@MisterW wrote:
@JSHarris FTTP does not go through the cabinets. The FTTP network is a PON network (Passive optical network) there's no power supply except at the exchange and the user premises i.e the ONT
Interesting, as that differs from what I was told by the chap working on our local cabinet a couple of years ago. He told me that the fibre came in to the cabinet from the exchange around 12 miles away, and that the gubbins in the cabinet retransmitted data out to local homes.
I specifically asked if there was any power requirement to keep things going, as at the time a group of us were looking to club together to try and get FTTP. I was quoted £35k for a single FTTP connection - our hope was that by clubbing together we could reduce the FTTP cost (turned out that we couldn't, but that's another story more related to OpenReach). In the course of the chat with the chap at the cabinet he did explain that the cabinet had the capability to drive fibre connections to our homes, but mentioned that the units needed to do this were still reliant on the cabinet power supply.
As an aside, our local telephone exchange (along with many others I believe) was decommissioned more than 20 years ago (it's now a house). My understanding is that the reason we need cabinet power is because our exchange is around 12 miles away, and that there is some sort of multiplexing that goes on in the cabinet to take our lines (be they fibre or wire) and transfer the data up and down the fibre to the distant exchange.
