For those who don’t know (and there will be many!) my home village of Warboys is a small town/large village right on the edge of the flatlands of Eastern England known as the Fens. Although the village has developed into a dormitory town for London and other major conurbations, it still retains its farming roots.
Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in BT and Openreach still consider it a backwater and we do not figure in any future plans for high-speed internet above an effective 50Mb, if you are lucky.
I should explain here that originally there was the GPO (General Post Office) that provided everything for analogue telephone lines. Come the digital age, the GPO transformed itself into British Telecom (BT) and eventually when the general public realised that they had a monopoly on everything over and under ground for telecoms and it took a year for them to authorise a new telephone (think the Civil Service on morphine), BT was split into Openreach, who deal with the infrastructure and cabling, and BT itself who has become another provider of data access through Openreach.
Needless to say, the historic links between BT and Openreach are still very strong so nothing gets done for an individual who needs high speed internet without both BT and Openreach being involved and the individual has to go through many layers of red tape. This means that although the majority of the cabling (from Openreach) goes to an area fibre “Green Box” there is still a strong reliance on the old copper cables that have been there for many decades and there is no interest in providing the last leg fibre to the home (FTTH) as we are not in a city and therefore our performance needs are not relevant.
The fact of the matter is that of the approaching 5000 people here, many work in London and expect 1Gbs performance and above on a daily basis. They then expect the same when they come home to find that in some rare cases, they can only get 1.5Mbs/10Mbs when they are sitting in their living rooms! This has been made worse in the latest epidemic where a large number of people now work from home. So now my broadband, which used to be knocking on 60+Mbs, is now down to 50+Mbs. Sitting at my desk on a Saturday afternoon, it is 49.6Mbs down and 9.09Mbs up. A year ago it was 58.7Mbs down and 10.5Mbs up.
So we are doing something about at least maintaining the speed of the broadband we have and also improving it! For those of you who are in the Warboys area, there will be a webinar from County Broadband on:-
This event is totally free and is easy to access through your normal internet connection. The County Broadband Webinar will give you all the information you need to make decisions about how you will be able to improve your internet accessibility if you live in the Warboys area.
For those who are wondering, I have no financial or business interest in County Broadband other than wishing for an improvement to my village services!
I'll see you there Monday week!