Well the fibre journey continues…
Back in January I wrote about how on the fibre journey, cabinet 25 in Weston Village had moved to the Design stage having spent years in the “we are exploring solutions” phase, which I actually believe means “it’s at the bottom of the pile of a large number of ‘solutions’ and we will get to it once we have had enough bad press, someone else starts laying cable or we have nothing better to do….”
Well as of the beginning of April we have moved along that fibre journey. We have entered the Field Survey.
We’ll now take the blueprints from the design stage to your community, and check that what looks good on paper works in the real world. Our surveyor needs to check that there’s enough space alongside all the existing utilities underground for our new cables, and whether there’s enough space to accommodate our equipment. We’ll also need to determine whether we’ll need to close any roads to install fibre and, if so, apply to the local authority for road traffic management, traffic lights etc… We’ll work closely with your local authority to make sure fibre is installed safely and with the minimum of disruption to local people.
This says we should have fibre in the next nine months which does make me wonder if BT are still hoping to have everything done by the end of June?
Nothing beats having a field survey of my own, and looking around that part of Weston Village where cabinet 25 lives, there doesn’t appear to be anything happening. No BT Openreach vans, no roadworks or cabinet installations. When other cabinets were upgraded, a new FTTC cabinet was put in place, usually just a few feet away.
So the story continues…
We are in a race to see who gets high-speed broadband first. Looks like we’re still in “design”…