street cabinets were full and awaiting upgrade.

Tackling capacity problems is a natural reality for all major network operators and many such issues are fairly quick to resolve, particularly if all that is needed is to simply fit an additional line card into a spare slot inside the cabinet. However where civil engineering work is required to install more equipment (e.g. adding an additional street cabinet) then Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk that the “average” wait was usually around 6-9 months.

Now Thinkbroadband (see TBB for the full table) has run the data and predicted that the number of cabinets affected by this issue ranges from 1,500 to 2,500 out of the installed base of 79,000 VDSL2 cabinet areas (January 2017 data). In terms of impact, around 89.8% of the UK can currently order a superfast broadband (30Mbps+) service via Openreach’s network but this coverage drops by -2.8% due to full cabinets.

Coverage of Superfast Broadband and the impact of cabinets which are at a capacity limit
Standard Coverage Figures Change Due to Capacity Limits
Region % ‘fibre’ coverage % superfast (30Mbps+) % Openreach superfast (30Mbps+) ‘fibre’ coverage 30Mbps+ Openreach
30Mbps+
United Kingdom 95.5 91.7 89.8 -3.0 -2.7 -2.8
London 96.6 95.3 91.5 -1.9 -1.8 -1.8
Northern Ireland 97.5 79.4 78.5 -3.0 -2.4 -2.4
Scotland 92.6 88 85.1 -4.7 -4.4 -4.3
Wales 94.1 88.9 88.4 -2.3 -2 -2.1

NOTE: “% fibre” reflects the raw fibre footprint, which also includes areas that receive sub-30Mbps speeds.

Unfortunately if you happen to live in such an area then this can cause a lot of frustration when attempting to order a new Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) based broadband package, particularly if the ISP accepts the order and begins the switch only to later tell you that they cannot complete the upgrade / move.

Meanwhile other checkers may cause confusion by telling you that “fibre isn’t available“, even though most of the local lines might already be receiving it from the same cabinet (a little more detail on those availability checkers would go a long way to avoiding such confusion).

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk in September 2016:

“Openreach has a dedicated team responsible for proactively monitoring take-up across all of our fibre cabinets.

The team considers a range of data to pinpoint exactly where and when more capacity is needed, and in the vast majority of cases we’re able to increase the capacity of a cabinet in plenty of time before it fills up.

On a small number of occasions, cabinets do reach capacity before we can upgrade them, usually as a result of an unexpected spike in demand or difficulties we face in adding the capacity needed.

Having said that, we do appreciate how frustrating that can be for the people affected and we work very hard to resolve these issues as quickly as possible.”

It’s worth pointing out that if Openreach has to build a new cabinet from scratch then that isn’t just a problem of hardware and labour cost. Complex delays can also stem from the need to seek planning permission, road access, wayleave agreements, power supply requirements and so forth.

As we alluded earlier, Openreach are by no means the only operator to suffer from such problems. Most of the time operators will get their forecasts right, but there will always be problem areas and delays.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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