Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => FTTC and FTTP Issues => Topic started by: atkinsong on March 23, 2021, 10:38:37 AM
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Yesterday morning whilst out for my daily walk I passed our FTTC cabs, 1 ECI and 1 Huawei, to find two OR engineers with both the PCP and ECI cabinet open. On the way back I noticed they were still at it and appeared to be terminating a tie cable between the ECI cab and the PCP. This surprised me somewhat as the ECI cab was at capacity some years ago, hence the Huawei twin.
About 30 mins after returning home our DSL link went down so I decided to wander back around and see what was happening. On mentioning the loss of DSL to the guy in the ECI cab he told me it would be off for about 1 hour as they were "doing 30 connections at a time". He went on to say that when it did come back "it would be faster as they were putting in new cables" After a bit of chat I learned that they were in fact replacing the tie cables between the cab and the PCP with Cat 5 ones, to reduce crosstalk.
When the line came back up I was surprised to see an increase in speed of around 6Mb, given that we are on a 475 metre underground feed.
This is not an activity that I have heard of anywhere, but the outage was notified on Zen's status portal as "Cat 5 cable upgrade".
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That's very interesting as you'd think the tie cables were already optimal for VDSL given that's their job.
Is this what you saw on the portal? Its curious it doesn't specify where they are doing.
Start: 22/03/2021 10:34 Next update / Cleared: 24/03/2021 16:30 (estimated)
Raised: N/A Cleared Reason: N/A
Detected: 22/03/2021 10:36 Exchange Name: N/A
Incident Headline: PCP FTTC cat5e uprgarde
Incident Details: At the moment some of your End Users may be experiencing a loss of service
Area Codes: N/A
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Yep, thats the one. I could only assume it was our cab. The OR guy did say that all CPs had been informed but OR had no idea how and if the scheduled downtime had been communicated to end users.
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That's very interesting as you'd think the tie cables were already optimal for VDSL given that's their job.
But they are not! They are just the standard, underground, multi-pair telephony cables.
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OR still working on the task today. At around 14:00 the estimate was they were about half way through. Should be finished tomorrow. In another brief chat today OR guy said back when the ECI cab was installed, around 2014 ish from memory, it was not realised that cat 5 would be a good idea. Apparently it has been used for some time now but he couldn’t be specific.
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They were using the standard tie cables long after 2014.
I know of a PCP installed in late 2018 that had the tie cables upgraded to cat5 around 6 months ago.
My understanding is they still install the standard tie cables to this day and only upgrade them if deemed necessary.
Similar "enhanced" tie cables exist in exchanges that LLU operators can pay OpenReach to upgrade to their cat5 tie cables to link their equipment to the MDF.
https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/exchange-based-products/enhanced-specification-internal-tie-cable
Our enhanced tie cable is an alternative to the standard specification tie cable.
You don’t get any more services with enhanced tie cables, and we can’t guarantee you’ll see any improved performance if you use them.
What a great sales pitch.
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Looks like they have just finished around lunchtime. So that's 2 men for the best part of 4 days to upgrade an ECI cab with 256 connections. Depending on how many need to be done, that's not an insignificant investment.
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They must have figured there was enough crosstalk going on to benefit from it, will be interesting to see if its true.