Forming the Cabinet
The cabinet itself is a large filing cabinet. It has air-conditioning. It has a battery back-up for the broadband system.
It can be a 1, 2 or 3-door cabinet - which can supply about 200, 400 or 600 customers
The cabinet base is a fairly simple arrangement. A concrete plinth for the green box containing 2 or 3 large ducts which come up into the cabinet and feed back to a nearby 5-ring chamber, plus an electricity supply. So it's fiddling around with the ducts that's the hardest bit.
The cabinet bolts down onto the plinth and several Core fibre bundles feed up through the floor from the nearby chamber.
The associate chamber is often located next to the cabinet for neatness, but it can be anywhere nearby.
Cabinet bases being installed.
The specification is available from B4RN. It is slightly different if it is going to be a 2 or 3 door cabinet.
An important thing about the chamber is that it needs to be somewhere that definitely can't flood - so the plinth may have to be built up a bit.
This is momentous for your village. Even though it might be a year before anyone goes live, the process has begun.
Sedbergh cabinet arrives The 3 door model.
As delivered. This is a 2-door cabinet.
Planning permission may be needed
Then you can plan your ducting
Allen Valleys
This is their cabinet installation. The layout is that the cabinet itself is one side of a concrete road and its associate chamber (chambers?) is on the other side of the road (they don't have to be next to each other, contrary to popular belief).
This meant that a lot of duct had to go under that road and a big section cut out of it. And it proved to be a tough job.
Mike "This was concrete and it looked as if one concrete road had been laid on another. The 24inch floor-saw we hired only cut through half of it and the remainder we tried to remove using a couple of Aldi's electric road-breakers but after an hour we had hardly touched it. So to save these poor little machines we phoned our very friendly tool hire company, for them to deliver their largest compressor road hammer. This took a morning to remove and lay in fresh concrete over the purple duct"
Cabinet will go on the plinth there on the left, chamber is off-camera to the right
Very soon after, they got their cabinet. The yellow builder's bags are still there and the concreting is just visible.