How many cable pairs feed an underground DP

[#1]

I live on a two year old modern development that currently has 4 houses fed from an underground DP on site. This in turn is fed by a multi-core cable from an Openreach underground cabinet across the road and then onward to the nearby street cabinet. A further 6 houses are now being built making a total of 10 in all. My question is what is the most likely number of pairs available at the on site DP - in another words is it likely to be enough to cope with all 10 houses?

[#2]

I would say yes, when we moved here there were plots for another 10 houses and these have now been built with no intervention from BT. When the original plans were submitted BT were aware of the fact that these houses were to be built so planned accordingly.

It may well be the case that you will find this is the same where you are. BT/OR don’t want to to the work twice, so if they knew there were 10 plots then I would have thought that the cabling provided would accommodate them with some spare.

[#3]

No Mook, when BT/OR were given the order to install the feed to the DP there were no plans to build the other houses. I thought the engineer said at the time that it was a 10 pair cable and this would allow some redundancy but I can't be sure. I just wondered what the most likely minium number number of pairs they would use is as I think at least one pair have already failed.

[#4]

Well I was going on my experience. The BT cable that comes to our house is a 4 core so now we have no spares with having two lines, and as far as I  know all other properties here were provided in the same manner. But a 10 pair sounds sensible so I guess BT will be back to install more at a later date.

[#5]

With a modern development, all the cabling should be in ducts, so it would be a fairly simple task to pull another cable through the existing ducts. It shouldn't require any digging.

[#6]

No ejs it would not be possible to pull another cable through as the ducting is not continuous. The duct from our DP stops at the road and the duct from the other side of the road does not line up with it and they are not joined together. It took us three months to get connected and a very keen BT engineer eventually manged to manually pull the cable around the ends by digging a hole (with a spade) to gain access to the duct ends. It was extremely difficult to do as it is actually under our drive and that part of the cable is not in a duct at all.

[#7]

It could be argued that it doesn't matter, as you already have lines in, but no doubt that the same or similar issues you had may well be repeated when the other plots are built on. To be honest its a bit remiss of BT not to use conduit as it only makes their life harder in the event of an under ground repair.

[#8]

The DP will be either 10 or 20 pair...

[#9]

Thanks DaveyH, with any luck it should be OK then. it's a long story! The ducting should have of course been continuous but it wasn't and nobody except for me knew that and they wouldn't believe me and kept trying to pull cables through.I just hope they don't mess up my connection!