Increase of Virgin Media & Openreach metal street boxes

[Ivor]

Back in October Virgin Media descended on my area in West Sussex digging trenches/cabling & pavement cuts up to property perimeters without any warning & even boxing in residents with barriers & the mess was unbelievable for more than a week but let me put that to one side.

Then followed grey metal boxes of varying sizes & could be one or two/three up to five together. They are ‘growing’ to the point in certain roads mine included literally within a minute’s walk there are more, then dark green ones have been fitted in various locations by Openreach (see attached screenshots)

I know nothing about utilities but I assumed everything nowadays in the main was underground & yes the odd metal box you could spot normally belonging to BT.

These haven’t been in long & already the graffiti artists are having a go at them, getting fly postered with the local gigs or diet club etc & of course the poor little darlings of today who have nothing at all to do attempting to jemmy them open or one recently pushed over even though concreted in.

Do you have them? Coming to an area near you soon? (not that you’ll be notified)

 

[Sad Sprinter]

They started appearing around South West London about 10 years ago. But were BT Openreach ones.

 

[nlogax]

Can't speak for the grey ones but I've seen the green ones on London streets for the last fifteen years. Many stretch back to pre-VM days when NTL and Telewest ruled the cable broadband market. The proliferation is down to the large increase in fibre connectivity for Virgin Media and for service providers using OpenReach's backbone.

 

[Bevan Price]

Yes . Had some in our area for several years. And like the grey central box in your top picture, several have potentially unsafe trip hazards with cable laid on top of parts of the pavement, rather than buried fully underground.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

And for us air raid siren enthusiasts (yes such a thing does exist) green boxes on the street could be old siren control cabinets

 

[Ivor]

They started appearing around South West London about 10 years ago. But were BT Openreach ones.

I’m an ex South Londoner & often return but not noticed the increase but I’m back next week & I’ll pay attention, yes I know I’ve got to get a life

Can't speak for the grey ones but I've seen the green ones on London streets for the last fifteen years. Many stretch back to pre-VM days when NTL and Telewest ruled the cable broadband market. The proliferation is down to the large increase in fibre connectivity for Virgin Media and for service providers using OpenReach's backbone.

Cheers for the info, someone who knows about these things I can tell.

Yes . Had some in our area for several years. And like the grey central box in your top picture, several have potentially unsafe trip hazards with cable laid on top of parts of the pavement, rather than buried fully underground.

That’s not good with cable on top of pavements, not seen that this way as yet.

And for us air raid siren enthusiasts (yes such a thing does exist) green boxes on the street could be old siren control cabinets

These are new boxes my way but interesting re old siren control cabinets about, never knew about those.

 

[sor]

If anything, the number of Openreach cabinets will shrink in time. The Openreach fibre to the premises network generally doesn't use cabinets. The electronics live in the exchange buildings (such as the "OLT", Optical Line Terminal, that can be seen marked on that grey cabinet) and they can fit the rest of it underground or on the poles.

Any new cabinets are far more likely to be from the so called "alt nets" who don't have that luxury. This is certainly true in my area - a recently installed big, noisy cabinet that is far bigger than anything Openreach uses is actually that of an alt net. I'd speculate the grey ones with "NX" are NexFibre, an altnet with deep links to Virgin Media.

The green cabinets pictured are likely to be Openreach's (top photo is just the FTT*C* cabinet, bottom photo has the normal copper distribution cabinet and its FTT*C* twin to the right). Given that Openreach isn't rolling this stuff out anymore, I'd be surprised if it's new?

 

[Ivor]

Given that Openreach isn't rolling this stuff out anymore, I'd be surprised if it's new?

Great info thank you, these units though are definitely new, been fitted since late Autumn, seem to have gone from the old BT unit around which were few & far between to this influx.

 

[david1212]

Around my estate Virgin Media have within the last year put up additional boxes at the side of existing ones. Time will tell if the older ones get removed.

Then starting over 2 years ago City Fibre put up their equipment boxes and dug up many of the pavements to put a connection box at the boundary of each house / block. Despite being marked the footpaths / pavements outside some houses have yet to be done, most of these are just a footpath. As to if the system is live yet ............
My current ISP contract with Vodafone has just over 12 months to run. Vodafone use City Fibre but I do not want to swap from FTTC to FTTP unless the City Fibre system has been debugged. I'm not bothered about speed, currently just over 20Mbps but do need reliability.

 

[barringtoncem]

Yes had one of the grey ones installed in the village a long time which i can see by looking out of the window as well as two of the large and small grey ones within in the last two years presumably for the newish estate if anyone wants to sign up