When we moved house recently, and hence the base for Feeding Edge I was on BT Infinity 70mb broadband. It was great, a great service and fast and reliable. On moving to Basingstoke I checked that the exchange for the house was Infinity enabled, it was. I couldn’t check the property as it didn’t have a BT line at the time.
As soon as we moved in and got a real phone number I ran the checker again. It said May 2013 was the likely time. As May passed it then said June 2013 and now it says “between June 2013 and July 2013”.
I realize it is all down to phone cabinets being enabled for FTTC (Fibre to the cabinet). I can’t even find our cabinet to check maybe that is the problem. It all seems to tantalisingly close to get back to 70mb again, yet registering interest on the BT site may not really be doing anything to make it happen. Maybe a bit less money on the adverts and a bit more on the rollout please 🙂
I am not sure how much there is to do, what the economics of it all are but it must be relatively doable or the checker wouldn’t keep making up a month?
As a business, and a techie one being able to shift data around is really quite important to me. I will be back on the top tariff as and when they sort it out. If anyone knows anyone who can point me at another way to make this go a bit quicker that would be great.
****Update 14/6/13
As I had tweeted about this it was great that @BTcare spotted it and contacted me. As a customer it is great to know that someone is bothering to listen. The answer may eventually not be the one I want to hear, but there is certainly some activity to try and find out a little bit more on the status of any line upgrade. That is really good. Thankyou BT 🙂
**** Update 25/7/13
I got a reply about the cabinet from NGA equiries
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your enquiry about fibre broadband. The current cabinet is full to capacity and in order to increase the capacity we need to install more interconnection cables to the existing telephony cabinet. However, to do this we would normally install a larger casing onto the telephony cabinet to accommodate the cables. Unfortunately, we cannot do this as the local council will not give us permission, as they state the cabinet is in an unsafe permission. Therefore, we have proposed to move the cabinets, but again, the local council are refusing permission for this also. We are continuing to work with the council and I have highlighted your problem in the hope it will add momentum.
As there are people who move in and out of the area, they may also terminate their broadband service, effectively creating spare ports. I would advise that as the engineering work will take some time, that you regularly contact your service provider to see if an order will progress utilising spare port capacity if available at that time.
Regards
NGA Enquiries
nga.enquiries@openreach.co.uk
I am now asking Basingstoke council if that is true or what I can do to sort it.
****update Dec 30 2013.
Having talked to the council it seemed that no planning application had been made ever to upgrade the cabinet. Somewhat frustrated I wrote an email to the (outgoing) CEO of BT. Somewhere along the line it got handed to a very helpful person in openreach. He was able to give me more information on the status and try and get to the cabinet upgraded. Just before xmas 2012 I tried the order system again and this time I seemed to be allowed 70mb Broadband. So I placed the order for completion on 30th Dec 2013. I was a little nervous the website had changed and it was not able to actually tell that the cabinet was full. However, the engineer turned up, installed and it is all working now.
I thanked my contact in openreach, though it may bt the work has yet to be completed it was just lucky someone was moving from BT. So I am happy with this much faster broadband, but hope that any actions will help anyone else.
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