Will I see any benefit from FTTC?

[#1]

Hello all,
I see that there are many similar questions to this one already on the forum, but I seem to have exhausted all routes of enquiry so am asking one last time before making the leap to Virgin (sigh) in order to get a faster broadband connection.
The situation is that I am sitting in a residential area of Sheffield, surrounded by shiny new fibre cabinets. Some, I assume, are BT, others are Yorkshire Digital Region. I'm 900m from an exchange which is currently scheduled to be upgraded to fibre early next year. All sounds great, BUT my phone line is connected directly to the exchange. So the cabinets that I walk past every day may as well not be there and, I assume, when the exchange does get upgraded I won't actually see any benefits. I've contacted BT Openreach, Plusnet and Digital Region about this and all have basically responded with "yes, that's the situation" with apparently nothing I can do about it.
I'm therefore about to switch to Virgin broadband, with whom I should be able to get a 100Mb connection (in theory). Before I do this, I just wanted to double check if anyone else had any alternative suggestions. I don't suppose there is any way of getting my phoneline rerouted to one of the nearby cabinets instead?
Thanks.
Tim.

[#2]

It doesn't seem likely that you'll be able to get re-routed.
In some of the rural rollouts (either Cornwall, or the start of the BDUK-funded rollouts like North Yorkshire), BT have started to say that they'll start to support EO lines either through FTTP, or by introducing some sort of hybrid cabinet. Take a look here for North Yorkshire, and here for Cornwall.
Timescales to roll out the trial more generally seem to be end-2012 onwards - but how much that rollout applies nationally is yet to be seen. I suspect that the FTTP-style rollout might have to wait until BT are capable of performing the fibre-on-demand product.
I suspect that, as BDUK targets 90% of the UK population, while BT state that EO make up 20%, BT really need a solution to cover the vast majority of EO lines.

[#3]

Thanks for that - and for the terminology - I know what to look for now. Hadn't realised EO was so widespread. Openreach have said "no current plans" for FTTP for our exchange (which is definitely very urban - not rural!) so I suppose I'll just have to be grateful that Virgin Media is available in our street.
Cheers.