The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

BT names more exchanges for early fibre upgrades

Greg J Preece

Little bit of a fib 

"We had aimed to get fibre to half a million homes by next March"

Doesn't he mean "to *near* half a million homes"?

Anonymous Coward

And by the time it's all rolled out.... 

Stop

.... it'll be not fit for purpose. The goals are far too low.

shut it

chris 

Thumb Up

see my local exchange is in the new list so that will be me hopefully going from 20 meg line to 50

Anonymous Coward

East of England 

Gates Horns

Good old BT still do not know where East is. Suprised they know Glasgow is in Scotland as it's North of London.... Little bit of good news about phorm being dumped, maybe one day they will admit to it being illigal rather than some lame excuse about spending money on the network which they have never done much of before now.

Adam 10

Generic comment 

Coat

The b*stards! Why isn't <insert name of my local exchange> on the list?

I expect at least 50 comments of much the same guise!

(my exchange isn't on there but I'm on cable anyway!)

Anonymous Coward

anything west of Bristol 

FAIL

is shagged then?

Anonymous Coward

oh joy 

Wednesbury is being upgraded...

Hang on i am on virgin oh well.....

Aortic Aneurysm

Ugh. 

Thumb Down

Instead of rolling out fibre to areas where people already have decent service, why not upgrade crappy rural exchanges first. I cannot get any more than 2mb, due to the equipment in the exchange. The BT engineer was baffled as to why our exchange had been left to get in such a run-down manner. (we have 2 exchanges covering our town - apparently one was upgraded a few years back, as it was running the same out-of date equipment)

Add to that my area is one of the last three to be switched over to digital, i'm debating whether to move.

Simon 6

What a surprise 

FAIL

To see Somerset, Devon and Cornwall all excluded once again.

ceedee

Why those exchanges, I wonder? 

WTF?

Let's hope that OpenReach aren't aiming to target areas already covered by VirginMedia's cable network in order to 'compete' with their 50Mb service...

Anonymous Coward

Only 2 in the South East 

Unhappy

The list says that Blazingstoke & Dartford are the ONLY exchanges in the South East (outside London) that are to be upgraded. I wonder why? We could certainly do with it where I live. The DSL speeds are pretty crap at the best of times.

ElNumbre

Bah! 

Well, I'm still not going to be able to impress girls with the size of my pipe - every exchange around me is being upgraded, and I'll still be stuck in the dark ages of the early 21st century.

Anonymous Coward

epic 

FAIL

So ponte-carlo and cas-vegas get upgrades but most of leeds doesn't. what do they base the rollout locations on? number of possible customer upsells per upgraded exchange? not by the looks of it!

Doug Manton

Finally I might be able to get broadband! 

Thumb Up

20Mbps to 40Mbps? Bah!

In a major population centre on the outskirts of Basingstoke we have empty cable ducting in the street and telephone lines running 6 miles from the exchange. Assuming BT lay fibre to the street cabinet near my house I will finally be able to get something more than 1Mbps!

Anonymous Coward

Don't mention the upstream! # 

Why do companies never mention the upstream?

Yorkshirepudding

oh ffs! 

Megaphone

i move away from home to a big city and my home town gets quicker interwebs than me! this wont do!

Richard 45

FTTK/FTTH 

When the Whitchurch trial went live, BBC Cardiff, sorry, BBC Wales seemed to be implying that it was fibre to the home rather than to the green cabinets. I did email them to put them straight, but they never replied nor corrected the report. No doubt they swallowed BT's press release and regurgitated as their own work and didn't bother doing any journalism of their own.

Tom Chiverton 1

Should already be here ! 

FAIL

According to http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/MRPOY I should have been switched 'Q1 2009' !

Anonymous Coward

Typical 

FAIL

No upgrade here, stuck on shitty 0.5mbit while living just outside a town centre - really not acceptable...

Paul H

Great! 

Pirate

Now I'll have to set up a torrent download... I mean... err... offsite backup server at my parent's house.. That'll teach me to buy a place out of town that I could actually afford.

Dabooka

Bah! 

Unhappy

One around the corner gets theupgrade, I miss out. Looks like I'm stuck at 1mb, rising to 1.4 on a good day with a strong wind behind it.

Neil Alexander

I'm surprised 

... to see my Exchange (Durham) listed there. Most of us can't get higher than 1mbps real throughput anyway. My 3 Mobile Broadband is faster than anything BT could give me.

Andy Barber

London 

Alert

Did you know that BT Regard Redhill & Reigate as London telephone exchanges. (L/RED & L/REI). Both are outside the M25 & I've worked in both TE's & all the others between them & the 020 area, (in the London South Area.)

Matthew 3

1MB?! 

You were lucky! In my day, all we had was a 2400baud modem and had to work 26 hours a day down t'pit...

</Python>

debaser

Would happily settle for.... 

Grenade

...existing advertised speeds.

Just spend the money on improving the exisiting exchanges so that everyone in the UK can get 2 meg all of the time with no fair use b*llsh*t or traffic shaping.

THEN you can think about rolling out super fast bandwith.

Whether it's schools, dentists, public transport or broadband, the whole countries has become desensitized into thinking a postcode lottery is an acceptable means of providing decent services.

Basically 90% of the population are supposed to stagger on with paltry speeds while funding the lucky 10% who happen to live in the same area as a senior BT manager.

moneyballs2

Broadband a Joke in E14 (Isle of Dogs) 

WTF?

This is great news! Not. The entire Poplar and Isle of Dogs area are unable to get fast broadband and there has bee no capacity at the exchange for a year. Surely this are would be best for the upgrade? I get 1Mb at the best of times, and I'm living in a high populated area of London.

Virgin Media do not even offer services here.

How can BT justify upgrading all these exchanges when LNPOP is at capacity and has had it's upgrade constantly pushed back, so much so that I don't even think a date is listed?

It does seem that BT are only offering these exchange upgrades where Virgin Media Cable services are offered so they can keep up with the competition. F**K the people that can't even get a decent connection.

Jonathan White

Blimey.. 

Grenade

I wouldn't want to be the BT techie tasked with upgrading Moss Side. Bulletproof vests do get in the way when you're doing techie work.

Jon

Jacko

Good Grief 

Happy

I'm on the list!

Rog69

Tossers 

Just at a glance I can see 4 places on the list that already have multiple options for faster than average broadband already and there are probably a lot more on there too. BT should be forced to concentrate their efforts on problem areas, the wankers.

Adam 38

Idiots 

FAIL

1. Upgrading exchanges that already have good speeds

2. Not upgrading central network architecture (what good is fast internet when you just get capped?)

3. Doing FTTC instead of FTTH/FTTB

Waste of money if you ask me.

P.S. Rural people, stop bitching. You can't expect private businesses to be upgrading places where they will get no return on investment.

Freddie

Yorkshire... 

Thumb Up

...appears to be seperate from the north east. Glad to see it's getting the recognition it deserves!

Anonymous Coward

Network upgrades, but the end customer will still get screwed 

Alert

I'd be happier to see the end of BT and their charging by the byte.

The apologists will try and step in to correct me here, but the reality of the way BT sell bandwidth and how ISPs need bandwidth means it is effectively the same as billing by the byte.

This is why nearly all ISPs have download limits. The LLU ISPs have transfer limits as clueless consumers in the market place allows them to get away with it, and the ISPs recognise how profitable tiered billing based on data can be.

Even though my ISP has tried to get me to "upgrade" to a faster line, I have stuck with the 512K down/256K up service as I can transfer more data over this line in a month than the top package allows (without additional charges). And this package is cheaper than the 50gigabyte download limited 8M/448K service.

In reality my ISPs best package is equivalent to a 160K down service. Nearly 8meg, my arse! And this is Zen, regarded as one of the better ISPs out there!

People need to realise just how much of a scam download limits are, and to not accept them at all.

Anonymous Coward

Actually.. 

Thumb Up

For once it looks like good news... My exchange is listed... And so it the one for the next town along...

I just hope they do it properly this time, not like the aluminium crap they cabled this area with in the 60s!

Grrrr!

Lucky to get 2mbs at the moment, and that keeps dropping.

flingback

What a surprise... 

Flame

If you overlay the exchanges that are going FTTC in this latest spat over fibre cabled areas you'll find some big overlap. Seems BT are not interested in new customers, moreover seducing people fed up with Virgin.

I have 8MB to the exchange and it's rock solid, however, my rural exchange with it's 1500 school kids and lack of 21CN means it's all but useless in the evening. Would be nice to see up core upgrades!!!

JonB

@Country bumpkins. 

5 miles of fibre to serve 5 sheep farmers or 1 mile of fibre to serve 200 IT companies, do the maths you witless morons, it's not just residential.

FFS They need to upgrade education out in the countryside as well.

Steve-uk

North Of Newcastle... 

Thumb Down

Seems as per usual we get dropped off the radar... theres 16000+ residential premises... im getting 1.4 meg primetime with 2meg during the night due to the line noise... BT wont fix the lines and as usual the High speed areas are now even faster when some populated towns are still stuck on slow speeds. i wonder 2020 before i get a decent speed or should i just move to BT's office's.

mittfh

Weird... 

Coffee/keyboard

Nuneaton gets upgraded, but not nearby Coventry...

Perhaps they think their engineers will be distracted by all the statues of Lady Godiva :)