Strange ... while I wrote that last post, the website didn't show me that BS had replied with details of the ECP, nor Kitz' PS. Sorry I missed those.
@Kitz: I can understand both your sentiment and reasoning, and find it a shame that there are those who choose to spend their time flinging wrath and accusation, but can't find a positive channel for their energy. Your way is much better - but it probably came with more appreciation in the past than currently.
@BS:
I was surprised when looking at the photos of the OCR that the incoming fibre was in a yellow jacket. Then some of the photos visible on that Flickr Photostream (like
this one) show a number of joints in the cable chamber that perhaps convert the external black cable into internal yellow. Is that likely to be the case? The photos then have lots of orange cables mixed into the same splice joints, so I'm wondering about those. However, I assume H&S raises its head even inside exchanges, so you'd expect a swap from external-grade plastics into low-smoke internal-grade.
Those pictures probably answer another question. All those architecture pictures show the route from head-end to aggregation node to include "CCJ" and "TJ". I wondered about what a CCJ was, but I now guess it is a "cable chamber joint". The "Connecting Shropshire" page reckoned TJ=Track Joint.
Looking at the Openreach diagram again, I can see for FTTC it goes
DSLAM > Handover > OCR > OLT > Backhaul
Not having seen an OLT and FTTC headend exchange, my mistaken impression was thinking that there may be something like the ODFs before the backhaul.
The output from the OLT is the Openreach cablelink product, which I guess goes off to CP equipment for different CP's - BTW, Sky, TT being most likely - and quite possibly combined with other cablelinks (multiple OLT's?) to then be distributed onto backhaul fibre. If I had to guess, I'd say that each CP would have still have some kind of ODF (optical distribution frame) where there is a handover between the in-building backhaul fibre, and the backhaul fibre leading back out of the building.
Having seen the pdf, it does seem that as well as being the OLT, this is what BTw referred to as the element manager in DLM. I knew it would be something similar to what the Fujitsu switch hubs/master control shelves do as explained by the BTw guy in the larger exchange I visited.
It would kind of be the fttc equivalent of this? Which is a Fujitsu master shelf to OR... and on here you can see the orange STM4 which connected up to the ODF > Backhaul.
An element manager? Related to DLM?
Hmmm ... that name rings a bell, but in a totally different context, all to do with O&M. Nothing to do with the flow of traffic.
I'll have to investigate more... Is there anything else on your site that shows the element manager, or the master/hub, in relationship to other things?
It is frustrating that when it came to adsl I knew a a fair bit, but I have large gaps when it comes to Fibre.
Its safe to say that what I've learnt about fibre has come in dribs and drabs. And whenever I learn something new, it usually manages to show that my previous understanding was wrong in some fashion. But I expect not campaigning so much takes away a little of the priority too...
