Too far from cabinet for fiber. Going nuts

Hi, We were promised fiber by openreach 18 months ago. We're now told that we can't get it because we're too far from our cabinet, just about 2 1/2 miles away.

We're in a small village near Inverness and EVERY other area within a 3 mile area has it. Openreach suggest we all club together and buy it. That's absurd as there's only a few houses that use the internet. We seem to be in the 10% of the UK that hasn't got it. Really sick fed up of their excuses. We were with Tesco bb, and our speed has been very erratic since the formal change over to talk talk recently.
Tesco said they can't force a quicker date, talk talk probably can't understand as their call center is in India.
Can ANYONE help us get a straightforward answer ?
Graham

They're pretty much correct. FTTC will not work at a distance of 2.5 miles.

If it's not going to be cost effective for your community to do something about it between yourselves, then it's certainly not going to be cost effective for Openreach to spend public money to come up with some solution that only benefits a few people.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day cost effectiveness is what it comes down to.

I suggest you get in touch with Highlands & Islands Enterprise (HIE) who are the BDUK authority responsible for the Inverness area. They will probably tell you what (if anything) is planned for your property. HIE were very helpful when enquiring about my cabinet in Westhilll, Inverness wrt FTTC/P and the fella you need to contact is Nick Scroggie:

[email protected]

Edited by deleted (Tue 15-Dec-15 21:57:45)

Thanks a million Baby Frogmella

Your only option may be satellite which now seems to be the governments solution to those in your position. You should soon be able to get discounted install for satellite. It isn't a perfect solution but it may be the best you are going to get in the next 5 years.

Thanks Ian

There may be an alternative if HIE tell you that satellite is your only option. There are a number of community groups in Scotland that have set up small wireless networks that share a Virgin or BT service 5 or 8 miles away. For a small group of 10-12 households you can use 1 or 2 80/20 lines and get a much better service than would be offered by your ADSL service.

If you keep it small the capital costs would be £500-800 for the core link plus ~£100 per household and you share the cost of the Virgin/BT service. The technical requirements for a small system are quite simple - larger systems are a different story! Anyone who is reasonably competent at IT can manage it.

The geography has to work as you need line of sight to your external connection and you may need to put in some kind of repeater for local connections but once it is set up the system should not need a great deal of management time. I have been involved with a number of these systems - both operating and proposed - in the south of Scotland.

If you want more information, search for the Tegola project or contact Community Broadband Scotland or you can send me a PM.

In my experience you will never get a straight answer. Our situation is similar to yours but the history is worthy of a 1960's farce. Imagine a 5 kilometre square with virtually all habitation to the extreme western edge and the only cabinet to the eastern edge with the odd farmhouse dotted about in the remaining area. Digital Scotland project managed the fibre installation without considering moving the cabinet to a more practical location and ALSO forget to arrange a suitable power supply to the cabinet. End result is an installation date delayed by nearly two years and from which few of us will benefit anyway! I have been in contact with our local MSP who is hugely sympathetic but Deputy First Minister Mr Swinney at Holyrood is content to regurgitate ad nauseam how good the Digital Scotland team is without actually answering any of the points put to him. It looks like 0.9 meg on a good day is all we can look forward to until Mr Cameron's fibre for all promise kicks in. (i'll believe that when I see it!)

I don't recall any promise of 100% fibre, and in any event public money usage in this area s nothing to do with Cameron. This issue is full devolved (in terms of the use of public money).

The relevant part of the BDUK money was allocated to the Scottish project and the Scottish parliament is free to set priorities and allocate further public funds as required.

Of course Ofcom provide the regulatory framework across the whole of the UK (so is not devolved) and that does not allow for any pricing mechanism to cross-subsidise broadband provision. Revenues from rural areas go nowhere near covering the increased costs of provision and maintenance and are cross-subsidised from urban areas, but that's just as a functional voice service, not as a broadband service.

Whether Ofcom will be addressing these issues in their new regulatory review, I've no idea, only to say I doubt that they will go so far as to change the regulatory regime to cross-subsidise rural broadband through, say, a levy. (It may be that submissions have been made to them).

In any event, at the moment, the best approach has to be to lobby your political representatives. Given that it's difficult to see how any commercial company will consider it financially viable, then it would require either more public subsidy, self-help or an explicit change to the regulatory regime to allow for the required cross-subsidisation.