A VERY BIG THANK YOU TO EVERYONE
We made it! So a very big thank you to everyone who made this result possible. Apart from a very few properties including those standing empty, almost every single household in Upton voted, an amazing record. The result is that we became one of the six exchanges that will be fibre optic enabled in early 2012.
My thanks to everyone for their support and special thanks to all the people who knocked on doors, spoke to people and generally cajoled everyone into voting. One of the many things about this campaign that was really gratifying was the number of people who don’t have broadband, or even in some cases a computer, who wanted to vote anyway and we were able to vote for them by proxy. They realized the importance of high speed Internet and saw this as a benefit to the village and its community.
Over the past few years Upton has become a much enabled community, and when the campaign started in October many of the early voters for the Blewbury exchange were from our village. The remarkably high percentage of parishioners on email is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information, and in a case such as this has proved to be very effective.
There were a couple of major wobbles in the very closing stages of the campaign – first with a big vote audit among the leaders (which we survived unscathed) and second with the emergence of six exchanges, all with 100% of their votes, vying for the advertised 5 prizes. To make matters worse, Blewbury (for reasons no one quite understands) was ranked 6th at the moment the competition closed on 31st December 2010. So we spent the weekend in a slightly nervous “will-they-won’t-they” state of mind, wondering whether BT would do the decent thing and just award the main prize to all six 100-per-cent-ers.
And they did! It was confirmed at 8 am on Monday 3rd January 2011 – a nice present for the New Year – so we’re definitely on for fibre optic broadband in early 2012.
Our final score was 1234 out of 1236 lines, a total of 99.8% and an extraordinary achievement over the four villages.
The other five successful exchanges were:
Whitchurch, Hampshire (104%)
Caxton, Cambridgeshire (103%)
Madingley, Cambridgeshire (102%)
Innerleithen, Scottish Borders (101%)
Baschurch, Shropshire (95%)
What next?
Well over the coming months and as the results of the BT survey become apparent, things hopefully will become clearer. We think it will be helpful to villagers to publish information about FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) and VDSL2+ (Very High Speed DSL) plus an explanation of all the jargon as well! We hope to do this on both the website and in the Upton News. So keep an eye open in both places.
In the meantime thank you again to everyone who made this possible.
Graham de Wilde