jamesclay, Author at Tech Stuff

July 6, 2017

Making a connection

After seeing BT Openreach vans and engineers around the cabinet, the connecting website shows Cabinet 25 has moved into the Connect phase.

We’re connecting power to the new fibre cabinet and joining the new fibre lines to the existing copper network.

Now there is a caveat that…

You can’t order a fibre service today but typically it’ll be available to your premises within the next four months.

However the process is moving faster than it says on the website, it’s one of the reasons I am blogging about it, so I can see if we are on target or slower than the website says. The build phase (which should be a “month” was just a week!

Now the building work is done, BT Openreach need to connect the cabinets and connect power to the new cabinet.

For a Fibre to the Cabinet connection this stage is about connecting the power and fibre cables to the cabinet in your area. The existing and new cabinets are now connected to each other by underground copper cables. The physical build is now completed and there shouldn’t need to be any further works in your area.

After this has happened then BT Openreach can activate the cabinet, inform service providers and then I can place an order.

June 29, 2017

We have a new cabinet…

Well the building work has finished and there is now a new fibre cabinet next to cabinet 25.

It’s in the corner just a few feet away from the original cabinet 25 (which in the photograph above is hidden by the larger green cabinet).

Now they have finished the “build” phase the next stage is the “connect” phase.

After that they can activate the cabinet and ISPs can start taking orders…

June 26, 2017

They’re building, they’re building…

After mentioning last time that BT Openreach had registered their “roadworks” it was nice to see today that they had been doing some work around cabinet 25.

Though in this picture you can’t actually see cabinet 25, it’s behind the green cabinet in the middle of the picture. They appear to be digging up channels to lay cables between the old cabinet and the new one. I believe that the new cabinet is then connected direct to the exchange with fibre, hence FTTC Fibre To The Cabinet. The last stretch of cable from the cabinet to the house is still old copper cable.

So will BT Openreach achieve their end of June deadline? Remember this was an extension from their original end of March deadline.

No.

According to a Facebook thread, it appears BT Openreach have pushed their deadline to the end of August 2017.

As you might imagine, disappointed.

June 21, 2017

We have roadworks…

Well according to the Roadworks website, it looks like BT Openreach will be working on Cabinet 25 upgrading it for FTTC service. It had looked like nothing was happening for a while…

Looking at the detail you can see the roadworks refer to cabinet 25.

The roadworks website outlines what companies are undertaking roadworks.

Once this is done then we are at the next stage of the fiber journey.

May 22, 2017

Build Phase, what Build Phase?

As I have mentioned previously, according to the BT Openreach Fibre site they are in the build phase for cabinet 25 in Weston Village.

Over the weekend I ventured down to the cabinet to see what was happening and see how far BT Openreach had got with putting in the new fibre cabinet, as I had heard that BT Openreach vans were sighted in the area!

Well as I could have guessed there was nothing there, nothing had changed.

Now I know that BT Openreach could potentially site the new cabinet somewhere else, but if you look at other upgraded cabinets the new ones are quite close to the existing cabinet.

Here is cabinet 24 in Weston village, the old cabinet is on the right, the new fibre cabinet is on the left.

I don’t know what I was expecting to see, actually that’s a lie I was expecting there to be nothing there…

Well, BT Openreach did say the end of June, I will believe it when I see it.

May 14, 2017

Openreach vans “sighted”

I recently posted we were in the “build” phase of the fibre journey for cabinet 25 in Weston Village.

Well according to a recent Facebook posting (hearsay evidence) BT Openreach vans were sighted next to the cabinet on Moor Lane.

I did check roadworks.org however as Moor Lane is no longer a road and the site of the cabinet is off the lane, the work wasn’t seen on that site.

The roadworks.org website is a useful site to see what is happening with roadworks and BT Openreach to log their work on this site. It was also where I found out that Virgin Media were laying down cable on the other side of the village.

May 7, 2017January 1, 2020

Fusion Drive Failed

Sometimes Apple technology impresses me with it’s reliability and stability and then sometimes it doesn’t…

I have a 2006 Intel iMac, one of their early Intel models and the 250GB HDD is working well today as it did when I first got it. My experiences with other iMacs that I have used at work have been equally impressive. I once did though experience hard drive failure on one of my PowerBooks, but that was because I dropped it….

However when it comes to my home 27” iMacs I have been less lucky.

My original 2009 27” iMac hard drive failed and was replaced by Applecare, only to fail again a few years later. With this failure I ignored the drive and replaced it with an external drive. Eventually the whole system failed.

My new 27” iMac which I got in late 2014 came with a 3TB Fusion Drive. Fusion Drive is Apple’s name for a hybrid drive, which combines a hard disk drive with a NAND flash storage (solid-state drive of 24 GB or more) and presents it as a single Core Storage managed logical volume with the space of both drives combined.

Last month I came to my iMac I found the prohibitory symbol.

When you see a circle with a slash symbol instead of the Apple logo, it means your Mac couldn’t find a valid System Folder to start up from.

I did try reinstalling OS X by using OS X Recovery, but that failed…

Checking my backups I realised that there were some files missing from the back up disks, so using target disk mode (and another Mac) I attempted to recover the files from the failing hard drive. I managed to get some, but unfortunately I couldn’t get them all.

I was thinking of using DiskWarrior (which had helped with my previous iMac hard drive problems, however version 4 which I have is not compatible with OS Sierra. After a while though it became impossible to mount the drive using target disk mode. Disk Utility also failed to do anything except spin the beachball.

The other symptom I saw was the separation of the SSD from the Fusion Drive, this was not good news.

Taking the iMac to the Genius Bar, they were unable to enter diagnostic mode and using a network startup drive, were able to check that the iMac was working fine, and that the problem was with the Fusion Drive.

I had considered using a data recovery firm, but in the end with the majority of the data in my backups I let the Genius Bar attempt to re-build the Fusion Drive, which didn’t work, so they had to replace the drive with a new one.

The next step is to re-build the iMac from scratch, which is nice to do now and again, but is a bit if pain if you have really slow broadband. Really looking forward to getting fibre back in the next two months!

I know I have some missing data, but I think I have the important stuff. One thing I am now considering is getting some cloud based backup which has got a lot cheaper since I last checked it out.

I am slightly disappointed that the Fusion Drive failed after just over two years. For a variety of reasons I didn’t have AppleCare with this iMac, and it is something I will certainly consider for future iMac purchases.

May 4, 2017

And then we move along again…

It wasn’t that long ago that I was complaining again about the slow progress of enabling cabinet 25 in Weston Village for fibre. When I checked this morning it was still at the Field Survey stage, however since this morning we have progressed along the fibre journey and are now at the Build stage.

We’re installing the new fibre cabinet and laying the fibre cables to serve your home or business.

You can get more detail on the fibre journey page.

At this point we’re ready to start the physical work in your community. We’ll be installing the new equipment and bringing fibre cables from your local telephone exchange to your area. You might see our teams working in the footway boxes along your street as they bring the fibre cable through the underground ducts or overhead on telephone poles. Putting our equipment in position might cause a bit of disruption with traffic diversions and closed pavements and we’ll do our best to reduce this. Throughout the build phase we continue to work closely with the power companies and local authorities to reduce delays and keep disruption to a minimum.

As you might imagine I will be taking a look round to see if they have actually started work…

April 25, 2017

You have been using too much wifi

I’ve noticed that GWR (who were First Great Western) have started to limit their customers’ use of wifi. Three years after free wifi was introduced on their high speed trains, they’ve realised that it’s very popular and have implemented restrictions.

Back in 2007 I wrote an article, This is the age of the train… talking about the refurbishment by FGW, then I said

Do you think I should point out to First Great Western that some train operators provide free wireless on their trains, or do you think that would be pushing it?”

After seven years in 2014, it looked as though they finally listened and added wifi to their carriages on their high speed services from Bristol to London. Back then when trying it out I discovered.

The speed, as you might expect travelling at 125mph is inconsistent, but having done a speed test I was hanging to get between 5-9 Mbps which is more than reasonable. I was also able to stream video using YouTube and iPlayer.

I also asked the question:

Will the travelling public use the wifi, what with 4G and 3G so much more commonplace than back in 2007?

Well it certainly looks like they have been using it, hence the restrictions that GWR have put in place.

It’s nice that they also let you know how it is being used and how much bandwidth is available.

It isn’t surprising that they need to do this, as technically I can’t see them being able to increase the bandwidth easily, so it make sense to restrict usage.

Having said that 15MB is not very much, not in this day of HTML e-mail messages, attachments, Twitter, Facebook and so on…

Well at least it’s still free. Hey Cross Country are you listening?

Me, well I still using my own 4G connection, it’s faster and unlimited data is greater than 15MB.

April 15, 2017

…and so it continues…

Well the fibre journey continues…

Back in January I wrote about how on the fibre journey, cabinet 25 in Weston Village had moved to the Design stage having spent years in the “we are exploring solutions” phase, which I actually believe means “it’s at the bottom of the pile of a large number of ‘solutions’ and we will get to it once we have had enough bad press, someone else starts laying cable or we have nothing better to do….”

Well as of the beginning of April we have moved along that fibre journey. We have entered the Field Survey.

We’ll now take the blueprints from the design stage to your community, and check that what looks good on paper works in the real world. Our surveyor needs to check that there’s enough space alongside all the existing utilities underground for our new cables, and whether there’s enough space to accommodate our equipment. We’ll also need to determine whether we’ll need to close any roads to install fibre and, if so, apply to the local authority for road traffic management, traffic lights etc… We’ll work closely with your local authority to make sure fibre is installed safely and with the minimum of disruption to local people.

This says we should have fibre in the next nine months which does make me wonder if BT are still hoping to have everything done by the end of June?

Nothing beats having a field survey of my own, and looking around that part of Weston Village where cabinet 25 lives, there doesn’t appear to be anything happening. No BT Openreach vans, no roadworks or cabinet installations. When other cabinets were upgraded, a new FTTC cabinet was put in place, usually just a few feet away.

So the story continues…