Are Street Cabinets Such a Good Idea ?

As you will know, I have been skeptical about the potential of Fiber to the Cabinet, mostly due to what I perceive as a lack of future-proofness (yeah, I know such a word doesn't exist...) of the deployment. One aspect that I honestly haven't investigated much is the impact of having cabinets in the streets. After all, I thought, cable operators have had them forever...

I guess I should have looked more closely at some of the posts James put up on eurotelcoblog. The photo on the right is a photo of one of Numéricable's cabinets in Marseille. Last year, a group of people went through several districts of Marseille and tracked down cabinets to photograph them. The results are here for the 14th district and here for the 3rd district.

This is truly frightening stuff. And the worse is I see no reason why this would happen to Numéricable and Virgin and not to others, including FTTC deployers. If you see similar sights, please send me photos!