Not with the residents it hasn't Only know that because a friend lives in one of the farms and he's currently talking about microwave link to Manchester - he has line of sight to most of Manchester...

Has any one talked to the BDUK project covering the area?

Is your postcode SK10 5RX or SK10 5RU?

For most addresses in SK10 5RX the Openreach checker shows FTTC availability (from PCP13, speeds poor due to distance from cab), for SK10 5RU (even further from PCP13) most addresses show no FTTC available but does say this:

�The cabinet that serves your premises is live, but your speeds aren't as fast as we'd like them to be. Your area has been reviewed and there is a plan to do further work to increase speeds via FTTP technology.

We follow a different design and build process for FTTP so you won't see updates at each stage. As soon as we have built the network and made services available, you will see an 'Accepting Orders' message.�

Based on that I would think all properties fed from PCP13 with either no FTTC availability or sub 25/30Mbps FTTC are likely to get native FTTP offered at some point in the near future.

>So tapping does not happen, its down to the planning and then running a fibre to you from existing infrastructure. So forget all notions of a person shinning up a pole and installing your fibre manifold with a simple cut into a cable.

Aww that's a shame - not like the old days when you could tap into a phone connection

I'm hoping that there was a bit of planning done by Openreach in this installation as it would be missing a trick not the split/whatever the fibre halfway to serve an existing industrial estate.

As was said yesterday it looks likely the area will get native FTTP soon due to poor/not available FTTC due to the distance back to Bollington PCP13.

If I were you I�d contact Connecting Cheshire to see if they can give an indication of timescale.

Not sure how this fits in with your local farmers who have either ordered FTTP on demand, gone down the community fibre partnership route or possibly are just aware of what is happening via Connecting Cheshire and might be doing their own digging to get the fibre from the road across their own land.

Some pictures of any new infrastructure attached to the poles might help identify how far the physical infrastructure work has got.

Thanks for this - I'm planning to meet with my friend later this week so we'll have a mooch around. Connecting Cheshire is a good call - thx. I don't normally get involved in the sharp end of all this - more of office equipment installer and IT support role but do like a challenge.

In reply to a post by robnicholson:

Aww that's a shame - not like the old days when you could tap into a phone connection

I think you have a rose-tinted view of the past, though I note the

The majority of the distance between a property and the exchange, perhaps 90% on average, is covered by E-side cables. These are the ones that are 400-1000 pairs, and pressurised to prevent water ingress. BT would never tap into one of these at a random location ... that is what the green PCP cabinets are designed for.

Fibre is no different. The main fibre spines can be made of cables with 288 fibres within, supporting up to 9,000 premises, and are very equivalent to E-side cables. BT wouldn't randomly tap into these cables to access a single fibre. Instead, they strategically locate a node with lots of splice trays for that purpose - the aggregation node.

E-side copper, and fibre spines, are both too valuable, too important, to randomly tap into.

>If I were you I�d contact Connecting Cheshire to see if they can give an indication of timescale.

Missed this first time around - I'll certainly give them a call.

Following on from this thread, I had a wander around the area in question with my camera. Can anyone tell me what I'm looking at here? This is one of the poles halfway up the valley outside the small industrial estate:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c1tznf43yhky3f0/Pole%20by%...

Is this something that looks like it might be extended in future?

Fibre pops up out of the ground about 300m further down the road:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nw2zbpt44hobkbd/Fibre%20st...

The installation is still going on - this is under a pole between there fibre comes out the ground and the pole posted above:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/stgh2r4gud0b00w/Fibre%20ca...

I've got a new small client along Moorside who are currently getting 2-3Mbps down and 0.1Mbps up on ADSL - they were told VDSL would be no better/maybe worse.

Unfortunately, the fibre doesn't currently go along the poles to their premises - so close yet so far! Hence my reason for asking whether that pole had an option for expansion.

So we're going to install a 4GEE router for £100 and sign up to a 100GB monthly PAYG service. They are reluctant to sign up for 18 months contract if fibre may become an option.