BDUK "Superfast" Broadband

A little bit of a discussion this one more than anything, but my local exchange is set to receive FTTC by the end of 2015 (via the iNorthumberland BDUK project).

However, my main concern is that the street cabinet for our village is approximately 1500m away, which means we should expect speeds of around 15Mb/s - which isn't really superfast at all, and in fact, barely double what we get now.

I have spoken to the council but have not received any response from them and so sent a letter to my MP earlier in the week, will be interested to hear his thoughts on the matter.

Seeing as the stretch of road between the cabinet and the village is all grass verge, I would argue that the installation of FTTP wouldn't be significantly more difficult and would ultimately provide everyone with an actual 'superfast' connection.

This then brought me on to my next thought which was, a year or so ago I was told that our village would receive superfast broadband, but if the definition of superfast is 20 or 24Mbps+ and nobody in the village can actually get these speeds then where as residents do we actually stand with this? Perhaps more crucially, what is the real definition of 'superfast' in the first place?

DCMS works to a minimum of 24 Mbps
EU to a minimum of 30 Mbps

A lot of the time officials promise things, but people here what they want to here, so a lot of the time fibre based broadband is promised and people assume super fast broadband is meant. Alas the two are different.

In terms of the cabinet, if no-one is within 1500m then it would make no sense to put in FTTC at all and serve people instead with FTTP if it can be done for the same price. So the question really is how many premises are close enough to the cabinet to get super fast speeds.

Assuming there is enough people near to the cabinet to make it worthwhile, the question is how much extra to install the 1.5km of fibre to your village and connect up every property? The council and BT may have taken the decision that this extra money is better spent delivering another cabinet elsewhere.

Knowing which county and address of the cabinet (or a very close postcode) will help people provide some informed information.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

DCMS works to a minimum of 24 Mbps
EU to a minimum of 30 Mbps

A lot of the time officials promise things, but people here what they want to here, so a lot of the time fibre based broadband is promised and people assume super fast broadband is meant. Alas the two are different.

In terms of the cabinet, if no-one is within 1500m then it would make no sense to put in FTTC at all and serve people instead with FTTP if it can be done for the same price. So the question really is how many premises are close enough to the cabinet to get super fast speeds.

Assuming there is enough people near to the cabinet to make it worthwhile, the question is how much extra to install the 1.5km of fibre to your village and connect up every property? The council and BT may have taken the decision that this extra money is better spent delivering another cabinet elsewhere.

Knowing which county and address of the cabinet (or a very close postcode) will help people provide some informed information.

Absolutely, here's a quick map of the area that might help you an understanding:

http://i.imgur.com/R7BJPTq.jpg

So the absolute best case is 1200m - which is still well below superfast standards at around 17Mbps. Worst case scenario is 1.7km within the main village, or 2km outside of it.

Seeing as there are fields running either side of the road between the village and cabinet, I can't imagine the digging costs for FTTP would be overly high.

I couldn't give you a definitive answer on the number of houses but I would go on around 200 premises on this particular cabinet. It's a typical Northumbrian village really, of which most are actually assigned a FTTC/H rollout - rather than just FTTC, which arguably annoyed me more. The fact that almost every other village is set for a FTTC/H hybrid while we a left only with FTTC is frustrating.

I'd sooner they invested the money into a community build project for FTTP rather than waste their money of FTTC to be honest. Although the same could be said for most BDUK.

Edited by Toonshorty (Sat 08-Mar-14 13:46:46)