Gearing up for speed up

Well, it's been quite a while since I last posted on this topic. Back in July following a meeting I had up at County Hall I was told that we would be getting the detailed plans for BT's superfast broadband rollout. This information would have enabled us to identify the premises in Stocksfield earmarked for the upgrade and those which were not.

I had hoped to present a summary of this information at September's Stocksfield Festival but, unfortunately, even now in November I have still not had sight of BT's plans for our area. Since then a map has been published which I have reproduced in miniature below. You can see the full size version at http://www.inorthumberland.org.uk/wp-content/themes/inorth/img/map.png. However, even when viewed at maximum size there is insufficient detail to be able to see what parts of Stocksfield and its environs will be getting what.

The best I can say at this stage is that it looks like a decent chunk of the Stocksfield exchange area will be getting the superfast broadband by the end of 2014 (and possibly by mid-year), but that's about as much as we can say. The other information I do know is that the broadband solution we will be getting is fibre to the cabinet (abbreviated to FTTC ). The alternative to this would have been fibre to the premises (FTTP) but as this would involve running fibre optic cables past every house it was unlikely to be cost effective in our area.

There are two questions people might have about this:  what is a cabinet? and what will fibre to the cabinet mean to me? I'll deal with these questions in the next post.