Superfast Stocksfield!

Superfast broadband is here (mostly)

First the good news. In September and October six of the seven fibre optic broadband cabinets served by the Stocksfield telephone exchange went live and are now accepting orders from customers. These are:

Cabinet 6

Cabinet 6 on Painshawfield Road (opposite Snowdrop Cottage) went live today.

Superfast broadband expands

As of today, the following Stocksfield Exhange cabinets are now live and accepting orders for superfast broadband:

Cabinet 1 - junction of Painshawfield Road and Apperley Rd
Cabinet 3 - Station
Cabinet 4 - Mickley Square
Cabinet 5 - Main Rd opp Cadehill Road
Cabinet 7 - Main Rd, Branch End, outside Boots

That just leaves

Cabinet 6 - Painshawfield Rd opp Snowdrop Cottage: expected by end of October

Cabinet 2 - Meadowfield Rd: still looking at into next year before this one goes live.

Check which cabinet you're on by entering your phone number at: https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html 

Stocksfield is going live: superfast broadband

Today I got some great news -- two of the Stocksfield telephone cabinets are now live and are acceptting orders for superfast broadband. To recap, there are seven telephone cabinets on the Stocksfield exchange:

Cabinet 1 - junction of Painshawfield Road and Apperley Rd
Cabinet 2 - Meadowfield Rd
Cabinet 3 - Station
Cabinet 4 - Mickley Square
Cabinet 5 - Main Rd opp Cadehill Road
Cabinet 6 - Painshawfield Rd opp Snowdrop Cottage
Cabinet 7 - Main Rd, Branch End, outside Boots

I got the following information from iNorthumberland today.

Cabinets 5 and 7 are now live
Cabinets 3 and 4 are expected any day now
Cabinets 1 and 6 should be live during October
Cabinet 2 is a bit further off - probably into 2015.

I’m on Cabinet 5, so in the interests of journalism (!) I’ve just ordered a superfast service.  (Remember, you can find out which cabinet you're connected to by visiting BT's broadband checker site.) You can buy your service from a number of providers but I guess that many people are with BT and may wish to stay with them. As I've been with Plusnet for a while I thought I'd go with their service. The maximum speed available on my cabinet is a whopping 80 Mb per second! However, I went with Plusnet's cheaper 40 Mb service to begin, with a view to upgrading in the future if I think I need the extra speed.

Here's what you need to know. Because this is a new technology, it is incompatible with standard ADSL broadband. So, I will soon be receiving a visit from a BT technician (as BT still handle the wires) who will replace my current master phone socket with a new fibre compatible one. The technician will also install a fibre broadband modem on that socket. All of this is free of charge. Next, Plusnet are sending me a new router as my current ADSL router is not compatible. This new router is also free (though they are charging me six quid for postage). I see from BT's web site that they will supply a free Home Hub 5 for use with their fibre service.

A Speedy Delay

Just as we approach the end of the period in which we thought we were going to get super fast broadband, there has been another delay, and we're now looking at some time in August before the service goes live.

Connecting the Cabinets

If you were inconvenienced by the temporary traffic lights along the A695 today, it may lessen the annoyance to know it was all in the good cause of super fast broadband. Today Openreach (the BT company that installs and maintains the infrastructure) were at the new cabinets along the A695 installing the main fibre optic cable that will link them to the main network.

Rollout pushed back to May

A quick update to let you know that the Stocksfield fibre cabinets are now due to go live in May and not March/April as previously advised. We're not sure of the reason for the slippage but assume it is some engineering problem.

March Broadband Update

iNorthumberland have now given a few more details of the planned availability of fibre-optic broadband for the Stocksfield exchange. I've talked about cabinets before, but here are a picture of two cabinets. The one on the top is part of BT's provision and the one on the bottom has been provided through iNorthumberland's scheme.

Here is a table showing the cabinets that are due to go live during March, April, and May:

Cabinet	No. Properties Served
Junction of Painshawfield Rd and Apperley Road	337
Stocksfield Station	399
Main Rd opposite Cade Hill Rd	132
Painshawfield Rd	254
Branch End (outside Boots)	151
	1273

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It is not possible to say yet which properties are included in the total figure of 1273, but it is clear that this covers a good proportion of the exchange area.

The information above (and more) can be found in iNorthumberland's West Area Update which you can download here.

Broadband status update

Since learning that the Stocksfield exchange has been pushed up the queue for fibre optic broadband rollout I have been regularly checking the BT website which tells you the status of the telecoms cabinet that provides your phone and broadband connection. (Just enter your postcode at http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/)

Until last week, the Branch End cabinet was showing as a "Future Exchange". Today it is showing as a "Coming Soon" cabinet with a forecast date of June 2014. I am hopeful that it will be even earlier than that, but it's nice to see it approaching all the same.

What now for rural broadband?

Just as things were looking up for rural Northumberland in the superfast broadband stakes, the county council has taken action which, in my opinion, could leave many rural residents without access to a modern broadband service.

As you may recall from earlier posts, the current rollout of superfast broadband (being undertaken by BT (Openreach) in Northumberland) aims to connect 91% of households to the new fibre optic service. Depending on how far you live from your nearest cabinet this would see you getting speeds from between 2 Mbps and 25+ Mbps. The remaining 9% of premises not covered by the rollout would need alternative provision.

Back in 2011 the county council established the iNorthumberland project to ensure that the remaining 9% of premises would also see some uplift in their broadband speeds. The company formed to deliver this is the Arch Group. However, the county council have just made large cuts to the staff base at Arch Group including the Broadband Manager and his team.

As some of the lowest levels of broadband usage in the country are to be found inNorthumberland I am deeply shocked by the news that key staff at Arch Digital have been removed. If the new broadband delivery team has been slashed then our most rural communities will be the ones to suffer. Our campaigning over the last 3 years has driven the extensive work done to try and deliver broadband to our most rural areas. We need County Hall to stick to its commitment to getting decent broadband to every property, not just those which will be reached now thanks to this Government's funding for BT to rollout to 91% of Northumbrian homes.

Whilst I eagerly await the imminent arrival of superfast broadband here in Stocksfield I know that even here, owing to the rural nature of large parts of the area served by the Stocksfield telephone exchange, there are likely to be a significant number of residents who will not benefit from the 91% coverage. Without the broadband delivery team in place at Arch I am very concerned that these remaining households and small businesses will miss out on a vital 21st century service.

Superfast coming soon! Just as NCC makes the head of Arch redundant

In my last update I talked about cabinets and BT's rollout plans. There have been some recent developments that merit a further update.

Spring is here

You may have noticed new green boxes sprouting up on pavements around the village. These are the cabinets that will provide the new superfast broadband. Three have appeared on the A695: one outside Boots, one opposite the entrance to Cade Hill Road, and one down by the railway station. Here are a couple of pictures of the new one at Branch End outside Boots.

It's not terribly pretty, and I'm not sure why it has been placed so far from the wall, but at least it will be giving us faster broadband!

In the original rollout plans the Stocksfield exchange was scheduled for the fibre optic broadband upgrade in late 2014. Some recent scheduling changes mean that Stocksfield has now been brought forward a quarter and some householders could be benefiting from a superfast connection very soon,  several months earlier than originally anticipated. Details on which cabinets will go live and in what order will be provided nearer the time, but I am working with iNorthumberland to organise a publicity event to take place in April to let residents find out full details of what will be available and when.

Problems at Arch

No sooner does it look like the superfast broadband rollout is picking up than NCC have decided remove the head of Arch, the company set up to oversee Northumberland's broadband rollout. Anne-Marie Trevelyan from Berwick gave her perspective earlier today:

I am very dismayed by today's announcement that Northumberland County Council have decided to make the recently appointed director at Arch, responsible for broadband rollout, redundant- just as all the key work needs to be done to reach the 90% of premises included in the first rollout, and then work on some clever planning for the last 10% presently not planned for.
Perhaps the Labour administration's focus on making these bad budget cut decisions (which will have longterm negative impact on the future economic development of rural Northumberland), explains why no-one from County Hall was lobbying Westminster to ask for a fair proportion of the next £250 million announced today.
Due to Labour councillors' lack of interest in the economic future of rural Northumberland, we have only been allocated £650,000- against North Yorkshire's £10million or Durham's £3.8 million.  When will our elected representatives start fighting our corner?
I have written to the Secretary of State, Maria Miller MP, at DCMS today to try to find out why we have had such a poor commitment, & what we can do to access more funding, since we have one of the hardest to reach areas left to get broadband to in Northumberland.  Funds should flow to these areas rather than to those easy-to-fulfil (& probably economic for BT anyway) through expected growth.
Rural Northumberland deserves a better deal & a fair share of resources from local & central Government.

Where's my cabinet?

In the last post we looked at what fibre to the cabinet means. The question then arises: what cabinet am I connected to and what speeds might I get when superfast broadband comes?

We saw previously that the maximum speeds we are likely to get is somewhere in the region of 25-30 Mbps compared to the 1-8 Mbps we get at the moment and that this is dependent on how long the wire is that connects your house to the cabinet.

Recently I was asked if I could help a resident who lives in one of the smaller settlements around Stocksfield identify where their cabinet was as their broadband speed seemed to be very low. Unfortunately, BT do not publish maps of where their cabinets are but with some helpful web sites we can, at least, find out what cabinet we are connected to and what broadband speed we should currently be getting. If you follow this up with a walk (or drive) around the area you might be able to physically locate the cabinet and thus determine how far you are from it.

Identifying your cabinet

To find out what cabinet your phone is served by, type in  your phone number to the box on this web page http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.welcome and hit the 'submit' button. (If the web page doesn't recognise your phone number there is a link on that page that takes you to a version that works with post codes.)

 This is what came back when I put in my own telephone number:

Telephone Number 01661XXXXXX on Exchange STOCKSFIELD is served by Cabinet 5

Available Products	Downstream Line Rate(Mbps)	Upstream Line Rate(Mbps)	Downstream Range(Mbps)	Availability Date
Featured Products
ADSL Max	Up to 8	--	7 to 8	Available
Fixed Rate	2	--	--	Available

According to that I am connected to Cabinet 5 and I should be getting a current broadband speed of 7-8 Mbps. I then put in the details for a premises in one of the local settlements outside of the main Stocksfield area and got this:

Telephone Number 01661XXXXXX on Exchange STOCKSFIELD is served by Cabinet 2

Available Products	Downstream Line Rate(Mbps)	Upstream Line Rate(Mbps)	Downstream Range(Mbps)	Availability Date
Featured Products
ADSL Max	Up to 0.75	--	0.75 to 2.5	Available
Fixed Rate	1	--	--	Available

Clearly, this house is a lot farther from its cabinet than I am from mine. This person reported they were getting very slow broadband and the results above confirm that this is to be expected.

While this will not tell you how fast your 'superfast' connection is going to be, it might give you an indication that if your're currently getting a speed towards the top end of the range then you will probably get a correspondingly high speed next year. Conversely, if your current speed is at the lower end (say 1 Mbps) then you will probably not be getting a 25 Mbps connection next year but it should be faster than you're getting now.

Of course, as soon as I find out any further information I will post it on this site.

Cabinets, wires, and speed.

In the last post I raised two questions that people might have at this point: what is a cabinet? and what will fibre to the cabinet mean to me?

What is a Cabinet?

Stocksfield is served by the telephone exchange next to the Branch End play area. Rather than run copper wires direct from the exchange to every premises, instead a number of roadside cabinets are installed around the exchange area. Each cabinet is connected back to the exchange and individual lines are then run from the cabinet to the premises it serves. This means that the length of the wire that comes into your house is as short as it can be. The problem with the old-fashioned copper wire that our telephone lines work over is that it was never designed for high speed digital broadband. The broadband speed you get is proportional to how far you are from the cabinet.

Cabinets are green roadside boxes and look like this:

or this:

What will Fibre to the Cabinet Mean to Me?

When superfast broadband comes to Stocksfield the new fibre-optic cabling will go to the Branch End exchange first. From there more fibre optic cables will connect the exchange to all the cabinets. It is this fibre optic cable that does all the superfast broadband magic. Fibre optic cables are able to carry much more data and at much faster speeds than old fashioned copper wire. That means that every cabinet will be connected to the telephone network at the new superfast speeds. Finally, your house will be connected to the cabinet with copper wire. 

Because the cabinet is now running at superfast speeds the copper wire to your house will still be able to pass on a lot of the extra speed. The question is, how much?

How Fast is Superfast?

In ideal conditions it is reckoned that the new superfast broadband service will be delivering speeds of up to around 25 or 30 Mbps (mega bits per second). Contrast this with the current up to 8 Mpbs service we currently get.

The speed you eventually get will come down to how fast you are from the cabinet to which you are connected. If you're very close you'll get somewhere near the top of the speed range, if you're farther away you will get a slower service. However, whatever speed it is, it should be faster than you currently get.

In the next post we will look at estimating where your cabinet is.

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.

BT's superfast plans for Stocksfield

On Wednesday I went to County Hall in Morpeth for a meeting with the County Council's chief executive, Steve Stewart, and our MP, Guy Opperman to discuss how plans for superfast broadband are going across Northumberland.

In previous updates I have stated that we expect only 75% of the Stocksfield exchange area to benefit from the superfast fibre that will be laid by BT over the next couple of years. On Wednesday I learnt that we will soon (in the next couple of weeks) be getting sight of BT's actual rollout plans which means we will be able to see just what proportion of the Stocksfield are will be getting the fibre broadband and which homes and businesses will need an alternative solution. This will give us a much better idea of where we need to focus our efforts over the coming months.

As soon as I get the information I will look at ways of sharing it as widely as possible. I have arranged a stall at the Stocksfield Festival where representatives from the Northumberland Community Development Network and iNorthumberland will be joining me to let people know about the services available to local people and businesses to help them make the most of the superfast broadband revolution. I aim to be able to show the planned BT fibre provision there too. More information on that nearer the time.

Broadband Demand? It's super fast!

In the next week or so copies of NE43 news should be dropping onto Stocksfield door mats. In it you will find a leaflet about superfast fibreoptic broadband which will be coming to Stocksfield as part of the major upgrade of Northumberland's broadband infrastructure. Because it is probable that a significant number of properties in our area (up to 25%) will not be covered by the upgrade it is vital that we get a sense of the likely demand for superfast broadband. This is because if we can demonstrate high demand then iNorthumberland will be in a strong position to secure funding for alternative broadband solutions.

Therefore, when you get the information leaflet PLEASE register your interest in having faster broadband. The more people who indicate interest, the more leverage we will have in ensuring that everybody in the Stocksfield area has access to the next generation of broadband technology. The leaflet outlines some of the benefits of superfast broadband compared with what we have now. 

If you're concerned that faster broadband means more scope for online danger for you or your children, then fear not as I am working with iNorthumberland to find ways to raise awareness for residents of how to stay safe online.

The information leaflet has a tear off slip which you can drop in the collection box in Boots at Branch End (just on the right as you go in), or at the Parish Office at SICA. If you do not want to wait for the leaflet or prefer to register your interest online then you can do so on iNorthumberland's Stocksfield web page.

Be assured that registering interest in superfast broadband does not commit you in any way to purchasing a contract when it becomes available or to signing up with a particular supplier. This exercise is about gauging likely demand.

Broadband by Balloon

As the reality of superfast broadband for Northumberland gets ever closer (see www.iNorthumberland.org.uk) a new technology is being tested. We know that the majority of the county will be getting their broadband through the new fibre optic network that will be laid over the next two-to-three years. For those communities that will not be covered by fibre, two alternatives currently exist: wireless and satellite. However, Google has recently announced a new way of getting Internet connectivity to those hard-to-reach places: it's by balloon. See this story on the BBC News web site for details. It looks fascinating!