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Originally Posted by goldchip
Very interesting point made "Fibre to 500 home level allows future upgrade to fibre to the home" - did the original poster see this? (sounds like he was leaning towards it)
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The 500 home level was always original ntl ie: cableTel architecture dating back to the mid 90's.
They started building nodes at the 500 home level, and then later as money was short (long before chapter 11) they increased new build to 1000 homes. They did some other strange things in Wales to save cost, like having no mains installed at one node but using Line power down the coax (like a DA is fed) from another node. We all shook our head at the cost saving and we were proved right when they had to revisit and rebuild some of these areas/nodes because they were too large for targetted services like Cable Modems, Interactive and proposed VOD.
There was talk many years ago, that fibre to the home would be a long way off because of many of the problems that stu038 mentioned above, and they would probably move the fibre out closer to the customer by making the distribution amplifiers nodes. That would take nodal homes passed to somewhere nearer the 150 home level (average guess). this would however mean using more fibre that's a short supply commodity in the nodal rings, or using DWDM from hubsite to the existing node then diplex each wavelength to the corresponding nodes. This would mean very little change to the existing architecture compared with FTTH, but would effectively increase the bandwith because the services could be targetted at a 150 home leven instead of the 500 home level.
If you do enough digging, I would bet my pension the 500 home figure was being suggested by the equipment vendors at the time. I remember seeing schematics in vendors leafets and ntl/cabletel planning/architecture would of taken advice from these people, as they were supplying equipment for build all across the world.
If you really got to the bottom of the 500 home figure