Residents covered by the Poplar (East London, UK) telephone exchange have raised concerns about the rollout of BT's new superfast 'up to' 40Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) broadband ISP services. Despite the exchange getting its upgrade, many of those living within its coverage (e.g. Sheldon Way) have been told that they won't be able to receive the new service.

FTTC delivers a fast fibre optic link to the operators street level cabinets, while the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 (similar to current ADSL broadband but much faster over short distances) through existing copper cable.

BT claims that the vast majority of local homes and businesses (30,000 premises) should still be able to benefit from its new service. However, the operator warned that it did not have an unlimited amount of cash and therefore could not upgrade all of the areas local cabinets.


The news is an important reminder of how tackling the Digital Divide is not merely an isolated rural issue and can also affect residents living inside or near to major urban towns and cities too. FTTC is by no means a perfect solution and BT's rollout does sadly suffer from a number of pitfalls.

FTTC only works over short distances from the street cabinet and some residents may simply live too far away to receive a good service. In other cases, such as this, BT will upgrade the exchange but will not upgrade all of the associated local cabinets, which can cause a great deal of frustration and confusion. It also takes quite awhile for BT to upgrade an areas cabinets, which only adds to the problem.

Sadly these problems are not uncommon and, as BT continues to expand its rollout, the issue is beginning to grow. One solution would be for BT to shift its focus away from merely announcing exchange upgrades and to also clarify which street cabinets in any given area will or will not receive the upgrade. So far they have refused to do that.