FTTP or FTTC Options ?? Rural location with new fi...

Question

Hi All,
I live out in the sticks and we have been limited to sub 2mbps for years and years. As part of the Rural Broadband project, Openreach have been installing fibre in the area for the last few months. It has been difficult to get any information on what they have been doing, but they seem to have been installing new ducting throughout the area, they also installed a new cabinet in the village, but it is not one of the the big green infinity cabinets.
Anyway....today they were working in my road. They have blown fibre all the way to the manhole outside my house - and I am the very furthest house from the exchange (3 miles) or the cabinet (1 mile). The manhole is about 10 feet from the boundary of my property.
I had a chat with one of the OpenReach engineers working and asked if they were installing the fibre for FTTP or FTTC. His reply was "both". He said that once the network goes live, we will have the option of ordering either FTTC via the existing copper back to the cabinet, or FTTP directly from the fibre outside the house.
So....does this sound right? Obviously, I am over the moon about the possibility of getting real high speed FTTP, but don't want to get my hopes up.
But on the FTTC option, the new cabinet that was installed in the village looks almost identical to one of the old copper ones. No venting and about the same size as a standard old" one. When this was installed prior to Christmas, I asked the engineers working on it what they were doing. They told me they were just installing a replacement copper cabinet as the base of the old one sat in water and (obviously) caused issues. I have also noticed new BT manholes popping up near to clusters of houses around the village, with new ducting runs from them to the older manholes. Are these likely to be fibre agrregation nodes of some sort?
Anyway - does all this sound "normal"? My presumption is that they would not have run fibre as far as the house unless we were definitely going to get the FTTP option. And does the lack of the "typical" Infinity cabinets in the area indicate anything?Also - typically how long after the fibre is in would the network go live? 
Many thanks,
Alasdair

Answer 1

Hi adentonmiller,
Yes some exchanges have been designated a FTTC/P exchange meaning that some areas within that exchange area will have access to FTTC where other areas within the same exchange area will have access to FTTP. 
For some information on the Fibre installation process view this video:
A) FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53NcsctuxV0
B) FTTP (Fibre to the premises) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_gUBw8gh90
As to the timescale it depends on how far Openreach have gotten with the deployment of FTTC/P in your exchange area. It can take serveral months if they deployment is already underway or over 12months in some cases.
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