Interesting article. I certainly hope that gives Pete some hope again.

Rustington is now live and I've put my order in, but do really feel for Pete's situation, and anyone else who isn't able to get Fibre in the near future. This article is potentially great news for others in the West Sussex area though.

In reply to a post by pete_thomson:

grrrrrrrr so angry right now!!!

I managed to get hold of an email address so I contacted them about my cab. This is the response I got:


As you will appreciate, Openreach is rolling out fibre broadband on a strictly commercial basis. When calculating the commercial viability of cabinet areas we take many factors into account. These include ensuring that we locate the cabinets in accordance with all national and local planning laws, ensuring that the cabinet does not obstruct pedestrians or provide a danger to all road-users. We must ensure that the DSLAM is located within 100m of its associated telephony connection cabinet and that there is adequate access to power and existing telephony infrastructure. To further enable the location of the DSLAM, we must accurately survey for underground structure and obstacles etc. As such we look at the potential return for our investment over a number of years, (20),with the prospective number of take up of the service being around 20% of households.
Your cabinet SD/LTTLH 34 has had several possible positions to locate it surveyed, however, the financials were too great to build and maintain this cabinet at this time and as such, this cab has been deferred from the programme. You must understand that this decision was not taken lightly, however, we have made a commitment to our customers, shareholders and the government to roll-out fibre broadband to 66% of the UK by November 2014. This is a complex and long term project with finite timescales and funding, we have to work within this confinement which ultimately means some areas are deferred. However, we do intend to revisit areas not included in the initial rollout, such as SD/LTTLH 34, for possible deployment at a later date.


Thanks BT, thanks very much.

Hi Pete,

Sorry to hear about this, i feel your pain being in a similar situation

Can i ask which email address did you have to write to get such a detailed response?

The CEO of BT and the CEO of Openreach replied to me but their responses weren't very specific to my case

In reply to a post by DarthVodafone:

This may be of use Pete.

m.littlehamptongazette.co.uk/news/local/plans-for-better-broadband-in-west-sussex-move-forward-1-4289434

I saw this on the Gazette's twitter feed the other day - it is thankfully a little hope, but I wont hold my breathe for the fear of turning blue!

iWc - address you want is '[email protected]' and a guy called Tony Franklin is usually the one that replies.

Well, I got my fibre installed on Tuesday. The guy who installed it had to come from Kent, said only him and one other guy were doing installs for this area, meaning Sussex and surrey, no one else is qualified yet. I've gone from about 5.5 down and 0.75 up, to 60 ish down and 15 ish up, well pleased.

In reply to a post by adam1968uk:

Well, I got my fibre installed on Tuesday. The guy who installed it had to come from Kent, said only him and one other guy were doing installs for this area, meaning Sussex and surrey, no one else is qualified yet. I've gone from about 5.5 down and 0.75 up, to 60 ish down and 15 ish up, well pleased.

Nice going! I've not given up hope yet, I'm in the process of mapping the towns cabs, working out who got what and what is live and I'll be approaching the council will as much info as possible and getting them to lean on BT. Hopefully the "white spots" that they are looking into get sorted quickly.

my exchange is the next one along...middleton on sea....
Original live date was June, then Sept..now Dec


cabs are all in, cables have been laid linking my estate..just waiting for the switch on.

"I'm in the process of mapping the towns cabs"

Wow, that sounds like a labour of love! Do you intend to publish the map? I'm in the older part of Southfields Road. The nearest cabs I've seen are some distance away. A postcode check gives a date of 31/12/2012 for my location.

Yeah, I will do.

It's less a labour of love and more a necessity to ensure that the council realise that we've been left behind. As we are (and I can't confirm this until I finished but I believe it to be the case) on the cab geographically furthest from the exchange we've had to suffer from low sync speeds from day 1 and probably the lowest in the town - FTTC was to be our saving grace!

If the "white spots" project the council is a success for us, then it'll have been worth it.

Well, it's been a bit of time since I posted last on this so I'll cut a long story short.

I managed to get the West Sussex Better Connected project to look into my issue based on all the info I gave them and they agreed to take it on.

They have been in discussions with BTOR and I got an email today to say that my cab is back in the rollout! I have no further info so I've contacted NGA Enquiries to see if they have any timescales yet.

Happier than I was a few months back!

Looks like a little progress:

This marker shows cabinet: P34
Which is linked to exchange: LITTLEHAMPTON
Please note: This is the intended area for the cabinet that will provide fibre broadband services to your postcode. We're sorry but it�s taking us longer than planned to get your cabinet ready for service. Please bear with us.

We're sorry that the work we are doing to bring fibre broadband to your area is taking longer than first planned. This can be for many reasons that include blocked underground cable routes, issues with providing electrical power to the cabinet and issues with the cabinet�s location. Please bear with us while we work to resolve this which may take some time. We will continue to work on this and apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.