FTTC for TPON slowspot area (limited access to broadband at present)

[#1]

Hi,
I've seen the following for my own line:
"Your cabinet is planned to have WBC FTTC by 31st March 2011. Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a fibre technology with an estimated WBC FTTC Broadband where consumers have received downstream line speed of 33.5Mbps and upstream line speed of 7.8Mbps."
I'm happy to trial it for personal use, but I'm thinking, we've got about 100 properties in the village who want broadband but can't get it at all right now due to the infrastructure with maybe another hundred solidering on with a pretty ropey connection over the copper overlay - and they are looking at setting up a community broadband solution if FTTC won't provide an alternative that everyone can benefit from.
Assuming I sign up to the trial and can prove it's viable, what would the projected costs be per household for people who don't currently have any broadband at all, to switch to PN for FTTC and are there any limitations on the number of lines that can be supported on FTTC from a single cabinet?

[#2]

Hi,
We've not done any lines that are TPON yet so I'm not sure how that will work. Have you checked the phone numbers of anyone that currently can't get broadband to see what the checker says? My memory of TPON is a little hazy, do you know if the whole line is TPON from exchange to property or is it just part of it? If the TPON is just exchange to cab and the rest is copper then FTTC should work fine I'd have thought for those lines. If that's the case then I don't think there would be any additional charge for FTTC over what we will be charging everyone else.
If it needs new copper putting in then I don't know but can ask the question and see what I can find out.
There are limits on the number of lines per cab, I can't remember off hand how many but as yet no cab is full. I believe they can add extra cabs if the cab does get full but that will depend on the area.

[#3]

Hi,
My line is not TPON, it's copper. The two services run out of the same cabinet. From the cabinet to the rest of the village, it's bog standard copper lines running from telegraph poles. Do a Google Street View from the corner of Pit Lane and Great North Road, Micklefield, to get an idea of what the lines are like.
I've attached a picture of the cabinets on the street corner there.
The battleship grey one on the left is the "old" TPON cabinet, which supports both TPON fibre (good phone line, no broadband) and copper overlay (poor phone line quality, patchy internet) to the exchange.
I watched the engineer unclip my line from the TPON and connect it to the copper overlay when it was put in, no changes had to be made to the cables going to the house. My guess is that with FTTC it'll be a similar process.
IIRC, the original FTTC proposals discussed a 2.5gbits/sec pipe , connected to a layer 2 switch at the exchange, and supporting up to 32 endpoints. Obviously if that's still the limit it's going to disappoint a lot of people... because all the connections that can be made to the copper overlay from this cabinet are already in use, and there are people in my street who are still being told by BT that they'll just have to stay on the TPON and not have broadband because the copper won't support any more connections.
So in a perfect world the FTTC solution would support ALL the people waiting for copper, as well as all the people currently using copper and finding it totally inadequate. Which is a lot more than 32 endpoints... 120 is probably closer to the mark.