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

Superfast for Colton - at last!

Well we seem to be on the way to filling in one of the not spots in our Parish with Openreach contracted to supply ultrafast speeds via fibre to the premises (FTTP). The route we’ve taken is via BT’s Community Fibre Programme (CFP). The quoted price is basically the additional cost to them for connecting up properties in a rural location. On its own, this would have been a challenge for us to raise the money but the Government’s Gigabit Voucher Scheme – designed to encourage businesses to adopt ultrafast connections – has come to the rescue. It’s great that everyone’s pulled together to make this happen. Timescales? within 12 months but I’m told that it will probably be much sooner for a small scheme such as this one. The wait was probably worth it given that we’ll then have blistering speeds and a future-proof network in this part of the Parish.
 
We’re still exploring options for the northern end of the Parish where properties are connected to the Satterthwaite exchange but too far away to get anything like decent speeds: options are another (and probably more complex) CFP or 4G broadband.