New telephone pole and equipment.

Roland_Sausage

It's a connectorised block terminal. Basically the FTTP equivalent of the copper distribution box to it's left. Any new fibre cables run to the individual houses will be plugged into this.

clive0510

I have telegraph pole in my back garden. about 20 years ago it had to be renewed, but they couldn't get any kind of machine in there, so everything was done by hand. the hole they sit in goes down about 5 feet. I was glad it wasnt me digging the hole. that pole has now got all the fiber stuff on it and yet I can't get fiber!

neilmcl

Not had any leaflets through the door announcing BT's Ultrafast broadband in the area so I'm guessing the rollout is still some way ahead. I'm on Sky fibre anyway via FTTC so I probably won't be upgrading anyway.

brewerdave

neilmcl said:

Not had any leaflets through the door announcing BT's Ultrafast broadband in the area so I'm guessing the rollout is still some way ahead. I'm on Sky fibre anyway via FTTC so I probably won't be upgrading anyway.

Openreach have just announced 118 exchanges for the switch off of analog services from June 2021 . Is yours one of those exchanges??
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/8743-118-exchange-areas-to-be-targeted-in-analogue-switch-off

matelodave

It's an Optical Connector Block. The cables hanging down the pole will be connected back to the exchange, either underground or spliced into an overhead optical fibre which will go to a fibre aggregation unit (either in a manhole or possibly a cabinet).
The box at the top of the pole has optical connectors which provide service to each house that's connected to it.

If you decide to have Fibre to the Premises they will come along with a drum of shotgun type cable - one side is optical and the other has a copper pair in it., one end having the optical plug already fitted. They plug it int the connector block and connect the the copper pair to where your existing copper drop cable was. The new cable will be run to your house and the copper pair will connect to your existing phone line.

The optical cable will be run into your house and have an optical connector fitted which plugs into an Optical Network Unit which has to be mains powered. The ONU is connected to your router using an ethernet cable. You should then be able to get speed up to 330mbi/s if you are prepared to pay for it. We are just happy with 76mbit's with ours which is significantly better than the 1.8Mbit's we were getting on copper.

neilmcl

brewerdave said:

neilmcl said:

Not had any leaflets through the door announcing BT's Ultrafast broadband in the area so I'm guessing the rollout is still some way ahead. I'm on Sky fibre anyway via FTTC so I probably won't be upgrading anyway.

Openreach have just announced 118 exchanges for the switch off of analog services from June 2021 . Is yours one of those exchanges??
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/8743-118-exchange-areas-to-be-targeted-in-analogue-switch-off

Yes, it is (Sherwood).

neilmcl

They were back out today running cable from "my" pole to the one further down the street which sits next to the cabinet, and what a rigmarole that was. It took them all day, first thing until gone 6pm, to run 3 cables between two telephone poles of a typical distance apart, probably 100m maybe a bit more, the complication being the one further down and the cabinet is actually on an the junction of a different road so it's set back a bit and there's also a rather large tree on the corner property in the way.

Surely they would've done a site survey before this, I'm sure if they'd spoken the the property owner they would've been more than happy for someone to take a bit off the height of their tree. As it stands now the cables are actually running through the branches at the top of the tree. Also I think the distance between the poles seems too long to run cables between them as shown by their difficulty to achieve the correct tension on the cable. Problems to come I fear.

matelodave

Was it actually OpenReach or a contractor - all our stuff was done by contractors except for the final drop to our house when we got connected.
I used to work for one of the major companies that supplied stuff to BT (lots of it, cable, exchanges, transmission equipment etc) and we usually did all the work, installing and jointing cables, installing, testing and commissioning exchanges -  almost everything except the stuff to customer premises. I have noticed that nowadays some of the contractors seem to be less professional than we were but they do seem to get the job done. Sometimes however, civil works can be a lot more difficult than some people think especially if there are problems in manholes and ducts or they got to negotiate other stuff, whether it be up poles or down holes.

DoaM

It looks like FTTP may soon be heading our way (South Lanarkshire). We had a letter through the door from AXIONE about them doing physical and drone surveys for fibre routings. The article linked below probably relates but I'd not heard anything prior to receiving the letter yesterday.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/10/axione-uk-planning-to-build-full-fibre-broadband-isp-network.html

neilmcl

matelodave said:

Was it actually OpenReach or a contractor - all our stuff was done by contractors except for the final drop to our house when we got connected.
I used to work for one of the major companies that supplied stuff to BT (lots of it, cable, exchanges, transmission equipment etc) and we usually did all the work, installing and jointing cables, installing, testing and commissioning exchanges -  almost everything except the stuff to customer premises. I have noticed that nowadays some of the contractors seem to be less professional than we were but they do seem to get the job done. Sometimes however, civil works can be a lot more difficult than some people think especially if there are problems in manholes and ducts or they got to negotiate other stuff, whether it be up poles or down holes.

Contractors. One lot out with a cherry picker putting up the cables and another lot, CadeX, out the following day connecting everything up.