I've heard about the long-term plan to close local exchanges. Presumably it's because of the PSTN network being replaced by IP telephony and it makes no sense to have cases where small exchanges are serving a few hundred properties when a larger exchange has a presence nearby.
Was speaking with a fibre manager only a few weeks ago and plans are in place to condense six (I'm sure it was this amount ?) London Exchanges into just one.
I have no idea which ones, as it is absolutely nowhere near my patch .... it was just interesting to hear his take on it all. He mentioned that we are currently running at 120% where FTTP is concerned, and that was set to steadily increase, as once one town/city becomes FTTP (in effect, a hands-off network), then the surplus engineers that used to maintain said town/city are then used to help with the next FTTP project ..... and so on, and so on .....
For the ground-troops, it unfortunately means they are slowly working their way out of a job.