With a little luck, they'll start early next week, and get it all done in one day... Well, I can dream, right?

I shouldn't imagine it will be too much longer now though, if they are going to meet the target the CDS have set, because as far as I'm aware, they only start to blow the fibre once everything in an area has been completed.
 

Hey!
guess what
It begins! FINALLY

It's not often that I class roadworks as a thing of beauty, however, just this once...

i am excited for fibre too!!

I'm currently with TalkTalk but thinking of making the switch back to BT.. what isp will you be using?

I intend to stay with Zen.

They're not the cheapest, but they do have excellent UK based support staff, who don't insist on sticking to a predefined script; I've had one fault in the last 5 years, and they had it fixed the same day...
Then there's the added bonus of having no 'safety' filtering or traffic shaping of any kind.
Throw in being able to run my own email server at home, and there's no contest.
 

I'll be going with Plusnet,
They use BT, have a UK call centre and in the past when I've had problems I was able to send all the diagnostic data to them, and I bypassed all the 'have you tried rebooting your router' [censored] that you normally have to deal with.

Also when i moved to Torrington there was a loose BT cable hanging down from my roof. They got an engineer out the next day to tidy it up for me.

on a slightly different note I've just upgraded my router to one that's VDSL capable (as well as standard adsl) which means I wont have to have the BT modem in between my router and the line. - I got a Fritz!box 7490, but there are several others around now, although the Fritz!box has lovely pretty diagnostic graphs on line sync, and quality which is really useful to feedback to an ISP if there's any issues. My previous router was a billion one which has an ethernet lan port too which I could plug the BT fiber router into.. but I quite like the idea of just having one box. I know it's a little overkill but it will support some fancy vdsl technology like VDSL vectoring which is designed to reduce noise on the line. I know.. Me and ShellieH both live close enough to the exchange to probably not need that.. but I'm so excited!

Forgot to mention..
There was a proper Jeremy Beadle moment when the people who live next to windyridge came back from a week away to find the roadworks outside their house (as they park behind one of the lamp-posts).

I spotted them and explained what was going on.. that the roadworks had actually been delayed 4 times already and this was the last bit of work Torrington needed for the whole town to benefit.

I think The workmen made a small gas leak too as we've had the gas people mending stuff there too. We'll have to see which side they'll still the great big cabinet on.

I can just imagine people arriving home to find that outside... The looks on their faces must have been priceless.

I'm not sure if it the very last bit or not; the works listed for New St near the top of Limer's Hill still seem to be on roadworks.org, and you're due to get a new telegraph pole down White's Lane at the end of October, but hopefully it's enough done that they will meet the deadline this time.
Also, going by what's stated on roadworks.org, it's a replacement of the in-ground chamber opposite the dentist near you, not a new cabinet.

With regard to the ISP situation, I have been with Zen for the last 5 years, and I can't find a convincing reason to leave.
At one time I would have have considered Plusnet, but knowing that they are simply a sub-division of BT puts me off...
We used to be with BT, and bought our way out of contract with them during the Phorm phiasco, after our line was one of those targeted for their undeclared tests of the obnoxious 'webwise' advertising system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
I've since had a policy of never trust BT.
 

In reply to a post by ShelleH:

Also, going by what's stated on roadworks.org, it's a replacement of the in-ground chamber opposite the dentist near you, not a new cabinet.

Thanks ShellieH, I didn't spot that - So i guess they're basically stopping opposite the dentists and running back to around the corner rather than running all the way down whites lane.

Good work on spotting the telegraph pole. I think that one only has 3 houses connected to it.. hardly much point in having a great big pole for that.

As for Phorm/webwise, I can't describe how nasty that tech is. I knew a guy who was working on it - it's been rebadged and is in use by some ISP's in the US. It's just horrible stuff, and the basic tracking is just the tip of the iceburg - as if we didn't get enough junk already.

It would seem so, yeah. I'm guessing that the rest of the ducting must have been good still.

I see that the Limer's Hill / New Street works have now been removed from roadworks.org, so hopefully, that's another piece of the puzzle done; one step closer.

And yeah, the Phorm stuff is very nasty. I remember reading the analysis by Dr Clayton from Cambridge University, and also some other work that was done to look at it, and I considered it worth buying our way out of several months worth of contract to avoid it completely.
On the upside, it did wake me up with regard to the amount of tracking that is done, and made me aware of several ways to minimise the amount of data that gets shared without us really knowing.