Who to ask regarding an exchange being enabled?

Hi

I have had no success contacting BT regarding my local exchange being enabled for BT Infinity, I am a long time Virgin customer and over the last few years I have seen my connection speed drop dramatically to a point where at peak times I am lucky to see download speeds of 1 - 3 meg.

Exchanges close to my area are already enabled or are due to be enabled this year however mine seems to have been left out of all plans

my exchange is CMBLAC

According to samknows I am 642 metres from the exchange I recently had BT Broadband installed and get 18meg down / 1 meg up which seems to work great even at peak times.

Now is there any way I can try and convince BT it should enable my exchange or find out if it will ever be in future plans.

Frustrated so much with Virgin and would love an alternative fibre connection.

Thanks in advance

Given near blanket fibre coverage from Virgin Media for Blackheath (Oldbury) unlikely to see BDUK help.
Do you count as part of Birmingham City Council? Or part of a County Council.

The main focus is on getting those who have no fibre a choice of 1, rather than those with one choice a second choice now.

Hi

Many thanks for your reply, I am part of Sandwell County Council, Oldbury is Enabled for BT Infinity and also has Virgin Media.

Also nearby Cradley Heath also has both BT infinity and Virgin Media.

All being under Sandwell County Council..

So annoying but I guess I either have to move or stick with [censored] from Virgin Media.

Thanks again for your reply

Edited by deleted (Wed 02-Apr-14 15:33:07)

In reply to a post by jlowe74:

I recently had BT Broadband installed and get 18meg down / 1 meg up which seems to work great even at peak times.

Why bother with fibre? You are getting nearly max speeds on ADSL, which, if you had fibre, it will soon reduce to ADSL speeds with all the crosstalk going on.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

In reply to a post by jlowe74:

I recently had BT Broadband installed and get 18meg down / 1 meg up which seems to work great even at peak times.

Why bother with fibre? You are getting nearly max speeds on ADSL, which, if you had fibre, it will soon reduce to ADSL speeds with all the crosstalk going on.

Because I need better upload speeds for streaming purposes and don't want to be stuck with adsl2+ forever

The other exchanges will have been done in the commercial roll-out, I.e. where BT tried to compete with Virgin Media using all its own money.

When spending public money they cannot deploy to areas with high levels of alternative provider coverage, there may be some cabinets where the overlap is low enough they can help to fund rollout.

Sandwell falls into a Black Country collective and https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah3sVRj... offers little information since the project is in the planning stages
http://admin.the-blackcountry.co.uk/Upload/01/Black%...

But its worth a look to see what they say for you.

Thank you I will take a look

Also whats the website where I can see what cabinet I am connected to have googled it but cannot find it now :/

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html

My money is on your not being within the scope of the project due to VM coverage

Thank you

It's annoying because perhaps if Virgin had competition in my area they might pull a finger out and actually fix the extreme utilization they have in my area and surrounding areas.

That's not much good to those of us with poor ADSL lines and no choice of Virgin. I live not far from jlowe74 (still in Sandwell but nearer to the Dudley border), but I'm connected to the Dudley exchange (CMDD) which is now apparently the largest exchange in the country with no fibre activated or planned.

The road I live in on (along with a another large development nearby) was built around 12 years ago and therefore doesn't have Virgin cable provision despite being in mainly Virgin-covered area. A few years ago Virgin made a big deal of saying they would fill in coverage gaps, so I asked them if they'd do my road. They said "no". I asked them again a couple of years later with the same answer.

As my line length is 5.5-6km, I'd managed to get a speed of just over 5 Mbps on Be by using a 3dB profile. As this has recently migrated to Sky due to the O2/Be takeover, I now have a 2 Mbps line! I suspect there's a fault to be addressed as my migration was a cock-up by Openreach (managed to connect my line to another property that required another engineer to fix), but I still don't expect to be pushing more than what I was getting on Be.

If the fact that this area has good Virgin coverage means that a BT fibre upgrade is unlikely (doesn't explain all the other exchanges locally and nationally that have both), then it seems I'll be stuck in the slow lane for the foreseeable future despite grand government promises of superfast broadband for all. I find it vaguely depressing reading about the fibre rollouts in rural areas when there are still many of us in major urban centres that are being left behind.

If I can't get Sky to instruct Openreach to try and fix my current slow speed then I have to question the point of even paying for internet access when services increasingly require much faster speeds. I guess my best choice will end up being moving house to an area with better provision.

If the level of coverage for Virgin Media means that an area/cabinet/exchange fails the EU State Aid rules then it will be outside the scope of the BDUK project.

The commercial roll-out was a we can go where we want to and with a 2/3rds aim lots of urban/semi-urban was going to be missed out. In essence same freedom Virgin Media had with its choices.

As for Government promise of Superfast Broadband for all, I'd love to read that promise, all we have is superfast for 95% by end of 2017 at present.

Am I right in thinking that BT have now annouced all exchanges to be upgraded as part of their commercial rollout? If so, and the BDUK state aid rules mean that Dudley falls outside of that project due to Virgin coverage, I'm guessing that means a 0% chance of getting fibre where I live.

How can the 95% target actually be met, or is it another case of manipulated figures that bear no resemblance to reality (not that I should be surprised if that's the case)?

The commercial roll out announcements ended in I think early last year.
It is all BDUK now - ost of which had their initial announcement mid/last last year.

Those who already have access to a commercial service (eg virgin) are excluded form BDUK funds
State aid is only for those places with no options.

The 95% will be met by focusing the limited BDUK funds to maximize the number of people moving onto SFBB availability.
So rural cabinet with few number of subscribers or a subscriber base a long way from the cabinet are not likely to be done while others are. It will be a simple 'numbers game' the maximum number of people for the least cost to the public purse.

The original commercial announcements seem to have finished, but deployment work is still going on.

However, BT announced an extra £50m for fill-in work in 30+cities. This is commercial, but on top of the original commercial work; I don't think we have seen any announcements about this at all yet.

The BDUK state-aid rules don't work at a town level, or an exchange level. They don't even apply at cabinet or post-code level. They are, in fact, right down at the level of individual properties. Intervention is allowed for properties that don't have access to superfast speeds.

If Virgin don't (and have indicated to the council that they won't) supply your house, then you are in an NGA white area. Your area (which might only be a single house) is eligible for state aid funding.

But that doesn't guarantee it is economic (or sensible) for BT (or whoever wins your bid) to convert your cabinet. They can reach 90% without converting every cabinet, and so tend to choose the most economic ones.

However, the question is really: Does Dudley have a BDUK project?

After a lot of searching, it appears they do. Birmingham dropped out of a "West Midlands" allocation, so there is just a "Black Country" project going on. That project finished the public consultation phase around 3 weeks ago.

According to this BCC consultation, the current status shows 7% of business & residential premises are in NGA white areas, so strictly there is nothing to do in phase 1!

Page 11 has an email address that you could use. It is probably worth asking if there is a way for you to register as a property/postcode that doesn't have access to NGA broadband.

Edit: Interesting to see that the BCC project is focussed on the "95% by 2017" target, not the earlier one. And that it has a budget of £8-10m; the original phase 1 BDUK allocation to the whole of the West Midlands was a mere £600k, and Birmingham decided to refuse their £120k share of it.

Edited by deleted (Tue 15-Apr-14 16:55:55)

Aside from how BT decides to spend the £50m announced a while ago for infill and that some commercial cabinets have been pushed beyond Spring 2014 now.

Thanks for finding that document. Great work!

They certainly didn't do much to publicise the consultation process within the Black Country. The maps in the document show that Sandwell, in particular, is a bit of a desert in terms of NGA coverage. I'll certainly have a go at emailing them even though the consultation deadline has passed. I wonder how long it takes to get these sorts of projects into motion.

Probably sign a contract in Autumn, start delivery Spring 2015