Quote:
Originally Posted by gimpymoo
We get served via overhead cables around here, do they replace the cabling going from pole to house as people sign up or do they just put up new poles in advance?
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Up to 80Meg too. FTTC around here is good for 17 at best.
So around my way, each street has poles fed from a main pole at the bottom (it's lots of cul-de-sacs off a longer cul-de-sac), which in turn is fed from a duct on the longer road. When OR turned up, their contractor began by inspecting each duct. They did some minor roadworks to fix issues with collapsed ducts, and then pulled cables to each main duct and tied blue pull-rope to the base of each main pole.
Then a few weeks later (presumably once an entire areas digging and main cable pulling had been complete) Openreach turned up and began fitting football sized fibre distribution boxes to the main poles, pulled the fibre to it and then from there pulled some fibre to each pole that fed from that main pole. Wooden poles get a box up high where the fibre to your house is connected from, metal poles have that box internally fitted.
The obvious giveaways are:
- Lots of white vans and blokes in holes
- 'Leavings' around the duct access panels
- roadworks.org or some similar site will have lots of BT related minor works listed all over your area
- Poles will have yellow "fibre overhead" warning stickers when they are wired up.
- Distribution poles will have a box on them that looks like an upside down black milk carton.
When you get FTTP, they'll run a brand new drop-cable from the pole to your house that uses a heavier gauge wire and remove the old line. It is only done when you sign up, as it's quite an involved process - especially now with social distancing making stuff more awkward for everyone involved. But the entire install can be done with one visit for the modern OR rollouts.