FTTP/H in Witham Friary,Frome

I am a parish councillor for Witham Friary, a small village south-west of Frome, Somerset. Our house is some 3.6 miles (as the wires run) from the Upton Noble exchange cabinet 1 and we can only just get 'broadband' at some 736kbps. Most of the vilage is either in a <1mbps or totally non-connectable state. Over the past couple of months BT/OpenReach have installed fibre cable along the road from the cabinet to our village and have marked up the nearby roads and now have a road closure notice from 15th October to carry out manhole work to install fibre cable. Talking to the OpenReach 'on-the-ground' surveyors/engineers they confirm that they are laying in fibre and the system will be FTTP/H by Christmas (2015).
My concern is that, as a parish council, we would like to be able to advise our parishioners about what they might be able to get as a broadband service in the near future. Some have already got satellite and have to commit to an 18 month contract. A new start-up company is promising wireless broadband by Christmas to Witham Friary and nearby villages, with a 12 month contract but only if there are sufficient potential subscribers.
I can find out nothing from Connecting Devon & Somerset regarding BT's fibre intentions and can find no contacts that can tell me when or if fibre services may be available. Can anyone give me any advice on this...do BT/OpenReach have some targets/incentives to just install fibre without making it a fully connected system. There is currently no sign at cabinet 1 of any adjacent cabinet works.

Believe the roadworks you are referring to is and is marked as a stretch of road to the SE of Witham Friary

PCP 1 - Holt Lane, Witham Friary, Frome, Somerset, BA11 5HL
Description: This job is to lay approx. 1700 meters of subduct
Works ref: BC005KN1W0BDUK-5984-6005

The PCP 1 part suggests it may be a fibre feed passing through for cabinet 1, so the big unknown is whether the engineers are overstating what is happening and its just FTTC for cabinet 1 or FTTP for a wider area.

Can attempt to ask Openreach if you email us with your details and a full address for a property.

The reason I urge some caution over what the engineers said is that for those doing the ducting and fibre blowing unless you see them installing fibre manifolds the work is identical for getting the fibre to a cabinet as it is for FTTP.

A fibre manifold looks like the black lozenge (around 12 inches long) in the picture at http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/fibre-cornwall/images/f... and they are placed on poles or in pavement chambers within 20 to 30m of premises that are destined to get FTTP.

you should be speaking to Connecting Devon and Somerset and the programme team

Thank you Andrew. I will send you as much information as I can. I'll also have another look at the poles to see what's mounted on them but, from memory, all I can recall is a coil of fiblre cable at the bottom of some poles.

Fastman2, I've been in email and phone contact with CDS but they can't find any information to give me. They don't seem to have any knowledge of anything going on in this area and their map still shows 'under evaluation'!

FTTP is planned, so be prepared for a wait!

Hi Ribble, what exactly does that mean?

It means that FTTP provision is as a rule extremely slow and you will have to wait for a long time.

In my case, and every case will differ, the time period from roll of cable at the bottom of the poles to fibre being available to order was about a year. Once I could order that took a further 2.5 months to actually get it. A guy down the road is still fighting the Openreach system to actually get it. After 3 months he has, after much fighting and complaining, got as far as a survey being done after five engineer visits who all said the same thing that a survey needed doing! Took him an email to the BT CEO to get as far as the survey. Goodness knows when he will actually get it!
So a long wait is likely - good luck but it is great once up and running.

Thanks Jax2...that sounds like what I'd expect somehow from BTOR - spend money on getting the infrastructure in then not capitalise on it to get the income from it - what a way to run a business!!

It is a mess, but hopefully getting better.

The pressures of meeting repair metrics and contracted roll-out targets for BDUK projects is a big reason why anything that is not bog standard is so slow.