What are my local BT works

I live in a village with approx 1,000 homes connected to our exchange (CMPAT) served only by BT with 8Mb broadband. We have no published upgrade dates.

Recently BT Open Reach have been digging like crazy along the main route into the village in the direction of our nearest City and between the nearest area with higher speed connections and ourselves.

Is there any way to find out if the works are towards a future upgrade as I'm desperate for a faster connection but that currently means moving house?

Thanks

If you go to the Openreach site Openreach site you can look in the spreadsheets for which exchanges are planned to be given FTTC.

I can see no mention of CMPAT in any of the sheets.

There is also upgrades to give 21c from BT wholesale that could give a speed increase but I don't have a link to the list.

Talktalk and Sky also have programme to rollout LLU but there is no indiction on Samknows that anything is happening.

With the small size of your exchange you may have to wait for your council to get BDUK funding and place a contract with someone to upgrade the final 3rd.

Edited by kitcat (Thu 13-Sep-12 13:14:45)

Does your council publish road works on roadworgs.org or on its web site? This may tell you what the work is for (look for references to "nga").

Look at council planning data (should be published on council web site) to see if any applications have been made for DSLAMs in your area.

FTTC is often done with a fibre feed from a "remote" exchange as the "head end" so the fibre goes there and doesnt touch your local exchange. In the case of smaller exchanges in particular this is a very logical way of doing it.

Of course it is possible that they are just laying new cables are building new ducts which are nothing to do with FCCT.

Thanks - my local parish and district councils are trying to get information too, but have nothing as yet. The county council is currently campaigning for faster connectivity.

I will check out those sources and see what I can find. I also send openreach the question directly.

Many thanks

Often it's easiest to just walk along and have a chat with those digging!

That's what I've done a couple of times and always found someone who knows what and why?

Depending on the local area, some even have leaflets to hand out explaining things.

You are not on any Openreach published list to get FTTC yet. The info is all on the site I quoted.

No BDUK contract has been announced for your council yet.

So the cabling works is likely to be for something / somewhere else.