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[aesmith]

We're served by underground cable about 900m to the public road, at which point the line goes up a pole, over the road to another pole which was the designated DP,  then back underground. On our side of the road that copper cable serves three widely spaced houses. Layout is like a capital F with the DP at the foot, us at the top of the upright, the other two houses at the ends of the horizontal.

Openreach contractors have been busy installing duct and some sort of chambers at intervals all along the public road.

Now recently some more bits have appeared on the DP pole, some cable crossing to the pole on our side, and a drum of cable at its foot.

Just out of curiosity I want to see if anyone can identify the bits and work out how they would connect the three properties. 

This just looks like strain relief or similar, there's one on each pole..

[aesmith]

This looks more important..

[aesmith]

And there's a box at the top of the pole which I only got in silhouette against the sky ..

[XGS_Is_On]

Some of it is for FTTP, none of it serves your property directly. Box at the top isn't for FTTP, the thing you thought was strain relief is indeed that, the other box is a splitter node I believe. This infrastructure is to serve a wider area, there's nothing that connects properties to the network here.

[aesmith]

Thanks. So do you know what would be installed to connect the properties in this scenario? From the pole on our side of the road the distances would be around 250m to the branch off to the first property which itself is around 300m. Then another 650m straight on to our place, finally 400m to the last property. 

[Dwight]

Thanks. So do you know what would be installed to connect the properties in this scenario? From the pole on our side of the road the distances would be around 250m to the branch off to the first property which itself is around 300m. Then another 650m straight on to our place, finally 400m to the last property.

I call them dead hedgehogs! It's the block of 4 8 9 sockets at the top of the pole. These take your fibre directly.
 

[aesmith]

Is that what they call "connectorised block terminal"?  I'll have anther look on our side of the road, from memory there is just the new cable crossing from the DP pole.

[aesmith]

Following the cables on the DP pole a plain black cable comes up from underground and goes into the "splitter".  The other cable, slightly thinner and with a yellow stripe, goes up the pole via the strain relief, crosses the road overhead. On our side it comes down the pole via another strain relief. The rest of that cable is on the 1000m drum sitting ready for "something.

So I'm not sure it's a splitter anyway, given one cable in and one out. Unless the yellow stripe cable is multicore.

[XGS_Is_On]

Both will be high fibre count cables. A 288f cable can have a diameter of less than 11 mm.

[aesmith]

Going by the label on the drum the yellow stripe cable is Prysmian 36F aerial fibre cable. I don’t know whether the presence of such a big drum means they going to install poles for the rest of the route, or whether they're going to cut it and joint to underground cable, but haven't yet done so.  It doesn't appear suitable for direct burial.