the local OR guys said they were only doing pockets not covered by the local FTTP or VM dig, not on a fibre priority area, not on the OR FTTP 2-year plan and only when an ECI cabinet was installed.
No idea why they make up such nonsense. Almost none of what that guy told you was accurate.
I haven't seen a single area where they have deployed G.Fast to ECI cabinets only, or shown even the slightest bit of preference to ECI's.
The rollout treated both the same.
There's considerably more G.Fast pods connected to Huawei cabinets then there is ECI, and that's simply because there are considerably more Huawei cabinets.
Plenty G.Fast where VM are present or where they were expanding also.
Almost the entire Edinburgh G.Fast rollout was areas with VM already or where project lightning was expanding their coverage.
The part about only deploying G.Fast where FTTP isn't on a 2 year plan is also nonsense.
They rolled out G.Fast to a number of Fibre First cities.
Within a couple months of many of the Edinburgh G.Fast pods going live they were overbuilt with FTTP.
Some of the FTTP actually went live before the G.Fast making it obsolete before it was even activated.
The only bit of that that's semi accurate is not deploying G.Fast where FTTP is already, but even that isn't always the case as G.Fast is done by cabinet and FTTP can be much more random, so there was lots of G.Fast overlapping FTTP areas.
From J0hn's comments it sounds like even the runt deployments are now at an end.
There isn't even "runt" deployments.
No new areas announced since 2018.
Announced in September 2019 that the rollout will be paused and only areas with existing plans scheduled before March 2020 will have pods installed.
Confirmed in June 2020 the rollout is officially "paused" (dead) with no more pods to be installed before a review in April 2021.
I've not seen or read of any pods being installed at all in 2020.