Received a letter from the local authority this morning, regarding a planning application. Openreach want to install a large green DSLAM cabinet on the pavement outside my garden wall. I read that to mean that superfast broadband is reaching this village at last and, with the cabinet so close to my house, speeds will be at the top of the range which I believe to be 70+Mbps, rather than the current theoretical 12 or actual 6 - 7. Sounds like a result to me.
We've been with Zen for seven years, and to date they have been ace - with the recent exception of pulling newsgroups - but that is available elsewhere.
Our green cab is about 250 metres away via crow, so probably 300 metres + plus for the cable run, half flown, and half underground. On installing it was tested at about 50Mbps, although we are speed capped on Zen's basic
38/9.5 Mb package. Subsequent testing does get a consistent figure very close to the nominal, so you should get the full 70mb at the distance involved.
They need planning permission? I would have expected this to come under a blanket "permitted development" either by the coucil or Openreach. Thanks for the info though.
Openreach are working on cabinets associated with FTTC down in the village, a new one to handle the line end of the VDSL connection has already been planted and cabled but one for the fibre termination and VDSL kit needs to be installed. The completion date recent slipped from September 14 to April 15. Keeping an eye on local planning applications could be useful.
The speeds starts to drop at line lengths greater than about 300 to
400 m.
Or at least through the cabinet that this DSLAM is associated with. In our case the fibre feeding the cabinet down in the village passes through a duct 5 yards from our front door. Trouble is the village is
2 km away and our line goes straight back to the exchange by a different route to the lines in the village. So FTTC is NFG for us. There is supposed to be a "fibre node" or something like that 200 m towards the town. It wouldn't be that hard to pull in a small duct from the hole on our grass frontage to that node and get FTTP. But I expect Openreach would still want an arm and a leg for it and the exchnage probably won't ever be enabled for FTTP either.
We are in a conservation area, and the village is within the Cairngorms National Park, so *everything* apparently needs planning permission.
We are less than 100m from the exchange as the crow flies, but longer by road. Personally, our usual broadband speed is good enough for me, but wife and son are gamers, and are hoping for an improvement, even if not top of the range speeds.
I really must clean this screen , I thought the header said Islam cabinet, blimey this scottish business is changing the goverment quicker than anticipated was my first thought.
Only an AONB here, search of local planning database shows nothing for the new cabinet in the village. Mind you the same search only shows 1 (one) application this year, which I find rather hard to believe.
Openwoe have got worse - they now subcontract to Kelly Communications who:
Give their staff 2 days training then let them loose unsupervised which evidently does not involve showing them how to make a jelly-crimp connection without the wire falling out;
Give them duff testsets so they sit around faffing wondering which pair is actually live;
Fail to explain what "30m extension kit is authorised if necessary" means when written on the ISP's order to BT.
Nice bloke - clearly the right personality for the job, but I felt sorry for him bumbling about and going back and forth to the street cabinet because Openwoe scraped the bottom of the barrel in the tender.
Luckily the job was booked through A&A and they answered the phone in 10 seconds, and had me speaking to the right person in 30 seconds who:
1) Reconfirmed that I could have the master socket relocated (especially when it was all of 2m away and I'd laid in trunking for him);
2) Got straight on the phone and gave BT a right good kicking, which will be followed up.
I got what I wanted in the end and FTTC works really well, but mostly because I was able to quote chapter and verse to the fitter. Poor bugger.
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