No superfast broadband for us

[lnr]

I recently heard that some of the BT cabinets in Great Shelford were being upgraded to FTTC, and that somewhat got my hopes up that we might soon be able to get Infinity. However after some digging I find that it is only a small number of ones being upgraded as a result of the Connecting Cambridgeshire scheme (http://www.connectingcambridgeshire.co.uk/).

According to Connecting Cambridgeshire: Cabinet 18 is not included in the programme due to the Virgin Media coverage in the area.

Only our house isn't on Virgin, though much of our street is, and their green box is under 100m from our door. I contacted Virgin on the offchance, and they put an actual paper letter through my door by hand to say they've done extensive surveys but that it is uneconomical to provide service to us at this time.

And BT, when asked if they have any plans to upgrade our cabinet themselves, say: please be advise I am afraid to say that your locality will be enable with infinity within 3 months

Which to be honest could mean anything, but I think means they have no plans within the next 3 months, and who knows after that. Mike is much more philosophical about the whole thing, we do at least get approximately 4Mbps these days, but dammit, I got my hopes up briefly there!

Comments

[emperor]

CC keep saying "soon, tbc, no date" and other such unhelpful things about Girton.

[lnr]

Good luck!

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

That message from BT is astounding. I would really expect them to have form responses for this sort of thing, but that sounds like a non-native-English-speaker garbled sentence.

[lnr]

You're right, I was shocked. In fact I've just emailed them an official complaint about it. Though since it's to the same address goodness knows what will come of that!

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Maybe they've handed off their customer communications to whichever program it was all the papers have spent the last couple of days idiotically asserting had "passed the Turing Test"?

[lnr]

Seriously I think a programme which was aiming to convincingly pass as a Ukrainian 13 year old boy would write better BT tech support emails than this.

[pm215]

BT haven't even done my cabinet yet, and I'm right in the middle of town! They keep pushing the estimated date forward...

[lnr]

But you have a date, not a "please sign up for updates" box? Good luck with that!

[sparrowsion]

That's even more frustrating than our situation. There's a Welsh government initiative called Superfast Cymru which is aiming to get FTTC to all the rural areas (in much the same way that a few years ago there was backing for any broadband, which is why we've got a reliable 6M down in the middle of nowhere). Except at this point, if you look at the "completed/planned/expected" map, our county is being completely ignored. Apart from the county town. Middle-of-nowhere 10 miles north, can expect FTTC by Christmas. 20 miles east by next Easter. Both across a county border.

[lnr]

Ah yes, I see the devolved governments get to be in charge of BDUK delivery (https://www.gov.uk/broadband-delivery-uk) where appropriate, rather than local authorities. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that we already get more than the 2M promised universally, even if we're in the 5-10% who won't get superfast connections.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

...24 Mbps is superfast? That's half the average in Sweden, which is a lot less densely populated.

Hmm...it's actually below the average UK speed as well.