On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 at 08:46, Paul Thornton <[email protected]> wrote: > > Is there anyone here who is using Openreach's Dark Fibre X? Interested > to hear of experiences, pitfalls, overall how easy the process is etc. >
So, I've been on the IWG for this (and for the aborted DFA) and these are some observations... - Official error/provisioning failure rate is low (that's measured on target delivery date not on "did it work the first time") it has exposed a lumpy level of ability of Openreach engineers to do OTDR tests. - OTDR/light level tests are single-ended only, some (well know fibre networks) are having to do bidirectional testing and are finding "artefacts" not detected with single-ended. There is an open request with OR to reevaluate the testing approach, but in the meantime recommend your own testing if you are doing anything more than a single p2p 10G. - Fault/repair rates are too low to provide any useful statistical help yet - Due to the current patterns there are still lots of parts of the country that haven't seen a single order, the expectation is that there will be a jump in mistakes because there's a lag between training and delivering the service. - OR engineers are very much experts with EAD (which is planned to be very forgiving with limits) so there have been some "less than perfect" installs on the first time for a particular engineer - OR assume that CSPs have an army of people who do single tasks and are subject matter experts on just one thing, they get very disconcerted when someone can understand both technical and commercial things (true for many of the smaller CSPs). They also assume that every CSP goes to every event that OR organises (even if they don't use that product) and will happily move topics between meetings even if you've not been involved in the other ones (so product changes to EAD or PIA will have an impact on DFx) - Using launch leads with an OTDR was initially an optional part of the process (there have been a number of field notices to OR engineers to remind them to use them) Should point we're not using it in anger yet so the list of "issues" may grow/shrink as we actively start to use it. Oh and I should probably warn people that the OR portal is about to get a cosmetic makeover so be prepared for link breakages as they shuffle the indexes... Thx J (and yes there might be a UKNOF talk about this when/if we get past a few installs)
