BT Fibre Pulls Out of Chelsea Over Ugly Equipment Cabinets 136
judgecorp writes "The up-market London borough of Kensington and Chelsea has lost its chance for BT fast fibre. After residents objected to the ugly fibre cabinets, and the council repeatedly refused permission to install them in historic sites, BT has said the borough will not get its fast BT Infinity product at all. The borough says it doesn't need BT, as Richard Branson's Virgin Media has got it more or less covered."
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)
They look pretty similar to the Virgin boxes that the residents seem to be fine about. Maybe a bit taller.
BT Infinity is made of fail anyway. It's expensive, slow and capped to hell. Rather than do real fibre to the premises they decided to roll out last century's technology.
Re:Agreed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why not underground? (Score:4, Informative)
They are deploying thousands of these all around the country, putting them underground would be considerably more expensive...
It's not just maintenance for which they need to access the cabinet, connecting new customers up requires that too.
Also, these cabinets contain quite a lot of kit that generates heat, that would need to be vented somehow and you can't just put vents in the top because water would get in. If you sealed them such that they were waterproof and insulated by dirt and paving slabs on all sides, they would overheat very quickly... With the above ground cabinets, you can have vents which are angled downwards to prevent rain ingress and the metal case will also conduct heat fairly well and is cooled by fresh air on the outside.
Re:Aesthetics (Score:5, Informative)
If you are unable to see that aesthetics actually has functional value, then I'm surprised you're actually capable of the emotion of "sadness".
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)
They look pretty similar to the Virgin boxes that the residents seem to be fine about. Maybe a bit taller.
BT Infinity is made of fail anyway. It's expensive, slow and capped to hell. Rather than do real fibre to the premises they decided to roll out last century's technology.
BT Infinity is great, and pretty much the best choice for internet access in the UK, just as long as you don't get it from BT... Plenty of other providers which resell the same FTTC service but without the crappy throttling/shaping. I'm with Zen and get 60down/20up solidly, couldn't be happier to be honest.
Re:Agreed (Score:3, Informative)
Taek a look at the UK Free Software Network [ukfsn.org] if you want a non-evil ISP.
I live in RBKC. I started with talktalk in March, and it's fine. I have only paid in advance for 1 year's phone line rental (£114), but the broadband is literally free for a year (they gave me a tesco voucher £25 and I used a cashback site which gave me £70 amazon voucher).
Compared to that, BT is really expensive, but then again they currently spend £20 every month sending snailmail spam to every flat in my building. On the other hand, Virgin spends £40 doing the same thing as they use A4 sized envelopes!