BT names 63 more exchanges for fibre upgrades BT has revealed its next wave of exchange upgrades, as it accelerates the rollout of faster broadband. As with the two previous lists, there's a strong emphasis on densely populated areas, where return on the investment is likely to be highest. This time, 31 out of the 63 exchanges are classified by BT as located in the south …
I can only comment on the Sheffield and Cardiff exchanges:
Sheffield:
Ranmoor: Solid middle class. Some traditional working class and student occupation.
Beauchief: Solid middle class
Cardiff:
Llanisien: Mainly solid middle class. One large ex-public housing estate
Llanedeyrn: Some very exclusive bits, but mainly a massive, and quite poor estate
Of course, I'm only guessing at the actually boundaries of the BT areas and assuming they coincide with what local people people refer to when using the area names.
Cheers
Peter
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... does not mean that they'll run the service to you. I live in Basingstoke (which is upgraded and suffers a lot from poor broadband speeds) and although the exchange is upgraded the only places that are covered by the upgraded cabinets are those that are already covered by the Virgin Media cable network.
Me, bitter and twisted with a <1Mb service? You may say that but I couldn't possibly comment.
But is any chance what so ever that all 63 areas have a connection to senior BT managers in some way.
I am not holding my breath for BT to roll out fibre to the unwashed masses any time at all really as the total amount of speed increase I have had out of BT in 5 years is 0.25mb which is me connected to a town centre exchange.
against those that are already serviced by existing high-speed offerings like Virgin cable and ADSL2+
It seems to me that BT seem to be spending money on the wrong exchanges, namely the ones that already have a raft of services to choose from, rather than those that NEED infrastructure.
It's called competition, thats what happens when you open up former state monopolies to other players. You really think BT is going to look at areas where Virgin (and the smaller cable co's befroe them) took a look and said, dig up the roads / pavements, run some fibre, install a load of equipment so we might possibly sell some services to the 4 houses down there? Fuck that.
OF COURSE BT are going to upgrade areas where they dont currently compete well with Virgin, please bear in mind that this is a business, it is what they do, nothing personal!
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I tried to buy BT Vision, and see a steady 3.6Mbits connection at the moment. Got a letter telling me my line was *too slow*, so went off to talk to BT why they thought 3.6Mbits was too slow for something that just needs 2Mbits. Eventually got through to someone on the Wholesale diagnostics team - BT Wholesale generally know what they are talking about, unlike BT Retail. Turns out the real reason was the LSI - my connection is too unstable. My exchange is ASDL Max and 21CN enabled. I talked to BT Vision and asked why they thought they needed to dumb down the response to "too slow", to which they replied "ah, well, not everyone understands what 'stability' means"... I then asked what could be done to improve the situation, since something that BT have installed is making it impossible for BT to sell me something else. Nothing. Not even the offer to upgrade the line from ADSL to ADSL+
And BT wonders why the Vision product is not being taken up.
I'm off to buy a Wii, even if it's just for the BBC iPlayer app.
Blowing the affluence of the area aside, there were 6 BT vans in my street last Saturday (a predominantly ex-council estate in Watford) laying down the preparatory items for the fibre roll-out in my area. The engineer I spoke to couldn't confirm when it would be completed.
Thus soon I will be able to truly take advantage of my Be supplied bandwidth muahahahah
"Although theoretically capable of 40Mbit/s downstream, such fibre-to-the-cabinet services are in reality expected to offer between 10 and 20Mbit/s"
that is truly sounds crap, I have aluminium wires and still get effective 11-14Mbit download
with BE in bermondsey, cheapest and best supplier !
( although I have periods when my connection keeps dropping )
I have a nice solid 20ishMBit/sec over ADSL 2+ (which was a nice surprise upgrade), and I have never had one of those letters- some weeks I might pull down 30 gigs or so (cough cough steam Christmas sale), but generally, I can't even find enough content that's worth the effort of ripping off- especially if you consider films and stuff, which haven't whelmed me much lately.
I suspect that ennui is the best defense.
If you ever been to Milton Keynes or are stuck living here like I am you'll know rhat 99% of the people are what should be termed as effluent.
We also have the afflient effluent (self centred excuses for humans with shedloads of cash)
Newport Pagnell is a hotspot for the afflient effluent, I'll be glad when they introduce broadband that sucks them all away.
Seriously though, what would you use more than 20 Meg for?
I presume that BT prioritises exchanges that it expects will have high(ish) takeup of its (or its LLU competitors) services.
So why cannot it not be *required* to set aside some of that increased take to fund the "uneconomic" exchanges. That way *everyone* gets done eventually (although that may be a while).
Nearly 30 years after the BT share sell off they are still *effectively* a monopoly. Virgin is the only *true* competitor in terms of laying a cable from door to door.
Tamworth, I guess that must be the token shit hole on the list as most people in that chav infested dung heap can't even read let alone use a computer. As most of it is made up of nests of horrible housing estates containing oxygen wasting benefit sponges I don't see much of a take up of high speed broadband, unless they give it away as prizes from scratch cards.
My bitterness is nothing to do with being connected to one of the neighbouring exchanges that will be almost certainly the last on the list to be done, just like it was for ADSL in the first place.
This is a rerun of the ADSL roll-out, and I've heard it all before.
Yes, I could use more, but will the ISPs be able to provide the total capacity. Better contention ratios would be more help at the moment.
About two-thirds of the line between me and the exchange would be replaced by fibre, which I'd certainly notice. It's the rest, between the kerbside box and my house, where the faults seem to happen.
Right now, "op to 8 megabits" is a risible claim. Get this tech rolled out, and a faster service might be worth paying for. But how many people need the speed for anything other than file sharing?
Herts, not Vasey.
When is the government going to bite the bullet, acknowledge the boost to the economy that upgrading the entire network will provide and pay for it?
Compared to some things we pay for, it's cheap, and will pay for itself.
Local fibre for local people!
I thought Manchester was a pretty big city, but I guess not enough to be considered for this. But it doesn't surprise me that the main focus is the South.
It's really a shame that we can't just invest in some major infrastructure for high speed broadband like they have in South Korea and Scandinavia. It's pretty much guaranteed to pay for itself and make a profit, and is very important in modern times. Rolling out a paltry 10-20MBit/s fibre service to a handful of upper middle class exchanges doesn't excite me.
And I also think focusing on providing broadband to people living in rural areas should not be the main focus of the government or a good thing to tax everyone for. Living in rural areas has always been a trade-off between convenience and getting away from urban areas. You shouldn't expect fast Internet or a massive 24 hour Tesco 5 mins away.
With the greatest respect to Crowthorne why on earth have they elected to do their exchange rather than Bracknell's which has over 3times the connected lines. Cynical side of me thinks its down to the fact most of Bracknell is newtown estates so its going to be "not as cost effective" :(
Frustrating when I live closer to the Crowthorne Exchange than the Bracknell exchange despite having a Bracknell postcode :(
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