Super-fast broadband has gone live in parts of Cornwall under a £132 million
investment programme launched last year by BT with additional funding provided
by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The new faster broadband
service is available to over 1,000 customers with 14,000 more expected to be
live in a matter of days. 50 customers in the area have already been connected.
Around 80% of households and businesses in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly are
expected to have access to faster broadband through this deployment by
2014.
The first enabled areas are Chiverton Cross and Chacewater with St Agnes, St
Day, Portreath, Devoran, Leedstown, Stenalees and Par expected to be live
before the end of the month. These first enablements are part of a pilot scheme
being run in advance of the main roll-out which is expected to focus initially
in South East Cornwall. The original
announcement of the scheme quoted a high penetration of full
fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) at around 50% which will offer a fast (up-to 110Mbps)
and future proof option to many people in the area, but pilot connections are
on a fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) basis which offers only up-to 40Mbps.
“Already this scheme is starting to make an important contribution to the
success of the Cornwall economy and to the lives of Cornish residents. We have
a team of about 50 engineers, contractors, planners and technicians working
together to ensure that the project is able to deliver the immense benefits of
super-fast broadband to customers in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly as soon
as possible. The amount of optical fibre cable already installed – more than
150 kilometres – would stretch more than the length of Cornwall.”Ranulf Scarbrough, (Superfast Cornwall programme director) BT
Fibre, whether it be full FTTH or FTTC, won’t make it to everyone in
Cornwall however. Those left out will see access provided via other means such
as Wireless or Satellite, which may not offer quite such a ‘super-fast’
solution. It should however improve on current access technology in the region.
More details about the plans to deliver faster broadband in the region can be
found on the Cornwall Development Company website.
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it will be interesting to see just how many get true NGA broadband, ie fibre to the home. anyone keeping a score? what’s the odds they nearly all end up on copper cabinets, BET and Satellites?
You mean your interpretation of NGA? Mine interpretation is that FTTC is also NGA as no doubt will the people that are using it that make a huge leap in terms of speed.
Out of interest when people were using dial-up and ISDN for internet access would you call ADSL next generation? I would.
NNGA 😉
@GMan completely agree – if the fibre fetishists have their way then the money available from the government for the final third may cover a handful of counties at best.
It’s about time people thought through the consequences of their statements – they will disadvantage large swathes of the population with their “FTTP or bust” approach, particularly is they fritter away even more money on ill-thought through digital patchworks and, even worse, “digital village pumps” that have no sensible means of connectivity to peoples’ homes and businesses.
Yup, its not hard to understand really is it (or so you’d think).
Cornwall have a lump of money to spend on rolling out Broadband, they can spend it wholly on FTTP to a much much smaller area of Cornwall (and keep cyberdoyle happy) but most of Cornwall high and dry, or they can spend wise and pay for a mix of deliverys to encompass as many people as possible.
That’s it… doesn’t get anymore clear cut than that. If cyberdoyle (sorry Cornwall) wants FTTP for every home they’ll need more money, simple.
Why not just make people pay for FTTH if they want it…
Having FTTH would increase house property values by a lot.
St Day???? Portreath????? Didn’t even know they had their own tp exchanges being but small villages. What an incredible waste of resources by BT yet again.
Well BT’s FTTH isn’t even an officially available product yet, will be in a few months though I believe, it’ll be interesting to see how much it costs and if there is any option to pay the real installation costs so you can get it regardless of whether they are planning to do your area or not.
@GMAN99
~£40k per FTTC cabinet IIRC.
Trench for your own house is ~£1k.
*£1k if you do it yourself.
Trench where where to where? If the closest fibre distribution point is 100m away then a self pay might be feasible, but it its a mile away and no direct ducting link the cost will rise.
FTTH works when you pass all the homes in a street, not just 1 in 50.
Just covering own property.
@Sobriane
no offence i live in cornwall (falmouth to be precise) and im happy that st day and portreath are getting broadband out there as their standard adsl2+ speed is an abysmal 1-2mb as their exchange is too far away so in theory this is not bad usage of resources its sensible usage of resources and par is also another clever usage of resources as they are using small and medium exchanges for this test roll out personally im happy that this is being tested first in these areas before they start rolling it out on an exchange that has roughly 20k lines on it and screw up.
So will those of us who use other ISPs over local loop benefit? I too am in Falmouth and on Sky.
@ypmud I agree – the rollout to those areas is sensible. I have 7M in Falmouth. Devoran includes all the deep pockets of Feock who will pay a packet to get off their current wet string service!
@real_woodworm
I’m not sure that anyone with an LLU provider will benefit unless they are migrated off of the legacy LLU kit and onto the Wholesale service?