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Live in Salisbury Close, off Salisbury Ave - opposite side of town.
Salisbury Ave is about 200m long, with a cabinet each end of it, to the Willaston exchange. Last summer BT connected both cabinets to the exchange - at one point, working 24/7 AND on Sundays (apparently something went wrong...). Willaston exchange is 1.9km away.
Our cabinet is between the other two - yep, they were pulling fibre right past it, and were even working on it, sorting out distance related problems, etc. Its also 1.9km from Haslington exchange. But the line length is 5m+ as it dog legs out to the Post Office, and then on to the old exchange site towards Haslington (the real Haslington). Why oh why that happened - the estate is only 4 years old - no one knows.
The RFS date for WMHAS has jumped all over the calendar 2010 to 2012. Using the Infinity checker we were told we would get service as of 311210. That changed to 010311, and now 310311. So far, no sign of any fibre being laid. And I doubt it will. The cabinet serves 166 households - less if you exclude the apartments. The path to WMHAS is convoluted, and given the experience in Basingstoke I think BT are going for cabinets which have 'straight-line' paths to exchanges, e.g very very few changes of direction.
I run a lot, and saw most of the Willaston fibre being deployed, and it was all in cabinets that had only one or two corners to the exchange... I hope there was an awful lot more I didn't see.
What is depressing is that this is the future for much of Britain: not 'high'-speed FTTH, or even 'fast' ADSL2 services, but instead flaky 2-3mbit connections capable of supplying a consistent 200kb/sec at best, and averaging 100k/bit. Yet with some imagination and foresight, BT could make inroads into these slow-spots and drag them forward, rather than widening an already deep divide.
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