The villages I am referring too are not just the odd few properties as would be expected. Our village is 160 properties and the other which is 3 miles away has 800 residents so 250-300 properties. Thats Weston on Trent where there are more properties connected to the cabinet that are too far away for FTTC than are close enough.With a quick scan of the map of Derbyshire I picked out other villages with exactly the same problem of, getting a very poor service but been considered commercially covered so public funding is not available.
I do not know if its a bang for buck decision or an oversight in the BDUK planning or BT just adding these to their properties passed numbers. For those connected via distant sub cabinets to commercially upgraded exchanges its a problem . A lot of the communities are unaware of this though and still think they will getting the improved service having been given the impression that the BDUK scheme was sorting out the rural broadband problem and it would just be really remote places that were missed..

Okay so not just a handful but 160 is not a large village, and needs to be borne in mind when the target is

95% connected to a fibre based broadband capable line (i.e. any speed but via fibre (FTTC or P)

Our estimate for the %'age who will be superfast in the County is 84% and is based on every cabinet getting upgraded and the line lengths taken into account.

Estimated population for Derbyshire is 773,000 and I think around 380,000 premises. City of Derby could hit 95% superfast, the other bits of the county 81-82%.

So 19,000 premises with no option of a fibre based service (irrespective of speeds) means that plenty of small villages and clusters may miss out. 3.2% of the county if JUST FTTC is deployed are estimated to be 2 Mbps or slower by our figures.

An often overlooked fact is that the 90% Superfast Government target includes the cities.

So the question that needs to be answered is why should those properties benefit, versus others? And does that represent value for money - the key mantra from all parties at Westminster.

My difficulty was not that we would not get superfast broadband in these villages. It was the lack of information and misinformation. If I had not asked questions on here and got clear answers from yourself and others I would be like the rest of the village were, expecting superfast broadband in the near future funded by BDUK or BT.
I have no disagreements with what you are saying, I just wish there was more upfront information. A lot of the places that will miss out on BDUK funding are not remote hamlets but villages near large urban centres.

Its easier to be the bearer of bad news when you are not linked with the project I guess.

Some councils are better are informing people than others and its not just broadband, councils are playing catch-up with the world of social media and providing information at a time when people no longer have to visit a dusty council basement to see a planning application.

As a general rule of thumb most of the BDUK work seems to be on cabinets serving 75 or more premises, but their phased roll-outs seem to start with the largest first in each area.

Yes the council here really did want to give out bad news. They could not grasp I was not making demands for a service, I just wanted accurate information.
This line about about BDUK i quoted was what i wanted the OP to see
''There are known issues with the current programme, these are being considered centrally within BDUK, as there are many areas deemed as covered commercially that are over 1.6 kilometres from the serving cabinet''
The village here and others may or may not be good bangs for bucks for the BDUK scheme but are not been considered whilst they are labelled '' existing or expected commercial coverage''
I do not know how exactly how they measure premises passed, but are these areas been counted in the 90% covered?

BDUK does include a test for distance to a premise from the cabinet when announcing superfast figures, and probably not unlike what we are doing - see Wales news on front page.

The key is the wording used - fast fibre means anything from 0 to 80 Meg, Superfast should be 24 (or 30) Meg and faster.

In reply to a post by GarySN:

Can anybody confirm if this is good news???

No, it isn't good news.

In reply to a post by GarySN:

Already available or due to be covered by commercial upgrades

You are in an area which either already receives superfast broadband or where there are commercial plans to provide it before 2015.

In this statement, you are being (wrongly, naively) included in the "already available" part. There is no known solution, used by BT in their commercial rollout, that extends coverage of a cabinet that has already been upgraded to FTTC: you are most certainly not part of the commercial plans.

The problem you have is one with your local BDUK project, and the way they are choosing to go about marking areas as being commercially-covered, vs being within the intervention area.

Some BDUK projects are more naive (or simplistic, or lazy) than others, and your property is one of the borderline cases where such naivety often shows up...

When BT upgrade a cabinet to FTTC, the reality is that some lines on that cabinet will be too long, or too narrow, or a combination of both, to get VDSL2 service. Such properties then become a "difficulty" for any BDUK project and the postcode becomes an equivalent difficulty. Your property is one of these.

Unfortunately, BDUK projects work at different levels of knowledge; for example the Warwickshire project is one of the best, and I can recommend reading their FAQ page and their latest news:
http://www.cswbroadband.org.uk/whats-happening/lates...
http://www.cswbroadband.org.uk/the-project/frequentl...

To the CSW project, every house is individual: If it cannot receive superfast speeds, then it is part of their intervention area and eligible for something to be done. Houses that are too far from a commercial cabinet are included in this group.

If you lived in the CSW area, and contacted them to let them know of your situation, they would add your details to the list of "NGA white" areas to make you eligible again.

The CSW website also explains the other difficulty: They produce maps, but they only have to show details at a per-postcode level, rather than per-property. When postcodes have a mix of property coverage, the maps cannot convey the right level of detail.

A more naive project can act more simplistically, and label your property as covered because they don't take the cabinet distance into account, or because they only act at a complete postcode level. Or it may be that their website design is naive, but the project staff are not: If you contact your local BDUK project directly, you may get the naive response that you are covered, or a knowledgeable response like CSW.

Getting your house labelled by the BDUK project as "NGA white" is just the first step, but it is an important first step (especially with further phases and funding to come in the future).

Actually getting your house chosen to be included for further work will then become much more difficult, simply because the "easy" step (a simple FTTC cabinet) did not work for you. Any other solution is likely to be considerably more expensive (to the project), and, while the target is only 90% of the county, there are probably easier areas for them to target before they come back to your home.

That was really refreshing to read the CSW site after dealing with Digital Derbyshire.
Are there any tips for getting them to recognise the area as ''NGA White''

This is my correspondence with Digital Derbyshire so far,http://www.elvaston-parish-broadband.org/?page_id=40
Its long, tedious and full of my dreadful grammar

In reply to a post by equiton:

Our village is 160 properties and the other which is 3 miles away has 800 residents so 250-300 properties. Thats Weston on Trent where there are more properties connected to the cabinet that are too far away for FTTC than are close enough.

On village sizes:

The ONS has a definition of a "built-up area" (essentially clusters of land which are urban in nature) that places 95% of the population of England and Wales as living within such areas.

The smallest thing defined as a built-up area can be thought of as a circular urban area 500m across (or a square 450m across), and the two smallest such places come with a population of 100.

This definition is handy, because the coverage percentage matches up with the government's 2017 target, but BUA's are also likely to represent a clustered target for telecoms infrastructure.

The breakdown of these built-up areas (BUAs) show that:
- 95% live in settlements of 100 people or more,
- 94% live in settlements of 500+ people,
- 92% live in settlements of 1,500+ people,
- 82% live in settlements of 10,000+ people,
- 60% live in settlements of 100,000+ people,
- 30% live in settlements of 1,000,000+ people.

Using the standard multiplier of people per property (2.4), it seems that villages of around 4,000 properties are going to be well within the scope of a BDUK phase 1 project (ie one with a 90% target), while villages with 700 properties are likely to be outside the project.

A lot of the communities are unaware of this though and still think they will getting the improved service having been given the impression that the BDUK scheme was sorting out the rural broadband problem and it would just be really remote places that were missed..

With a 90% target, some people were always going to be missed out. And while individual locations will get different results, it wouldn't surprise me to see the boundary between the haves & have-nots of phase 1 being communities sized at around 700-800 homes.

When BDUK moves on to phase 2 (ie the 2017 target of 95%), you can probably expect cluster sizes in the range of 40-800 properties to be targeted.

Great breakdown of village sizes and population.
I think the BDUK areas that are not been up front about who is going to be missed are causing a problem.
if you only say something like this in your FAQ

''Is there a chance that despite the roll out of better broadband I still may not get access to it?

Some areas in Derbyshire are so geographically remote that superfast broadband will not be achievable for cost or technical reasons.

Derbyshire is working to achieve basic broadband speeds of 2Mbps across the county as a minimum.''

When I did the check on our village Doctors, University Lecturers, People who are running businesses from home, families etc were under the impression that the BDUK project was going to fund superfast Broadband by at the latest 2016. They actually had a meeting in the other village I mentioned Weston explaining how they were going to install the cabinets etc.
It took me months of effort to get Digital Derbyshire to say we were not included in their roll out plan. Part of the difficulty there was that they were misreading their own map.
I had worked out we were not going to get a service and looked at alternative solutions. It took less time & effort to arrange the alternative solution than get a clear answer from the BDUK project
It turned out we are fortunately nicely in the Line of sight of a fixed wireless development for a school. Putting an antenna in the village helps the company doing that project and should provide a good service for a quite a few people.


For the long term we need to get out of this category of ''existing or expected commercial coverage'' Its how to do that I am now stuck on.