I'm in London, on Commercial Street just by Spitalfields Market. Pretty darn central. My local exchange, Bishopsgate, is now "taking orders" for Fibre. I've been watching contractors pulling cables around the place, and have been trying to find out when my local one will be enabled. Finally got an email through today from OpenReach. A fine example of obfuscation but the gist of it is "we're not going to do your cabinet, it's not worth it".
I make videos. That's what I do for a living. My clients want me to upload things to YouTube and Vimeo. My ADSL+ upload speed is 0.36Mbps. It's so slow it's painful. I want something much faster. Apparently I'm not going to be getting Fibre. What other alternatives are there?
Here's that email, just for fun.
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband at Bishopsgate exchange cabinet CL.BIS 27. Our deployment is based on the commercial criteria for each cabinet and your cabinet fails to meet the commercial criteria. This is because the cabinet has too few premise connected to it, rendering it too small to provide a return on the investment based on the costs for the construction and on-going running costs of providing a new FTTC cabinet. When calculating the commercial viability of cabinet areas we take many factors into account. These include ensuring that we locate the cabinets in accordance with all national and local planning laws, ensuring that the cabinet does not obstruct pedestrians or provide a danger to all road-users. We must ensure that the DSLAM is located within 100m of its associated telephony connection cabinet and that there is adequate access to power and existing telephony infrastructure. To further enable the location of the DSLAM, we must accurately survey for underground structure and obstacles etc.
We do look at the demographic nature of the potential customers within a cabinets working area, however, we focus on the amount of connected lines at the time and not the potential expansion within a cabinet area as this is not guaranteed - this is the most efficient way to deploy fibre broadband whilst keeping within our finite budget. As such we look at the potential return for our investment over quite a number of years, with the prospective number of take up of the service being a large percentage of premise.
Please note :- It is not possible to move your service to another cabinet, this is because the telephony network over which fibre broadband runs is bespoke. As such, all premise are served from dedicated distribution points which are connected via their own underground duct network to the telephony cabinets. There are no interconnections that can be utilised to give fibre broadband services between these cabinets, therefore, I'm afraid we technically can't move your service to another cabinet. In addition, it is not Openreach policy to rearrange the network to enable services where they are not currently available, which is what would occur if your service was moved.
