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[mentaltom]

Hello All.  I have been keeping an eye on the forum for a number of months  now - thank you for all the useful posts.  To cut a long story short, I paid for Openreach to install an FTTC cabinet to serve my street, as we are currently connected to the only PCP without FTTC in my town.  I placed the order in early February 2018, and Openreach committed to me being able to "order an FTTC service" within 12 months of this date. Although physically Openreach haven't even begun, my account manager still believes they will be on target for February (all paperwork done apparently) and so naturally I am getting excited to go from 15MB/1MB to 70MB/20MB (I am only a couple of 100m from the cabinet, and about 2.5km from the exchange).

I know from research that a copper frame will be installed into the right hand side of the PCP (hopefully there will be enough room!?), with every pair on this new frame jumpered to the FTTC cabinet.  Then, when I order an FTTC service, the OR Engineer will simply remove my pair from the E side, and place it into a spare pair on this new frame. This will link me to the FTTC cabinet.

My queries therefore are:

1.  At what point and by which interface is the incoming copper pair connected to one of the linecards in the FTTC cab?
2. Does each linecard have one fibre terminated to it? (so one fibre will be serving 36 customers, 6 fibres necessary for the 6 linecards due to be installed)
3. What happens at the exchange end; is the copper link between the PCP and the E for my line now obsolete?

I did hope to be able to visit the exchange during the cabinet installation, and I am sure I will pop along to chat to the engineers when they are out installing, but unlike when I was ADSL campaigner back in 2004, it's unlikely they will let me have a look round the exchange.

Thanks,
Tom

[j0hn]

My queries therefore are:

1.  At what point and by which interface is the incoming copper pair connected to one of the linecards in the FTTC cab?
2. Does each linecard have one fibre terminated to it? (so one fibre will be serving 36 customers, 6 fibres necessary for the 6 linecards due to be installed)
3. What happens at the exchange end; is the copper link between the PCP and the E for my line now obsolete?

I did hope to be able to visit the exchange during the cabinet installation, and I am sure I will pop along to chat to the engineers when they are out installing, but unlike when I was ADSL campaigner back in 2004, it's unlikely they will let me have a look round the exchange.

Thanks,
Tom

1. They are connected between PCP and DSLAM by copper tie cables.
Each tie cable is connected to a port on the line card, serving a single customer pair.

2. I'm not sure on the specifics here. There are a number of fibres terminated to the DSLAM. There is ample capacity between FTTC cab and exchange. I've never known this to be a bottleneck.
I'm not aware of any 36 port line cards. There are 24, 32, 48 and 64 port line cards.

3. Obsolete for broadband. E-Side only carries voice after taking FTTC.

Do you know what size cabinet they are installing?

[mentaltom]

Thank you John. Sorry it will be 32 port line cards they are installing I imagine.

I don’t know the size of the cabinet they are installing however the contract notes:

“We’ll provide all ductwork, civil construction work, fibre installation and power to enable the new fibre cabinet to be fully functional and ready to take orders from Communications Providers (CPs).

– The new cabinet that we’ll install will have capacity to support up to 288 end users.”

[gt94sss2]

Sounds as if they will be fitting a Huawei MA5603T. However, they don't fit enough line cards to initially support 288 users - they will initially add one or two line cards and then add more depending on demand (adding a line card is a relatively quick job).

I can't recall how many fibres OR use per cabinet (1 or 2?) but they will run more than this in case they need them the future/for redundancy. The fibres will run from the nearest aggregation node so changes at the exchange will be minimal.

The E side line is also still used for line testing as well as voice calls.

[j0hn]

The 288 port capacity cabinet is as described above by gt94sss2.

The cabinets OpenReach use are described here also...
https://kitz.co.uk/adsl/fttc-cabinets.htm

The 288 ports is made up of 6 x 48 port line cards.
This can be expanded to 6 x 64 ports to increase capacity to 384 ports.

You pay for the cabinet and its installation.
All future capacity upgrades are OpenReach's responsibility.
The day it goes live it is treated as any other cabinet.

[mentaltom]

Thank you both. Will keep the group updated and I’ll try to post a few photos. You’d think with me paying for the upgrade they’ll let me have a little look during commissioning

Tom