Colton Superfast Broadband Why it's important and how we can get it......Mike Postle (mike@mpo1.uk)

…..And in Colton Parish?

Well first of all, fibre to the premises (FTTP) connections have mysteriously sprung up in parts of Nibthwaite. How or why this happy event has happened remains a mystery but Openreach moves in a mysterious way sometimes….

 

In Oxen Park, Bouth and Rusland three folks who live in those areas have put in a lot of hard work ascertaining the degree of local support for upgrading the existing Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) networks to FTTP (Oxen Park, Bouth) and replacing very slow ADSL connections with a FTTP (Rusland, small area of Bouth). In each case, a list of interested premises has gone to Openreach to be costed.

 

Only one costing has come back so far – Bouth – with Openreach adding a large number of properties to the original list, including obvious outliers, and coming up with an unrealistic costing. Work is on-going to look at a more realistic project scope and costing. The Openreach log jam referred to in the earlier post not conducive to the speedy development of these projects.

 

So what of the Government’s Broadband Upgrade registrations of interest referred to in my September posting? Some alternative suppliers have shown an interest in serving our part of the world. The problem of looking at alternatives to Openreach is assessing how viable and future-proof the projects which would result from these overtures really are. Perhaps the front runner here as a possible alternative is B4RN which has an extensive network in the South-East of the County and North Lancashire. But it’s not a quick fix as there is no B4RN infrastructure in the immediate area. Meanwhile, it’s worth persevering with trying to develop viable projects via Openreach: it’s great to have an FTTP network here in Colton!!