As I have mentioned previously, according to the BT Openreach Fibre site they are in the build phase for cabinet 25 in Weston Village.
Over the weekend I ventured down to the cabinet to see what was happening and see how far BT Openreach had got with putting in the new fibre cabinet, as I had heard that BT Openreach vans were sighted in the area!
Well as I could have guessed there was nothing there, nothing had changed.
Now I know that BT Openreach could potentially site the new cabinet somewhere else, but if you look at other upgraded cabinets the new ones are quite close to the existing cabinet.
Here is cabinet 24 in Weston village, the old cabinet is on the right, the new fibre cabinet is on the left.
I don’t know what I was expecting to see, actually that’s a lie I was expecting there to be nothing there…
Well, BT Openreach did say the end of June, I will believe it when I see it.
I recently posted we were in the “build” phase of the fibre journey for cabinet 25 in Weston Village.
Well according to a recent Facebook posting (hearsay evidence) BT Openreach vans were sighted next to the cabinet on Moor Lane.
I did check roadworks.org however as Moor Lane is no longer a road and the site of the cabinet is off the lane, the work wasn’t seen on that site.
The roadworks.org website is a useful site to see what is happening with roadworks and BT Openreach to log their work on this site. It was also where I found out that Virgin Media were laying down cable on the other side of the village.
It wasn’t that long ago that I was complaining again about the slow progress of enabling cabinet 25 in Weston Village for fibre. When I checked this morning it was still at the Field Survey stage, however since this morning we have progressed along the fibre journey and are now at the Build stage.
We’re installing the new fibre cabinet and laying the fibre cables to serve your home or business.
You can get more detail on the fibre journey page.
At this point we’re ready to start the physical work in your community. We’ll be installing the new equipment and bringing fibre cables from your local telephone exchange to your area. You might see our teams working in the footway boxes along your street as they bring the fibre cable through the underground ducts or overhead on telephone poles. Putting our equipment in position might cause a bit of disruption with traffic diversions and closed pavements and we’ll do our best to reduce this. Throughout the build phase we continue to work closely with the power companies and local authorities to reduce delays and keep disruption to a minimum.
As you might imagine I will be taking a look round to see if they have actually started work…
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 I recently contacted BT Openreach about Cabinet 25 in Weston Village and asked for an explanation of why it hadn’t being upgraded to fibre and why the original date of March 2017 was now delayed? I specifically asked them for an explanation.
Their reply was
In response to your query regarding delay in providing fibre we would like to inform you that the cabinet is not fibre enabled yet, however, a project is ongoing to provide fibre to the cabinet.
The project is expected to be completed by the End of June, 2017, however, this date is subject to change as per the amount of work left.
Please keep an eye on our website from the End of June, 2017 for an update. It’s where we publish the very latest fibre coverage information and we update it daily. This is when we would estimate that you should be able to place your order, all being well.
They are saying the end of June 2017…
Really…
Somehow, and for some obscure practical reason I think, it will be delayed a they say themselves
this date is subject to change as per the amount of work left.
As you can also see there was no explanation as requested.
Though to be honest I will believe it when I see it!
Those who have been following my FTTC fibre journey will know that I was one of the first people in my area to get fibre back in October 2010. I was impressed with the 40Mb download speeds.
I was less impressed when I moved house in 2012 and having moved (literally) just down the street I was back on really slow ADSL. So for nearly the last five years I have had an ADSL connection that struggles to get to 1.5Mb download speed!
The story of the fibre journey of cabinet 25 connected to the Worle Exchange has been one of mis-information and downright confusion.
It would appear that BT Openreach decided initially that cabinet 25 wasn’t commercially viable, as a result passed it over to Connecting Devon and Somerset. Then at some point BT Openreach changed their mind about the commercial viability, so when Connecting Devon and Somerset came to plan to upgrade the cabinet, they found it was part of a commercial plan, and under the rules they adhere to, they weren’t able to upgrade it. Now we are in a situation where BT Openreach are saying that it is under review with no indication of when or even if it will be ever upgraded.
In May 2016 there was an article on the local paper.
According to the report in the local Weston Mercury, BT Openreach had changed their mind and would be upgrading cabinet 25 to fibre so that we can get FTTC.
In theory we were supposed to be getting fibre by March 2017… then it all fell apart and BT Openreach backtracked on the date!
So last week when I checked the BT Openreach linechcker I was surprised to see that the fibre journey which had been stuck on “We are exploring solutions” for years had moved along to “Design”.
According to the BT Openreach website this means
You’re in a fibre plan and we’re looking at the existing network in your area to see how we will design the upgrade. You can’t order a fibre service today but typically it’ll be available to your premises within the next 12 months.
So we could be connected to fibre in less than 12 months!
We’re drawing up our network plans and assessing the best way to bring fibre to your area. We currently deliver fibre to you in two ways. Sometimes we use a combination of fibre and your existing copper line to deliver our Superfast network (Fibre to the Cabinet). At other times we connect fibre directly to your property (Fibre to the Premises). We often need permission from the local authority while also considering the wishes of your community in terms of look and practicality. At the end of this design process, we’ll have a blueprint in place for delivering fibre to your community.
Possibly we might even get FTTP (fibre to the premises) but I think I am just blue sky thinking there!
The fickle nature of the web is one of those things that I find annoying. You post a link, embed a video and then a bit later you find that it has gone! This was very apparent today with the news that the BBC are, in order to save money, will close down their recipe website. For me this is a mistake, however I also understand how this can happen, not just with textual content, but also media too.
I understand that with YouTube videos you can get take down notices and the link no longer works, or you are left with the blank player if you have embedded the video into a blog post
There are times though when people have removed a video years later and looking through an old blog post you find the embedded video has disappeared as the obscure service you used has shut down, or was taken over.
A few years ago I had a Nokia N95 and used the Shozu app to upload photographs to Flickr, it also had another feature of creating a WordPress blog post and embedding an image. This was shut down a few years ago, so now I have lots of posts from conferences back in 2008 or thereabouts that consist of basically a blank post. The post title was left and is merely a filename and then you get the blank square with the red cross. It is for these reasons that I try not to embed content from third party sites if I can help it.
A good example of this is from 2008 when I posted a video from the mLearn 2008 conference. I used VideoPress rather than a third party site so my copy is still there on the blog. However I also uploaded the video to YouTube and Blip. However the Blip site is now dead and gone….
One aspect that I do find frustrating is when links disappear. A few weeks ago I tweeted (and Google+’d) a link out about #digitalcapability and wanted to use the link again for something else, so looking over my Google+ profile I found the link, clicked it and got a 404, the missing page error. I checked with the author and he kindly pointed out that the URLs had recently changed and there was a new link. No problem, but I did wonder how long before the URLs changed again or the page disappeared!
Sometimes it isn’t as quick and it can be a few years before the site disappears and the link is no longer live.
Sometimes I think, why do people and companies do this? Then I remember I do this myself and sometimes you have little choice.
Back in 2001 I was appointed Director of the Western Colleges Consortium and we had a website and the URL westerncc.ac.uk and the consortium was wound up in 2006. As a result the website was shut down.
Back in 1998 when I created my first web site I used the free hosting from the ISP. A few years later I moved hosting providers (as I was using too much bandwidth) and had a domain of my own. I did leave the old site on the ISP, but due to bandwidth usage it was eventually shut down!
Sometimes there are things you can do, so for example when I moved my elearning blog from iBlog, which I was using when I was at the Western Colleges Consortium, I initially moved to wordpress.com, so had the URL elearningstuff.wordpress.com. Due to a variety of reasons I decided to move to my own domain elearningstuff.net and imported all the content. However due to the number of incoming links to the elearningstuff.wordpress.com site I used the domain forwarding service from wordpress.com (and still do) so that any links to elearningstuff.wordpress.com are automatically forwarded to elearningstuff.net. So I do try when possible to ensure that existing content on the web is still accessible years later.
In many ways I wasn’t surprised to read on the BBC News that the BBC are to remove existing web content and in the future only have some web content around for 30 days!
Sounds like BBC iPlayer, no these are recipes from BBC food programmes. This is from the BBC News item (and I expect like other BBC News links this will be around for a long time).
The BBC Food website carrying more than 11,000 recipes is to close as part of a plan to cut £15m from the corporation’s online budget, a BBC source has said.
All existing recipes are likely to be archived, though whether some could move to the commercial BBC Good Food website is still to be decided.
TV show recipes will be posted online but only made available for 30 days.
I can just about understand a future policy doing this, but why on earth are they going to remove the existing web archive of content? What is the point of this exercise? There are, as the report says, thousands of recipes online that can be searched, found and used. I use this a lot myself for finding recipes and inspiration.
For me this is a mistake, sometimes you can’t avoid losing or deleting web content, sometimes you make a mistake, but in this instance I think that it would be mistake to lose the web recipes from the BBC.
Your thoughts? Is this a good idea? Will it help other publishers provide content now? Or do you think it’s a mistake by the BBC to do this and they should keep the food and recipe content online?
So those who follow my trials and tribulations with getting better broadband, will know that following a move in 2012 I lost my FTTC connection and had to revert back to an ADSL connection, a slow ADSL connection at that generally getting between 1-1.5 Mbs. This was because my house was connected to cabinet 25, and this was the only cabinet connected to the Worle Exchange which was never upgraded to FTTC. My expectation was that within a year it would probably be upgraded, it never was…
When I first approached BT Openreach about this issue, they said it was not commercially viable and that they wouldn’t be upgrading the cabinet. The only alternative I was told, it would probably be upgraded by Connecting Devon and Somerset as part of a public private partnership.
Their first response was that it wasn’t part of their initial roll out. I wasn’t too surprised by this, as I was sure they would focus on the rural areas away from the places that already had FTTC to show real impact.
When they updated one of their maps I discovered that we were no longer part of their plans, it followed that we were now part of a commercial roll out and wasn’t
BT Openreach still wasn’t providing any sensible or details.
It was apparent that there was no solid information on when, or even if, we would be getting fibre…
In a side story, on the other side of the railway tracks, on the other side of the village, Virgin Media were laying cable. Now there was very little information on this installation, the Virgin Media site was giving even less away than BT Openreach!
Then some news…
According to the report in the local Weston Mercury, BT Openreach had changed their mind and would be upgrading cabinet 25 to fibre so that we can get FTTC.
So what changed?
Personally I did wonder if the Virgin Media installations were getting them worried?
Who knows?
Well in 2017 I may finally be getting a faster internet connection, until then I will have to contend with slow ADSL and 4G for my connectivity.
A documentary about the Geek Out! event at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. A group of intrepid geeks set out to achieve a 30 year old challenge by playing Mahler’s first symphony on a network of ZX Spectrum computers.
How did I found out about this, the video uses one of my CC licensed images from Flickr.
