Car wins in battle with Openreach street cabinet
It seems an early morning driver has had an argument with an Openreach street cabinet and the aftermath is pictured in the local press, the cabinet was on Finchampstead Road, Wokingham.
BT is expected on site to start restoring service on Thursday, the priority being to get voice services working, and as the FTTC will need more work that will take longer and it will be interesting to see how quickly it can be done. A lot will depend on whether the mains feed is damaged, if not then as the cabinets are usually delivered with electronics installed it may be relatively fast. The fibre runs usually terminate in the bottom right hand section of the cabinet which is now very empty, so either spare fibres will be tested or new ones blown through existing ducting.
The cable detector and spade that can be seen are probably from the emergency attendance of the power company to make sure that there is no danger from the mains that used to serve the cabinet.
Comments
If there was a crime that warranted execution...
Indeed. And that's on top of the possible Drink Driving
The bottom right hand section of the cabinet isn't so much empty as destroyed! It will be interesting to see how hard it is to restore the fibres that once were there. I'm not familiar with the blown fibre system BT Openreach use, but presumably the worst case is either joining on a new piece of tubing and blowing in new fibre, or cutting off what remains of the bundle and fusing on an extension if it's too short.
The tie cables are clearly wrecked, too. Replacing those is potentially easier than fixing the fibres, at least so far as running in some new multi-pair cable goes. Restoring all the ties is potentially fiddly, though.
On a brighter note, it looks like the electronics may have survived and may be usable as spares elsewhere.
d-slam, or d-splat
at risk of the filters,
"You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"
I keep thinking that will happen to the one down the road from me. It is opposite a junction and one a day someone is going to right across and onto the pavement taking both cabinets out. that is the one i would be joined to if I had a phone line
someone ran into a VM one the other day and it just slanted.. not sure if it still worked or not. but it was upright
Please no more of these stories TBB. The jokes are abysmal and the comments for the most part cringeworthy.
BT shouldn't put any cabinets on the main road (any car accidents will going to hit it one day)
I hope BT send the FULL bill for the replacement to the car driver/their insurers.
adslmax - BT have relatively little discretion where to put the cabinets. There's a 100m limit on the tie cable length, and they prefer to keep it shorter than that, if possible. The FTTC cabinet location is therefore heavily influenced by the PCP cabinet location, which, in turn, is heavily influenced by the road topology.
Where then adslmax?
You can't criticise without offering a solution... cost neutral preferably, I don't want to give BT any more money than absolutely necessary!
@zyborg47
How long has the phone been there then, without being "taken out"?
@adslmax
They just need some of those cement post things around them.
@adslmax, does that mean people shouldn't use footpaths on main roads either? Bound to get him by a car at some point? Stupid people and their walking about
@Dixinormous really? It's just broadband...
It must be a full moon!
I've just come past a plain but large cab on the corner of Chepstow Road and Somerton Road ( where the exchange is and that too has been rammed over - this time into the side of the pub!
Got roadworks barriers around it but it's similar to this one and it's also being held to the ground by the underground cables.
I'll try and get a pic of it in the morning.