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Hi,
I've got a couple of questions I was hoping someone here may be able to answer.
I'm connected to cabinet 151 on the Cheltenham exchange, which isn't part of the 66% commercial roll out as Openreach deem it to be "not commercially viable". We're not in the intervention area for our county's BDUK (Fastershire) as they think we're in "an area likely to receive commercial investment."
I wrote a little app that hits the address checker to come up with the number of properties on a cabinet, and there are around 164 properties connected to our cabinet.
First question: Is this likely to be the reason why it's not commercially viable, or is this a reasonable number of properties for a cabinet? Does anyone know why the cabinet isn't viable?
Second question: I've confirmed with Fastershire that the 2mbps minimum for all applies to everyone and not just their intervention area, although the website implies it is just their intervention area. We currently get around 1.6Mbps, so although 2Mbps isn't amazing, it's still 25% increase. Does anyone know how they're likely to achieve this? I'm hoping Satellite isn't the answer as low latency is important to me too.
Thanks
Edited by deleted (Fri 11-Jul-14 16:56:59)
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Openreach have just started upgrading a cab in my area that has around 110 properties connected to it. I wouldn't have thought it would have been classed as commercially viable but as the town's regeneration plans include 100% access to fibre broadband I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some council money involved.
East Sussex BDUK money isn't going to be available until next year to upgrade any cabs not part of the commercial rollout.
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Have you any plans to make this app available?
Current on Zen, getting around 5mb.
Exchange is Fibre enabled, street cab not economically viable to upgrade.
Could get V*rgin, but I'd rather not.
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Do you know how long the cable is between you and the cabinet?.
If it is 5km like mine, upgrading the cabinet to FTTC won't do you much good.
Michael Chare
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The BDUK projects are only allowed to spend money on the defined intervention areas. However, they should have two intervention areas; one for superfast broadband and one for basic broadband. Fastershire should be no different.
Generally, the work for the "basic broadband" fill-in will be the final phase, after all the superfast rollout has happened.
Here's an old plan with the two areas defined:
http://www.cotswolds.com/Portals/11/Broadband%20File...
In a case like yours, where an area falls between the two projects, we see different behaviour. Some councils are flexible, and can add them into the intervention area on the fly - and some even chase BT to get things changed (Warwickshire are good at this). Some councils, however, are very static and refuse to change the area on the fly.
As we are progressing towards the start of the extension project (SEP, or phase 2), councils are starting up the processes to re-define the intervention areas for phase 2. This is happening in even the most stick-in-the-mud councils.
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Is this in one of the areas of Cheltenham that has Virgin Media available, if so, there is no way that BDUK funding will be available for it.
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It's in St Leonards along The Ridge opposite Fletcher Avenue, . Link . The street cab was connected up three weeks ago and is showing in www.dslchecker.bt.com
Openreach are finishing the last few cab that were part of the commercial rollout and were delayed for various reasons. I've also discovered, contrary to what I previously thought, two cabs that are being upgraded in the next couple of weeks with BDUK funds
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Thanks for the replies.
It's about 300m if the cables follow the course of the road from the cabinet to us. We're in the unfortunate position of not being rural enough for BDUK.
Some of the properties connected to the cabinet (about 60% maybe?) can get Virgin, the rest can't. One road wasn't done as the road wasn't adopted at the time virgin cabled the area, the rest are on a new build estate and the developer didn't have an arrangement with Virgin. I've tried the cablemystreet address, but they won't look at it until the new build area's roads are adopted.
Is the above likely to mean we're missed out by BDUK? If, in 3/4 years time, when the roads are adopted, Virgin won't cable it, and BDUK skipped us, does that leave us potentially screwed?
At least we've got the upgrade to at least 2Mbps to look forward to, assuming it's not satellite or data capped 4g (or 3g).
Happy to make my "number of properties on a cabinet" app public (in fact it's already public elsewhere), I'll start another post for that after making some tweaks.
Matt
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The local BDUK (Fastershire) have done 1 cabinet in Cheltenham that was missed in the commercial rollout - but as many on your cabinet can get virgin media I would expect that BDUK funding won't be available as they don't use public money to compete with existing 'superfast' infrastructure.
According to their website "1,504 homes and businesses that are not part of the Openreach commercial programme can access fibre broadband in and around Cheltenham as part of the fastershire project." - so I'd bet that they are doing more cabinets than the 1 they have done so far.
If fastershire have confirmed to you that your cabinet isn't being done then, In the short term, I would say things don't look good
Edited by Spudgun (Sun 13-Jul-14 17:49:54)
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Fastershire provided a very low res map of their intervention area and said:
...you may have heard the good news that Herefordshire Council and Gloucestershire County Council have been allocated an additional £10.98m to enable more people to connect to faster broadband. This will give the counties additional coverage on top of what is in the process of being rolled out as part of the Fastershire project. We are looking at our options for match funding and will have to investigate how best to spend the money to achieve maximum coverage. We are keeping track of any cabinets like yours in the Openreach commercial rollout area that are not being upgraded as not deemed commercially viable, and these cabinets may be considered as part of this additional coverage
According to http://fttc-check.alc.im/ we're not in Fastershire's plans yet.
It would be a shame if we miss out because others on the cabinet can get Virgin.
For Cheltenham, they have said 2Mbps is expected to be completed by December 2015. Given this isn't that far away I'm surprised they won't talk about what they're planning on using.
Would bonded lines be an option? Does anyone know what other areas are looking at using / what kind of subsidies they're looking at providing?
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Hi, I've posted a link to download the app in this post
Thanks, Matt
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Thanks Matt, I'll give it a try 
Current on Zen, getting around 5mb.
Exchange is Fibre enabled, street cab not economically viable to upgrade.
Could get V*rgin, but I'd rather not.
Edited by kebabselector (Mon 14-Jul-14 13:07:16)
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this would be a a BDUK and not a commerila cab --
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This one is one of the last 5 cabs in the area that were in the commercial rollout that Openreach are currently finishing off. The fibre cab was stood and power connected about a month ago.
Work on the first BDUK funded cab starts at the end of this month.
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On the Fastershire website it says In areas where fibre broadband cannot be provided, Fastershire will make use of other broadband technologies such as satellite and advanced copper. These areas and possible solutions will only become clear later in the project.
Does anyone know what "advanced copper" means?
I'm hoping it will be cheaper to upgrade our cabinet that subsidise satellite, but does anyone know what the BDUK subsidies are likely to be?
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Does anyone know what "advanced copper" means?
Possibly ADSL range extenders at the PCP
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ADSL extenders or BET i.e. just about able to meet 2 Mbps standard
But with the Superfast Extension projects gearing up, spending on those with further spending for upgrades may mean people skip the extender stuff and just wait a little longer to get super fast (i.e. the 95% target projects)
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The author of the above post is a thinkbroadband staff member. It may not constitute an official statement on behalf of thinkbroadband.
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Does anyone know what "advanced copper" means?
Possibly ADSL range extenders at the PCP
*Facepalm*
Not a reflection on you, Mr Ribble.
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It's 'BT speak' for the WBC up to 20Mbps service. It's mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of this.
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I'm on Cheltenham 151 too but can't get Virgin either.
I'm going round in circles trying to find out why it was deemed unviable and how to get them to reevaluate.
I'm going to see the local MP about the issue to try and get his help.
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I'm on Cheltenham 151 too but can't get Virgin either.
I'm going round in circles trying to find out why it was deemed unviable and how to get them to reevaluate.
I'm going to see the local MP about the issue to try and get his help.
Did you manage to see the MP about this / have any luck? I emailed the MP and the local councillor (Andrew McKinlay) and didn't get a reply from either!
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Hello,
I've had a number of conversations with Andrew McKinlay and people from Martin Horwood's office. I've also been speaking to someone at BT (not Openreach) on the situation.
I have an appointment with Mr Horwood when he returns from holiday.
If there's any information you wish me to bring to his attention or join me at the meeting?
I've also asked Virgin to review the options to get cable broadband to my address - given that my address is on Chargrove Lane.
If you wish to email privately, I can PM you my email address.
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Fingers crossed then! I've PMed you about the meeting and my email address too.
Did you manage to find out why 151 wasn't commercially viable?
Good luck with Virgin!
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For those interested, we have setup a local campaign at www.cheltenham151.com
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Email [email protected] they are looking for small infills in areas like yours. You never know....
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It's not the number connected to the PCP there are many different factors taken into account.
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I went to a Gigaclear presentation the other day. They specifically target communities that will not have public money spent on them under the BDUK plans. They work to bring FTTP to communities at surprisingly affordable prices. But they don't go where BDUK do. Might be worth registering interest with them.
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That's a good tip, will give it a go cheers.
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Well we was down for FTTP back in 2011 where they started to install the fibre, we even got to the stage where they fitted the fibre manifold in the pit and the enclosure up the pole.
Three and a bit years later still nothing and we are now down to not being viable even though half our road has it (i.e. 5 to 8 doors away), even though we was "Part of BT's 66% Commercial Plan", we are not even covered by the BDUK due to we get over the 2Mb speed and also the BDUK spread sheet says we covered by extensive commercial deployments, even though BT/OpenReach says we are not.
The guy across the road from us was told the other week that we are not viable for FTTP (even though we was back in 2011) but now might be for FTTC, I am fine with that, at least it would be better than what we currently get.
The annoying thing is that they have now put us at the back of the list and we have been told we will have to wait for the UK to be all fibred up before we get it, this is completely not fair, at the point where they got greedy and decided on making it not viable and moved us over to FTTC they should of started the process of the rollout for FTTC etc, not put us to the end of the list.
And to top that off we cannot even get VM here.
So we are now stuck with a rubbish slow BB connection that drops connection all over the place when it rains, we cannot even ask for an engineer to come out due to the time they come out its all dried up and working again until it rains again.
Our broadband speed is that slow its slower than 74% of the broadband connections of GB, now that is bad.
Not very happy at all.
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Our broadband speed is that slow its slower than 74% of the broadband connections of GB, now that is bad.
So, your broadband speed is faster than 25% of the broadband connections of GB. That seems pretty good. No great, but perfectly fine to be going along with until something better is available.
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