Representatives from the Astons, Blewbury, Upton and West Hagbourne met with BT on Thursday December 1st to discuss exactly how and when local broadband speeds would improve as a result of winning BT’s Race to Infinity. It’s pretty complicated, but here goes with the Campaign team’s attempt to explain what’s happening:
- The overall effect of the Infinity upgrade will be to make 90% of lines in the Blewbury exchange area capable of speeds of 15Mbit/s or more, with the remaining 10% capable of 2 to 15 Mbit/s. This means that everyone will be able to upgrade to new broadband services delivering speeds at least three times faster than what they’re getting today. The exact names, suppliers and prices of these new services are not yet 100% clear.
- Two broad kinds of technology are going to be used: Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) and Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). FTTC will take fibre to a total of four street cabinets in the Astons, Blewbury and Upton, and then use existing copper connections to reach individual properties. This will provide the range of faster speeds mentioned above for most of Blewbury and all of the Astons, Upton and West Hagbourne – around 900 lines in all. If you’re lucky, you could get up to 40 Mbit/s initially and up to 80 Mbit/s in the not-too-distant future.
- FTTP, a new element that has been introduced since the Race to Infinity was won, will take fibre right into individual homes via two street cabinets located on Bessels Way and South Street in Blewbury. This will provide even faster speeds to premises served by those two cabinets – around 360 lines in all. And by faster, we mean seriously faster – at least 100 Mbit/s initially, rising to perhaps 200 to 300 Mbit/s in the future.
- The technical work on the four FTTC cabinets should be completed between the end of December and early March, with Upton probably the first to go live. As soon as your particular cabinet goes live, you will be able to order your new fibre-based superfast broadband service (although see below for exceptions to this).
- The technical work on the two FTTP cabinets, and their required sub-networks of smaller ‘nodes’, should be completed by July. If you’re served by one of these cabinets, you will have to wait until then to order your new fibre-based ‘ultrafast’ service.
Clear as mud? It gets muddier. Here are a few more twists in the tail:
- For those with access to an FTTC cabinet: Just because you can be connected to a fibre-enabled cabinet, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to order a full ‘superfast’ broadband service. For example, BT can only sell its superfast service to people whose lines are capable of receiving speeds of 15 Mbit/s or more. If your house is too far away from the cabinet, or there are other technical reasons why your particular line can’t achieve that speed, then you’ll have to choose either a superfast service from a supplier offering a lower speed threshold, or a non-superfast (but still faster than today) service more suited to your line speed. Not surprisingly, this will apply more to those on the outer edges of the exchange area, such as West Hagbourne and parts of the Astons. In fact, we spent some time at the meeting discussing possible additional funding methods for helping West Hagbourne, as under current plans they will have no direct fibre link at all.
- For those with access to an FTTP cabinet: You might think there’s no downside to 200 – 300 Mbit/s, but bear in mind firstly that you will need a new set of hardware (modem/router) to make it work and secondly that it’s this or nothing, i.e. you will not be able to order an FTTC service instead. (Although, as with FTTC, you will of course still have access to your and other current copper-based services.)
We hope we’ve got all this right: as mentioned above, it’s pretty darn complicated. The easiest, and best, thing to keep in mind is that whatever speed you’ve got now, you’ll be able to upgrade to something at least three times better when all the work is done. For most that will be March (not too far from BT’s original promise of ‘early 2012’) and for the rest it will be July. For some, the results are far better than expected and for others they’re nowhere close, and we’ll probably need until the end of 2012 to figure out whether it was worth all the effort. On balance we think it will be, but by the same token we wouldn’t want to go through it all again!
Campaign Team