BT are starting to extend their fibre network to improve Broadband speed. As Alstonefield has less than 1000 properties, the chances of getting any improvements at the Alstonefield Exchange are very very low, but if we can get 75% of the users at the Alstonefield exchange to show an interest, BT say they will “engage with the community to see what they can do to improve things”. I was the first to express an interest – perhaps other people would like to do it. Here is the link to express your vote:
Alstonefield
In the Peak District National Park
I think some additional publicity is required to get this going. How about a leaflet drop?
Hi Lorraine,
I’ve created a link to the website directly from your post so that people can just click on it and vote. I’ve voted now and I’m number 4. Good idea about the leaflet drop too….
I’ve just seen this acticle – appears to have been published last Friday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/stoke/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9080000/9080689.stm
I have been looking into this also. My conclusion was that BT have no interest in doing anything soon, unless there is some regional development money to subsidise it.
However there was far more promise from TalkTalk (who own many other providers, eg Opal, Pipex). They have a program of rolling out their equipment into local exchanges, and when I last spoke to them they said although there was no specific schedule, we were looking at “2011”.
I’ll chase them up and post any new info here.
r.
Unfortunately fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) broadband, BT calls this Infinity, requires not just equipment in the exchange but fibre links from the exchange to the BT cabinets at the side of the road that feed the line to the house. As I understand it, only BT will install these links between exchange and cabinet, so by definition other providers will always come along after BT have already enabled the service, or at least not before.
ADSL2+ has a theoretical maximum download speed of 24Mb/s and upload of 1.4Mb/s, the numbers for FTTC are 40Mb/s (rising in future to 60Mb/s) and an upload max of 10Mb/s.
With standard ADSL broadband through to ADSL2+ many people are familiar with only getting a fraction of the maximum quoted speed in practice. This is due to deterioration in the signal quality due to the length of the provision on copper. With FTTC of course, that distance is much smaller.
I’m assuming that ADSL2+ is realistically possible in Alstonefield. FTTC would be fantastic, but not sure whether this could be done within the existing infrastructure: can fibre go overhead or must it be routed underground?
As an aside, the biggest practical problem we see is laggy BBC iPlayer. But with a measured generic download speed of 6.5mbps it seems more likely that the problem is with either the BBC servers or ISP/network throttling targeted at iplayer traffic.