Broadband roll-out held up in Stretham

Connecting Cambridgeshire had hoped to pave the way for superfast broadband in the village last year but engineers have come up against problems and the date for completion has been pushed back to as late as September.

According to Connecting Cambridgeshire, which is managing the roll-out of superfast broadband across the county, up to 750 homes are connected to exchange only lines, instead of via telephone cabinets.

It said: �The Stretham exchange is a particularly challenging exchange to upgrade and whilst Openreach have been working in the area during 2014 it will require continued work through 2015.

�This is because around 750 homes in the village are connected directly via the Stretham exchange on exchange only lines rather than through a telephone cabinet which is more common.

And Exchange Only areas are often in the later waves of the various projects, because of the extra work needed.

Explanations in the actual local press that your post is lifted from could have been worded a lot better, but difficult to know how much a good explanation has been mangled between original comment and publication.

Surely it must have been known that these were EO lines before the CC project was given the go ahead, they wouldn't have just dived in without checking would they?

Plenty of county level projects are resolving EO line issues, just tends to take longer and need a bit more work.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Plenty of county level projects are resolving EO line issues, just tends to take longer and need a bit more work.

I imagine they will have needed to, but I expect this was known when the planning was done.

In my local BDUK project there are half a dozen cabinets about to go live close to the Bedford exchange where all the served areas use to be EO. That was anticipated and dealt with, whereas this problem in Cambridgeshire gives the impression that it wasn't obvious before they came to do the street-level work.

http://westvillages.shapeyourplace.org/2015/01/06/su...
and
http://www.connectingcambridgeshire.co.uk/parish/str...

Cover the situation. I think it boils down to areas nearby having already been enabled, and nothing appearing to happen in Stretham.

A pain to wait, but seems to be on the way at least. County target is 90% with access to superfast, so there will some missing out. Around 25,000 without superfast broadband, and of those I'd estimate 12,500 will be getting something better than ADSL from FTTC but not fast enough to be fibre.

Stretham is a bit of a beast for BT to roll out to. The exchange has 2 existing cabinets, 1 in Little Thetford, which has an FTTC twin and is accepting orders (cabinet 1), and the other in the village itself.

I have spoken to Connecting Cambridgeshire (officially, via email) and Openreach about fibre for cabinet 2. Both said the same thing: "It's scheduled for FTTP." This is presumably because of the 90% superfast target. The majority of premises on cabinet 2 would be too far away to benefit from FTTC.

This is what I know. I decided to do some asking and digging since it's where I live lol

Edited by deleted (Fri 16-Jan-15 18:35:59)

If its FTTP then more work and almost always slower to provide . Had not chased down the detail since camb site seemed so clear on EO.

My understanding is FTTP was originally planned for the whole village until they realised the scale and cost. Now the EO lines are to get a PCP at the the exchange, then a fibre twin beside it.

FTTP is for cabinet 2.

Okay had the time while doing my Saturday afternoon cabinet twitter searches.

Cabinet 1 live with FTTC
Cabinet 2 FTTP planned
New Cabinets 3 and 4 serving what was EO lines, probably eradicating all but a handful of the EO and using FTTC

So yes a different mix to many other exchanges, and would explain why its not all happening at once.