BT's giant new faster broadband boxes blocked BT has been forced to put the brakes on an ongoing pilot of faster broadband technology in north London because of protests from local residents, who say its new roadside cabinets are too big and ugly. Haringey Council has blocked BT from installing any further equipment on the leafy streets of Muswell Hill until it rethinks …
My router is small and slim and i can hide it from site, why can't BT do the same.
Size isn't everything and nones impressed by BT anymore, hide it in an exchange, wtf do I have to pay 50p a month extra for this type of shite.
And I bet they haven't applied for the proper planning permission.
F+++ BT, F+++ Carphone warehouse/TalkTalk et al.
The public own the country not f++++++ some money only whore company who only gives a shit about making the rich richer.
For a fact TalkTalk only entered the market to make money not to provide a decent connection, BT balked at unbundling, balking now at having to upgrade their own network.
If it wasn't for the public there would be no BT. At least Virgin/NTL and Sky fund there own expansions, but at a cost it sems their subscribers will pay. BT forces it down your neck, no options.
Why is it that BT and other telcos think that pavements are just free space for their boxes and their vans. Here in Bristol, whenever the council widens a bit of pavement to make it safer to cross a busy road, BT or a mobile telco immediately try to take it over, as somewhere big enough for a mast, a couple of boxes and a van is exactly what they want.
....is a survey by a group of London based Estate agents , saying that proximity to a fast exchange is more important than proximity to good schools and transport links, in both the letting market and the sales market, for studio flats to 4 bed houses.
Who knows, it might even be true!!!!
Might be one helluvan eye opener for the NIMBY residential committees in some areas.
Maybe they might have to pay "hello money " to BT et al , if it was conclusively found to be true.
(From the Evening Standard, 07 August 2012) Classifieds
Lock-up garage, 4mx3m, own metered power supply, telecoms:
Suit internet hobbyist /seedboxer ,100mtr from main high speed exchange (Muswell Hill)
£650.00 pcm ono.
"For a fact TalkTalk only entered the market to make money "
And why else does any other company set up!? Just cause they are kind. What nice folks. Making money is *always* a secondary consideration. From the folks in the Dragon's Den to McDonalds. They all have *us* in mind!
Welcome to reality dude.
I'm Connected - The Tea Chain says so :)
"A BT spokeswoman said the new cabinets had to be larger because they needed powered electronics to convert the light signals transmitted over fibre optics to electrical signals to be transmitted to and from homes, over copper."
So just replace the copper to the home with fibre, too. Screw 40Mb/s, let's all get 100Mb/s and up!
There is a very simple solution that the post office solved nearly 100 years ago.
Dig a hole, 0.8m, put connections and stuff that doesnt need checking/altering there, and then put the accessible stuff higher up, thus cabinet is 1.0m off ground.
Width issue - muswell hill has narrow paths, but all the boxes are right on peoples gardens, just give the home owner free fibre broadband and put the box back a foot into there garden solved.
And where its not possible just do what they have done since the war - use 2 boxes side by side.
As for the prams, well thats the internet faster internet = more prams roflmao.
Britain tries to drag its telecoms infrastructure up from third-world status and what happens?
Some bunch of poncey monied NIMBYs (who probably think dial-up is fast enough as they only use the internet for petitioning their local council) deny their neighbours a vital step in faster online access.
Come the (technological) revolution, those bastards will be lined up in front of their bloody Chelsea tractors and gunned down like the selfish scum they are.
if a customer speaks to me and has exceptional bb speeds, i often pop them a spot of advice about adding such details to their property advice pack or whatever they callt hem. it would certyainly be a question i would ask when viewing property..
as muswell hill: pah, who cares. conservation area? does that extend to the typw of car you are allowed to drive? ge trid of those ugly modern cars..pre 1940s models only to suit the rest of the borough's mentality..
I know that there ould be some issues, but...
Why not bury it? Cab is 1.8m tall, dig a hole 1.8m down and big enough that a person can get in too, cover as per manholes, put a small cab on top to deal with cooling. Simples.
I know it's not as simple as that, but it's a good solution IMHO
"My router is small and slim and i can hide it from site, why can't BT do the same"
Well take you router + power, multiply by 100 or more (number of houses it will serve). How samll is it now?
Size isn't everything and nones impressed by BT anymore, hide it in an exchange, wtf do I have to pay 50p a month extra for this type of shite.
As mentioned before. This is the opposite end of the exchange, i.e your mummys home end
And I bet they haven't applied for the proper planning permission.
Don't have to. Only becuase it's a conservation area is there a problem.
F+++ BT, F+++ Carphone warehouse/TalkTalk et al.
So who do you use for phone line 9sorry who does your mummy use?). Or has someone been disconnected for making calls to the old lady down the road?
The public own the country not f++++++ some money only whore company who only gives a shit about making the rich richer.
Actually, here's the shock, the people do NOT own the country, the vast majority of land is not owned by the public. If you belive otheriwse, can we come and shit in your (moms) garden, after all, we own it, so why not?
For a fact TalkTalk only entered the market to make money not to provide a decent connection, BT balked at unbundling, balking now at having to upgrade their own network.
Wow private business wnats to make money. Shock horror!
If it wasn't for the public there would be no BT. At least Virgin/NTL and Sky fund there own expansions, but at a cost it sems their subscribers will pay. BT forces it down your neck, no options.
And how do your think NTL and Sky talk to the rest of the population? Magic pixie dust? How much do you think your subscribtion would be if Sky / NTL actually paid for every mile of copper BT own that they use (they pay flat rates regardless of where the call is routed? How much do you think it would cost if these actually moved out of the large, high density, profitable cities and into smaller towns and villages? I reckon a few hundred quid a month.
So go crawl back under your stone, do some reading up and come out to play when you can string a comprehensive argument together.
BT are placing large boxes in the public foot path without regard to the feelings or desires of the residents.
Yes the residents want the service. No they do not want their paths taken over by big green BT boxes. These paths are for the daily use of the residents, and that includes prams pushchairs and wheelchairs.
My wife uses a wheel chair and I have had enough of having to push her along the road because some mindless idiot has blocked the pathway. Whether that be with a Comms box, Pile of sand, parked car (get loads of scratches on those), skip, rubbish boxes / bags, etc.
The residents have accepted the smaller boxes so why didn't BT model the new kit on those? So BT shrink your street boxesand every one will be happier.
.. may be the answer but it may not. First off their is the question of what is the ground under the box. Most streets are full of pipes and wires. secondly their is the problem of what goes in the bottom of the cabinet. Thirdly their is the question of how you maintain that which is in the bottom of the cabinet. Having sead this I dont know why they cant lie the cabinet on its side. 1.8 meters is very tall! There is also a coserted effort to reduce street architecture so I simpavise with the residents on this.
Because your router doesn't have to handle lightning, homeless people, vandalism, floods, hot summers, freezing conditions, the occasional car crash, or, oh, fifty subscribers worth of pirate movies and pornography.
Just you, which only counts as "vandalism" and maybe two or three normal people's allowance of porno.
If they'd actually done any research into their trial area at all before building these things, they would have found out immediately that parts of Muswell Hill are mostly populated by well off busy bodies who spent large amounts of time objecting to anything and everything. Quite amusing really since Muswell Hill is in Harringey, a borough which is notorious for dreaming up expensive hair-brained schemes aimed at improving the lot of its residents but which would normally have the opposite effect. (case in point, its intention to turn the entire borough into one great big CPZ, which we in nearby Hornsey have fought off twice now)
Usually these things are stopped at the last minute by furious objections from Muswell Hill or Crouch End, but not before the council has blown loads of money on the scheme first. In a way I love that the people won't just bend over and take it from the local authority or companies with dubious intentions. Sometimes justice is trampled anyway, as was the case with the recently green-lighted concrete factory to be built in a residential area near schools thanks to the proximity of a railway siding.
Advances in technology shouldn't just make the place look like a dump. I guess people objected to the red phoneboxes when they came out but they definitely look a fair bit nicer than the exchange boxes. And people are prepared to deal with the hassle of digging up roads so that we don't have a mess of cables running over our heads.
If you're upgrading the infrastructure you might as well spend a bit of money on digging holes to hide things and employing some designers to make what does stick out complement the scenery rather than a necessary evil.
Speaking as someone who lives in a conservation area, you have to accept certain disadvantages (no sat dishes in view, you can't do what you want to visible parts of the house etc) for the overall advantage of living somewhere that has been selected for it's niceness.
I hardly think it's NIMBYism to to not want the front of your grade two listed building (or preservation ordered building) to not have a large out of place green monolith placed outside it. The streets in the area where I live do have a single small greenbox, it's not particularly offensive, but if it were 1.8m tall it would block light out of the nearest house and be pretty ugly. Not to mention taking up a large area on the very narrow footpath. Like someone mentioned above, a little lateral thinking on the part of BT and placing the box as much underground as possible would probably be a good solution, it's not as if conservation areas are rare.
In addition to all the other people who rightly point out you've got poor logic, read up on who paid for the NTL/Virgin infrastructure ultimately. It may surprise you. As for Sky, it doesn't own it's infrastructure. Its sats are owned by Astra, it's broadband is provided over BT infrastructure, and it's unbundled some of the local loops - much like a whole host of other ISPs.
An idea, a little knowledge and a keyboard - bad combo it seems
...in an uppity neighborhood whining about having a 5 foot tall box of fiber-to-copper kit close by; I just wasted a perfectly good mouthful of coffee upon reading that shite. I'm in that gray zone between exurbia and boondocks where you're just glad you're within the zone to get 1.5 Mb DSL. I would be thrilled to cordon off a sector of outyard for my ISP to put in a fiber-fed node and the building/shed to house it in exchange for a gratis FiOS connection and service, and my chow says that he would keep the vandals away too. There again, maybe the best bet is to just let these crybabies take the piss over these boxes while the vast majority who would welcome the faster connection contacts the ISP to let them know where the boxes would be welcomed with open arms.
Typical from the yummy mummies and liberal media dads who litter the streets of Muswell Hill! After all, Muswell Hill is not exactly attractive, is it? And it's stuffed to the brim with BMW X5s, off-road pushchairs and double decaf lattes. Although the Chinese Takeaway next to the cinema has always been pretty good.
'FAIL' because NIMBYs are good at standing in the way of improvements in the world. I suppose they'd rather the exchanges were replaced with Agas.
for career mums to push those articulated lorries they call prams down the street is a good thing in my book.Make them 100 meters tall and 3 meters wide with a big middle finger drawn on the front.
If people can have a selfish "my baby is more important than everyone I inconvenience on a daily basis" attitude then BT can have a selfish "decent internet speed is more important than your baby" attitude.
QED
Telewest solved the problem by putting a box every 6 feet or so (ok maybe an exaggeration, but they put them on nearly every street corner). The cable companies also had a lot more money to spend so in some places could afford to bury the kit. As most of them went bankrupt (some more than once), you can see the success that business plan had.
BT PCPs usually number far fewer (most places have less than 10 per exchange area), so they have to handle more far more lines. It is difficult to make the technology smaller as an engineer still has to be able to get his chubby fingers in the kit. Add to that the usual anti-vandal countermeasures, and the kit starts to become pretty sizable.
As most people think that £20 a month for broadband is already too expensive, you can see why it can be difficult to double the installation cost...
FTTH isnt without its problems either, you have to put a powered box in the customers home, which means either using their power (not allowed under universal service obligations) or providing power via copper wire. The latter method combines all the problems of copper wire vs fibre technology.
They really dont understand that fibre is better for the enviroment than copper then??
I do wonder how people like this think that the world is going to develop. a slightly larger greenbox next to another is hardly going to kill anyone. Maybe they still send letters and use that ceefax thing?
I say shoot the fakoors. I wish i could get the FTTC in my area but even with the accelerated SYDR program i have to wait till 2011 :(
However the idea above of plonking the cab in my house sounds like a good one, i would give up a bit of my front lawn for a nice green box at the edge of my land for free tinterweb at full speed as well. ahhh i love day dreams....
Paris, cos just like her common sense doesn't come to these hill billys and BT....
Yes, there's that, and there's the option of BT 'renting' the tiny bit of land that they use for their new boxes from those who are happy to have a box by the fence (on the inside).
BT goes for the path of least resistance first, i.e. public land, even if the land owners were to say 'yes please', they are also bound by the conservation groups (when you buy in a conservation area you have to agree to the covenants that are demanded by the conservation groups).
So even if you were to own your property, you'd still have to do it the way the conservation group wants it, and if they don't want the box, there's nothing YOU can do about it (other than drag it through the courts).
Conservation areas mean restrictions mostly on residents. Boris Johnson had to get rid of his shed on the balcony pretty sharpish recently.
If people are restricted in what they can do with their own homes, then similar rules should also apply to private companies wanting to build in the area (What's good for the goose, etc.) . BT isn't motivated by altruism, after all.
The solution is for BT to design a new box * that matches the area (Victorian or whatever), and for the extra cost to be (partly) shared equally by the residents . The area remains conserved, people have access to faster internet, and BT aren't too much out of pocket. The alternative design can be reused in other conservation areas of a similar period, so it would make sense in the longrun.
*
(The contents of the box is the expensive part, and that doesn't need to massively change. )
Put flowerboxes on top with the sort of plants they put in hanging baskets. No idea what they're called, but the locals will love them, looks all rustic. Additional benefit is it encourages bees and delivers the little stinging insects neatly at head height to those pesky locals and to BT engineers. What's not to like?
Alternative is to do what they do with mobile phone masts in forest parks and disguise them as something already in that habitat. In Muswell Hill that means paint the broadband boxes to look like crappily parked G-Wizzes and no one would ever be able to tell the difference.
I don't get it. If these people are Luddite enough to block the cabinets in their area then why don't they organise a campaign against those other ugly boxes on four wheels which are habitually parked at the kerbside.
Personally I'm against the nasty Euro-boxes blocking my view of some perfectly formed telco cabinets usually decked-out in a rather snazzy battleship-grey.
Those old cable cabinets were only designed for analogue TV + phone line though. They still are like that, which is why some people find Virgin (formerly NTL, formerly... etc) connections can be tremendously unstable when digital TV and broadband is applied.
Unlike BT's copper to home, the connections from cabinet to consumer in terms of TV and broadband work by essentially a big coax cable of the old thick-ethernet style, complete with noise, interference, and is affected by neighbouring connections, especially unterminated ones (much like thick-ethernet).
The best solution to connect to houses for digital is fibre, next best is dedicated copper / twisted pair. The worst is noisy coax, which is what cable companies use from cabinet to home. Great for a crappy analogue TV picture. Rubbish for digital.
BT's cabinets likely have a lot of electronics in there that the old green cable cabinets have, and a dedicated connection to every house. Cable cabinets only have dedicated phone lines. The coax is shared in a loop with spurs essentially.
Anyway, how are BT going to stop the kids kicking the crap out of the boxes like they do with the cable cabinets?
The missing pics.
http://modular-solution.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/fttc-ipswich-1.jpg
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4011-aaisp-connects-first-business-on-bt-fibre-to-the-cabinet-pilot.html
Personally I wouldn't be bothered if they wanted to stick one on my road - it's no bigger than some of the other stuff lurking on our pavements!
Sod it, I say take the buggers out, leave the ungrateful sods with slow broadband and then redeploy them out to the rural areas and to areas where there are folks who can't get decent speeds and are crying out for something like FTTC.
Rob
(Happy with his 20 Meg Virgin broadband, who has real sympathy for those who are on slow connections)
In case any of you don't understand what a Muswell Hill street looks like, have a a watch of Shaun of the Dead and then inform us all EXACTLY where you can plant something as big as a 40U rack on those pavements without COMPLETELY fucking up their utility. And BT want to do this to install pornband inadequate for the needs of today, let alone tomorrow.
I get 50Mbps via Virgin right now and the cabinet is about 1x1x0.3m.
WTF is wrong with BT?
just an excuse to moan?
if they really wanted to restore the area to its natural or original state I assume they would be demanding the removeal of
Road Services
Sewers + Sanitation
Electritiy and Gag
Telephone Poles
Post boxes
the list goes.....
of course take this to its logical conclusion should there be a policy to revert back to its natural state of farm land, heath land , wood land etc?
They could put these up in Elmbridge District Council Area, we dont use paths - we drive everywhere in 4x4s even to teh end of our driveways (which you couldnt see the box from anyway!)
okay, if they have to convert the fibre to cab into copper rather than just going the whole hog and doing fibre to the home (FTTH) why dont they 'bury' the cabs below street level?
when last in rural Spain i was out late after a long Tapas session and when i went back through
the town square I saw a remarkable site...2 lorries emptying the bins...but the bins were fixed to the
street..the street had actually been raised to expose big wheelie bins underneath street level...which then got emptied into the trucks.... not only were bins buried in the ground ideal for anti-terror (bomb wouldnt be above ground in metal bin) but smell etc vastly reduced.
i can envisage datacabs being put into such underground raisable cavities....with looms of flexible copper and fibre to connect them (i cant find a decent picture or video of the underground cavity bins)
oh, and heres another slightly simpler option...imagine the wheelie bins being a fixed cab instead.. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-451172/The-bins-disappear-underground.html
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All this rabid obsession with destroying our environment just so people can get movies and porn quicker.
well done Muswell hill.
Shame there wasn't more objections when the streets and pavements were torn up to put cable in.
The joke here is that by the time 100mb is commonplace the download of copyrighted content will be punishable by death.
"Because your router doesn't have to handle...oh, fifty subscribers worth of pirate movies and pornography."
Oh less of the piracy/porno attitude. High speed subscriber access is needed for many reasons, not least the increase in the number of simultaneous connections per household. Wherease 10 years ago it was just one, its now likely to be 3, and with the growth in IP video services and the number of Tvs shipping with ethernet and pre-programmed internet content retriveal, will increase further. Whats more, whereas in the past content has been sub-broadcast quality and at SD or less, 720 and 1080 HD services are available. Except in the UK, where even ADSL2 is insufficient to guarantee faultless viewing, of a single channel with no other inernet access. Add another family member wanting to watch another channel, and the demands grow.
And of course BT will increase backhaul capacity to match. Not. The current infrastructure cannot cope with the demands of the current <8mb service (avg 3.5mb). What hope it would cope with, the current number of subscribers at 40Mb, let alone 100Mb, or god help BT an increase in access bandwidth *and* an increase the customer base.
well, if they are having that much of an issue over installing new technology... why not just rip out the whole telephone network.... and replace it with what ever communications technology they had at the time the area was built...
there again.... they will complain about all the pigeon shit !!
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The problems of providing power to the cabinet/node has been known for years. They should take the fibre to the gate. Then each premise can provide its own power to convert the optical signals on the fibre to/from electrical signals on the premises copper circuits. Also means you don't have 1,000's of cabinets strewn across the entire country for vehicles to drive into, goths to vandalise, burst water mains to flood etc etc.
As for Muswell Hill, about 40 years ago Joni Mitchell wrote those immortal words "they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot", there's no reason not to do it again, is there?
Seems a shame to put these big ugly boxes in the street just so a few more people can surf for grot, post yet more 'hilarious' drunken photos on social-tard sites and get ripped off by websites selling fake trainers.
Has anyone cottoned on to the possibility that all this extra bandwidth is in demand because so many of us are downloading acres of copyrighted material?
At the risk of sounding like Bill with his 64k quote, I find 4mbps does me quite well thanks.
This is just the sort of shit that PC World get up to, selling folk PCs with 40000000GB of RAM, 82-core processor, 9000TB drive just so they can check the sports results and rub one out when 'the missus' is down the bingo. Sigh.... has anyone seen my sheepskin?
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