As a business user on Crossmaglen exchange the cab that i am on is to be ungraded by 31 Oct good news yes.

Yet my neighbour next door who is non business user and for sure is on the same cab as me get message saying that the cab he is on is not been upgraded .

So what are they going to do have seperate cab for bis and resid users surley not .

This project is aimed at business users. For now i think that residential users will have be left until ISP's come on board.

That what I dont understand ISP's have to be onboard from the start even for buisness users are we going to be tied to using BT as a provider ?

BT look to be the only main ISP selling FTTC so far. And if it is only for business users first we may need to get BT Total Business Broadband Fibre at £30 or £45 per month. I really don't want to wait as the speeds I receive now are awful. Does anyone know if u can get BT business broadband without owning a business?

I am not sure but I think maybe DETI have just got a list of registered business through out northern Ireland and this is what the checker is going by .

I would say by launch time isp's will be all over this I know Elclips isp is starting to sell FTTC packages soon so i am sure there will be others .

Andrews & Arnold already sell FTTC in enabled areas. One of the best ISPs around, but expensive.

Other ISPs have been conducting trials in it before launching the product to customers, since the technology is still very new.

I think you can get BT Business BB without being a registered business.

Yes so what information is the checker going by ?

My ISP is PlusNet ( a BT subsidiary Company ) This is their reply to my query regarding the availability of Fibre.

Determining who can and can't get FTTC at the moment is a bit of a complicated task as the only easy way to do is to check each phone number 1 by 1. Which is rather impractical when we have several thousand customers on the enabled exchanges. It's was pretty hard to manage when there were just 2 exchanges. So at the moment the trial is pretty low key, if people are interested in it and they can get it, and the accept the trial Ts & Cs etc. then we'll happily add people to the trial but we're letting them come to us at the moment rather than us going to them.

The best thing to do is keep an eye on the BT availability checker here:

http://www.dslchecker.bt..../adsl/adslchecker.welcome

Once your exchange and cabinets have ready dates this will show up, some of the dates do move around, there's a couple of threads on the forum now from people in Luton and Basingstoke where the dates keep changing.

Once it's enabled just drop me another PM and I'll let you know how to take part.

Latest info from DETI:

"DETI�s aim was to target businesses with the aim of boosting Northern Ireland�s productivity. Based on your postcode I can confirm that there are plans to invest in telecoms infrastructure for businesses in this area. However I am unable to precisely inform you of the nature of the infrastructure improvements at this time or which businesses will benefit as I do not have that detailed information to hand.

Although the project is business focused, we expect there to be significant spill over benefits to residential consumers. The contract does not prevent BT, or any other service provider, using the infrastructure to deliver services to non-business users and we expect to see this happening but the decision on to provide service to residential consumers will be a decision of the communications provider to make. In fact, the wholesale provision within the terms of the contract is provided on a non-discriminatory basis so that it will encourage competition and choice in the provision of faster broadband to all of Northern Ireland."