FTTC Upgrade - inaccurate local govt data

Bit of a weird (and frustrating) scenario here, so I'm interested to hear if anyone else has experienced the same.

Essentially BT Openreach have deemed my cabinet not commercially viable for a FTTC upgrade (I asked them back in 2012 and then again this January). So I contacted my local councillor to see if any public/BDUK funding might be available as I know they are doing some infill work in that regard. The response back was that their records suggested that my cabinet was "NGA Grey" meaning it was due to be covered as part of a commercial rollout.

Likewise the county council website has an area where you can (allegedly) register your interest, except it blocks me from doing so because again it states that it is due a commercial upgrade before 2015.

So the problem is that not only will BT not upgrade my cabinet, but neither has it even been considered for public funding because they believe it is being done commercially.

So what I need to do is find a way of getting the public bodies to update their records to accurately reflect the situation. How can one go about this? As I say, I've already contacted my local councillor and also fired an email over to the county council team responsible for the superfast rollout.

NGA grey means that an exchange is enabled and there are white areas in it the BDUK could spend money in it but have chosen not to or there is another operator already present

Edited by Fastman2 (Sun 02-Feb-14 20:20:34)

As I said in another thread, this does appear to happen. If OR thought the cabinet was commercially-viable at first, it would cause the area to be marked grey in the county plans.

On the other hand, your area might be grey due to provision by a supplier other than Openreach - perhaps Virgin supplies the area.

If you would only have received NGA speeds through Openreach, and it turns out to be unviable to upgrade your cabinet after all, perhaps due to power problems, it seems that it doesn't change status within the county's BDUK plans. See, for example, this report from Craven council within the North Yorkshire BDUK rollout, for a case of 3 cabinets that did this. There, the council obviously took steps to cope with the situation.

You might be able to use this example to prompt your own council into taking action - or at least taking note.

Another possibility is that various councils are now vying for an allocation from the second tranche of BDUK funds. This seems to be causing new OMR processes, which should catch cabinets like this, and get them re-included in the plans.

For this to work, you might need to find out if your council is expecting to take part in the second tranche, and if so, checking that they will do a new OMR, and re-classify areas as needed.

[OMR = Open Market Review, followed presumably by a further public consultation]

I have had the same problem part of my post code is served by FTTC but not my part it seems and you see this in my London County Councillor reply that Virgin drag their feet in giving up a monopoly they have in high speed service and BT where they do..

reply sent to me from BT and then my Councillors' reply:

Dear Sir,
Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband, properties within the indicated postcode are connected directly to the exchange and not via a telephony cabinet located in the street, this is referred to as an E/O line.
Our deployment is based on the commercial criteria for each exchange and in turn, how broadband is delivered from the exchange. Unfortunately, as your line is fed directly from the exchange it fails to meet the commercial criteria. This is because the solution to deploy Fibre Broadband to lines connected this way would not provide a return on the investment based on the costs for the construction and on-going running costs.

Where E/O lines are not in our footprint, or are not commercially viable, it is worth contacting your London Assembly Member or local council to register your interest in case any government funding becomes available to help fund deployment.
You may also wish to lobby your Assembly Member or local councillor on progress gaining funding for such deployment from the Government. You can also register your interest on the Openreach website at; http://www.openreachfibrebroadband.co.uk/expression-...

__________________________________________

Dear Paul,

You have probably picked up from my blog and my column in Southwark news that I have started working on this issue. A few weeks ago I wrote in Southwark News about the problems the community have in SE16 - Rotherhithe - because of uselessly slow internet access and BT's refusal to upgrade the area's cabling to allow 'Superfast broadband'. I met with BT's London Director and they argued that it would cost too much due to local technical problems. (The type of existing local 'exchange only ' lines and the lack on street 'booster' boxes)

I was overwhelmed by the reaction in the area and the sheer number of people who got in touch to say what a real difficulty 'rubbish' broadband causes to their daily lives and work.

Just to let you know what else I have discovered so far.

I have just met with Sara Kelly from the Mayor's Infrastructure plan team - she is in charge of the GLA IT infrastructure programme area. The government funding for Broadband is basically being used as grant aid to small companies to pay for Super-fast Broadband installation. However rolling out infrastructure to domestic customers has some special legal problems which prevent and constrain the use of any 'Public' aid.

Sara has met with both Virgin and BT about London's Broadband needs, and as part of her conversation, asked specifically about Rotherhithe for me. She shares my understanding of the background problem of 'exchange only ' lines in the area. However, she feels that the advice I was given about applying to the EU for the lifting of EU anti-competitiveness regulations is slightly misleading. Certification is a long slow process and is usually met with objections by either BT or Virgin who try to protect their own interests. Previous attempts at this elsewhere have met with fairly aggressive legal action by competing infrastructure providers. Birmingham were taken through the courts for beginning the installation of their own cabling after some 'dark' infrastructure which was owned by Virgin was found when digging began (even though Virgin didn't know about it until the Council found it) The GLA fears that getting EU permission could take 4 years or so - most of that time spent in expensive legal wrangling. But at this stage they are willing to look at all options.

City Hall is hoping to write action on developing IT and communications infrastructure into its Infrastructure Plan to be published in the Spring and are interested in our problem in Rotherhithe as a case example - can we together find solutions that would be useful across other problem areas in London? One of the GLA's thoughts is that if they could get reliable mapping of existing infrastructure they could try to begin a process of getting permission for and developing a GLA dark fibre network. Essentially seek to build infrastructure in areas where there is an absence of provision and no argument can be made that they are interfering with the market share of either Virgin or BT. However the two infrastructure companies BT and Virgin generally do not want to share their existing mapping (which may anyway be incomplete) they consider it commercially confidential. If the GLA has a map it would give a basis for safely planning a proposal for installing a dark fibre network. The GLA are keen therefore to have a Rotherhithe infrastructure map put together this could prove to be crucial therefore in one possible solution. A very helpful local volunteer in Rotherhithe (with an appropriate background) has offered to help me with this mapping exercise using a mixture of published sources and on street survey techniques and he is beginning that work for us.

Sara and I are going to meet Cllr Fiona Colley (Cabinet Member Regeneration Southwark Council) to discuss what options the Council could help with. It may be that there are useful options to extend cabling because of the major developments underway in Canada Water. And/ or there may be funding possibilities using the Planning rules and legislation (Section 106 for example) . I know from my contact so far with the Council that they see the Broadband issue as a key concern and want to do what they can to get it resolved.

The GLA are also meeting with OFCOM about the GLA's work generally and will raise our specific problem in Rotherhithe.

I will be meeting with Virgin to explore their thoughts on what they/ we could do.

Hi,

We've got a fat metric tonne of properties that are within the BT commercial footprint but BT have yet to deploy. Some areas have been 'in build' for 2 years. However, FTTC cabs are now going in on a daily basis.

To be fair to BT, myself and other local residents have been keeping a close eye and know BT have deployed chambers, unblocked ducts and deployed ducting. So they are doing work it is just very slow.

For FTTC you will mostly see ETA data on the BT checker. For FTTP you will NOT see ETA figures at all. Also asking BT via nga.enquiries seems to elicit a response. However, in many cases a large % of times the response is WRONG or contradicts other information. For areas that will be provided by FTTP as part of the commercial deployment this is especially true - we suspect the information is in a different system so gets missed.

As suggested by other contributors you need to confirm that your area isn't served by other providers (such as Virgin).

Also, don't rely on BT's BDUK maps as the resolution is in most cases is stupid and the lines aren't exactly accurate. Your council should provide a postcode checker which should give you the correct answer.

Regards,


Gareth
Milton Keynes Broadband Action Group

In reply to a post by garethr:

Also asking BT via nga.enquiries seems to elicit a response.

Maybe not any more, unless this poster was asking a question that made the person there hit the "Push off" button.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 02-Feb-14 23:49:22)

A dark fibre network would do very little to help unless installed to every property.
Likely result is used for business and some cherry picking on small blocks of flats.

State aid will be difficult as 4g needs to be considered too as well as other smaller fibre providers.

The annoying thing is that in the 1990s, cable was laid along the length of Redriff Road and probably beyond, you can still see CATV covers. The tax breaks ended and/or the money ran out and no homes were connected to this cable. I wonder if Virgin even know (as I assume they'd have inherited it) that the cable is there.

Already confirmed that there are no other providers, I even contacted Virgin's "cable my street" team to see if they would extend their presence in my town but they have no plans to do so.

A tad over-simplistic but I wish BTOR would hike their wholesale prices and thus make things more commercially viable, I get annoyed seeing all these bargain fibre deals for 20 quid a month or whatever when I'd happily pay at least 3x that if it was available.

In reply to a post by HangTime:

A tad over-simplistic but I wish BTOR would hike their wholesale prices and thus make things more commercially viable, I get annoyed seeing all these bargain fibre deals for 20 quid a month or whatever when I'd happily pay at least 3x that if it was available.

Then less people buy it because it's so expensive, so it doesn't actually get any more commercially viable because the price kills the uptake off.

Uptake in a lot of areas with half-decent ADSL are pretty low even with current pricing.