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Church helps Polperro gain better broadband
Monday 06 August 2012 12:48:55 by Andrew Ferguson

We have in the last year featured a few areas of the UK where Openreach has had problems finding a location for an FTTC street cabinet. Polperro in Cornwall has found an innovative solution, by taking up some space in the church yard of the Methodist Church.

As Openreach pushes its commercial funded roll-out further away from the wide pavements of cities, this problem may become more of a problem. Particularly in rural areas, where planning rules and space constraints limit the available options, perhaps we may see more social awareness and flexibility from both Openreach and residents and businesses.

The service is now available to order in Polperro, and you do not need to be next to the church to get good speeds, the Blue Peter Inn down by the quay has a speed estimate of 66.9 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for upload.

[ Topic: Broadband | 15 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by ian9outof10 10 months ago
Makes sense. I always through it would make sense to put some DSLAMS in community buildings. While not everyone lives near a phone exchange, people do often live near a pub, or a school.

Happily, FTTC sort of makes this less of a problem.

Posted by EnglishRob 10 months ago
That's good news. Hopefully BT might look at this as a solution for other areas too. I'm sure many people would give up a bit of space in their gardens for faster broadband connections :-)

Posted by cyberdoyle 10 months ago
The trouble is, cabinets are still going to leave a lot of people out - unless they put millions in. And they are picking their spots, either where there are a lot of people (not businesses - they don't want to lose leased lines) or where a community makes a big noise and gets sign ups. This is good news for a few people in Polperro and they will be very happy for a few years, but it still isn't the final solution. Good on the Methodist church though! Community spirit in action.

Posted by Somerset 10 months ago
It could be possible that cabinets serving business areas have relatively few connections and are therefore not currently viable. 99 business premises in Polperro.

Posted by GMAN99 10 months ago
"The trouble is, cabinets are still going to leave a lot of people out " - So what is your answer to this? Digital hubs? Who pays for this? The government? If so it has nothing to do with BT so you should be asking the government to step up

"And they are picking their spots, either where there are a lot of people " - sounds like a good place to start, those lot of people no doubt want broadband? More people = more potential customers = more profit - The building blocks of any business that wants to survive.

Posted by andrew ( staff member) 10 months ago
Millions? Reality warning, the UK is not that large, Openreach has 85,000 street cabinets. The roll-out to date has covered 20,000 of these.

As for not being happy in a few years, seen the Openreach long game plan? Fibre only exchanges - some years away but will happen.

So altnets have a ten year time frame to get in break the apparent BT monopoly. Oddly some a good few altnets are deploying where there is already lots of choice.

Posted by herdwick 10 months ago
Altnets have done effectively nowt in the last 9 years, notspots remain notspots. Fibre remains elusive.

Posted by timmay 10 months ago
@cyberdoyle do you ever say anything positive without a negative spin?

Posted by kmendum 10 months ago
@herdwick: altnets. It is the TalkTalk and Sky type ISPs who have built out to far more BT exchanges than Cable&Wireless etc, and who built or rented seriously large backhaul networks (Sky: 10Gb from Dundee for heavens sake. Why??). Theses are impressive networks with plenty of spare capacity on the backbone and interconnects, but some of us wouldn't touch TT etc with a bargepole. Virgin won't build out to new areas, even when there is revenue just waiting there, so guess what we are left with?

Posted by Somerset 10 months ago
cd - Does Nellie think that the UK would need millions of cabinets?

Over a 1000 properties in Polperro, is that a few? Please provide a professional view of future broadband speed requirements.

Posted by pcoventry76 10 months ago
over 27000 on our exchange and 3000 business premises.. But not in the roll out plans yet.

There's no rhyme or reason.

Posted by timmay 10 months ago
@pcoventry76 Cornwall gave a shed full of money to BT to do FTTC in the county. http://www.superfastcornwall.org/ there's your reason.

Posted by andrew ( staff member) 10 months ago
On the Virgin not going to new areas, they do do about 100,000 new a year, which is more than the altnets do so far. A small amount overall, but at least its some.

Posted by GMAN99 10 months ago
@kmendum I wouldn't class Sky , TT etc as Altnets :)

Posted by themanstan 10 months ago
@pconventry76 and the EU gave a shed load of money too.

Kudos to Cornwall's local gov for succesfully negoatiating with the EU to extract funds and getting BT to sign up to roll out county wide.