In fact the only way to properly pre-survey for anything needing power is to apply to the power company for an estimate, and if roll-out is say 18 months away the costs may have changed since then.

Technically anything is possible in terms of getting >2 Mbps to everyone, the problem comes from trying to do it within a budget and via a service people are happy with.

I can understand people wanting commitments to roll-out but can see the problems that can arise.

I do not think it is that difficult to look on a map and see all the places that are more that 1.5km from a cabinet, but no one appeared to do that in Suffolk .

However to be fair Suffolk Council when they appoint so called experts to do reports and those experts make statements such as "ADSL is universally available across Suffolk" there is no wonder they get in the mess we are in now

The state aid consultation document states"to the extent that operators claim a footprint for their networks they will need to provide sufficient information for us to be able to make a judgement about where areas should be classified as NGA Grey or NGA white for the purposes of defining our proposed intervention area"

It thus appears that if you give insufficient information eg do not disclose which postcodes are more that 1.5km from a cabinet, or state that you will roll out to these areas by some other means, then the intervention area has been set wrongly.

The catch 22 of course is that BT are on now on both sides of the boundary, so they win either way.

In the sense that all exchanges offer an ADSL service in Suffolk that is true I believe.

In the sense that all lines in Suffolk have an opportunity to order ADSL it is probably true. There is an old figure from 3 or 4 years ago, that BT had ~32,000 lines in UK where people had ordered ADSL and it was not found to work at all.

Now how many of those are in Suffolk I don't know, but given time you could work it out, and the same with distance plots etc

and that "sense" is why Governments believe everyone has access to ADSL. I cannot think of any other situation under which a definition of available actually includes unavailable, and it is a testament to the ability of BTs spin department that it appears to be an industry norm

There's only so much granularity possible in a scheme like BDUK. Long lines (>1.5 km from the cabinet) are a particular challenge that may well fall through the gaps, as they are often highly geographically dispersed and low in density.

In some cases, network rearrangement may allow the creation of a secondary connection point closer to the served premises, and it would be possible to site an FTTC cabinet there. I'm not sure whether BT Openreach do this in practice - it's merely a possibility.

In many cases, the long lines are so geographically dispersed that there's no way to rearrange the network to create a viable deployment scenario for FTTC. The problem is finding a site for the cabinet that gives worthwhile predicted speeds for the end users without complete network reorganisation and running new lines from subscribers to a new cabinet (which is extremely costly - if you're going to go to all this civil engineering trouble, you may as well deploy FTTP whilst you're at it).

The obvious answer from a technological standpoint is FTTP, but the installation costs are far too expensive for the limited funds available, particularly from an 'investment per served premises' standpoint. The distances involved only serve to increase the cost per premises served.


If there's 80 long lines on a cabinet, in four rough groups which are all of relatively low density, the only economically viable solution for superfast broadband for those premises is likely to be wireless - fixed wireless (4G / WiMAX, Wi-Fi using specialist antennas) if the population density and terrain are favourable, satellite if not.


A good analogy is mobile phone network coverage targets. Getting to a certain proportion of population is fairly straightforward for the mobile networks - start in the major cities and build outwards in descending order of population density. At any given time, the low density of potential users and the challenges of terrain form an upper bound on the level of coverage economically deployable. Large and sparsely-populated areas are typically the last to be covered.

With both mobile phones and BDUK, it's important to remember the difference between proportion of population served and proportion of land mass covered. BDUK is about fixed users, so does not have the problem mobile users find of coverage disappearing when they move away from populatid areas. There will be areas, especially in large and sometimes sparsely populated areas like Suffolk and Norfork, where there is quite reasonably no need for superfast broadband.


BDUK, at least in the incarnation we have now, never promised 100% superfast coverage.

BDUK's aim is to get a superfast fibre-based service or an equivalent to 88% of population by end 2015 and 95% of population by end 2017. This will inevitably mean selecting the properties that are easiest to serve and deploying networks there, leaving the rest unserved. The maximum public benefit is derived by serving the greatest number of properties with the available funds. It is not possible to providing 'at any cost' solutions for the most difficult to serve areas, and those areas should not expect to receive anything from BDUK.


There's also a 2Mbit/s universal service obligation - but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Not just in the UK either, BT's reach must be massive.

Makes you wonder about other areas where politicians take stats are absolute without any understanding of the limitations

COUGH Universal Service Commitment

A minister once made that mistake in front of lots techies and other MPs

The aim is still 90% for 2015 - but an acceptance that current projections suggest 88% most likely.

The general hope is that by doing FTTC to all cabinets in a county most will manage the 2 Mbps without too much issue, and to hit the various superfast targets that will almost need to be done.

I live in Suffolk, and the worst "exchange/cabinet>properties" example I can think of off the top of my head is if you live in Brettenham, which is served by the Rattlesden exchange - that's 5km away, and that's as the crow flies. The BT checker says 2.5MB max, with WBC having a placeholder date of the 31st Dec, so I suppose IF those figures prove realistic then it's not the worse case scenario. Thorpe Morieux is served by the Cockfield Green exchange which is "only" 3km away as the crow flies, but the BT checker says "up to 1MB" on ASDSL Max, and 0.5 for fixed rate, with no date set for WBC. So they're not even planning to hit their >2MB target there.

I know distance from exchange isn't everything (or sometimes anything) when we're talking about the prospect of any type of fibre, but there are loads of places like that in Suffolk. I'm sure loads of people rely on local wireless services, I didn't want to start a competition of who can find the worst cases!

Edited by gazzyk1ns (Wed 02-Oct-13 16:11:23)