This is all information that I have pieced together from various places, including, local residents, local council, various online forums and BTs' OpenReach site. If you see a mistake please contact me and I'll correct it.
2004
NTL/Virgin Media
The Abbey Fields development by David Wilson Homes hit a dispute with Virgin Media at the time due to a number of outstanding payments from your predecessor corporation, NTL. Up to this point David Wilson Homes had been installing the cable infrastructure to enable every home to receive full cable service.
BT
At this point, one can assume that BT had run out of copper capacity at the Bedford exchange (SMBF) and started installing an alternative solution, Telephony over Optical Passive Network, TPON.
As you can see in the above picture TPON is the orange link on the right hand side. Due to BT using this 'Fiber Optic cable' setup, it was incompatible with ADSL.
2005 - 2012:
Virgin Media
Many requests were placed by residents who are located in the area where the Virgin Media service is currently not installed. The Virgin media service is installed at odd numbers 1 - 9 and even numbers 2 - 6, Croyland drive. In 2012 Virgin media said that it was not in a position to invest in any infrastructure installations and the service would not be extended to adjacent properties
BT
At some point during this period BT started to overlay all there TPON infrastructure with good old copper. Some might think this was great everyone can now get ADSL connections, which is true however given the length of the copper cable from the Exchange the speed of ADLS is limited to a maximum of 3MBPS, with most getting less that, if any at all. It also turns out that cabinet 49T is a Secondary Cross-Connection Point (SCP). This can been seen on the diagram above as the green pillar in the center. It turns out that BT didn't quite calculate the number of lines correctly and they are unable to supply everyone connected to Cabinet 49T.
2013:
Virgin media
In a shock development, Virgin Media extended the infrastructure to supply odd numbered homes up to and including number 19 Croyland Drive.
BT
March/April BT erected a brand new FTTC cabinet outside No. 1 Sandleford Drive. This cabinet is fully equipped and powered to deliver FTTC including the fiber cable from the Duck Mill Lane.
Cllr Tim Hill revealed the following to me today in an email conversation.
ReplyDelete1. The cabinet that was erected (in Sandleford Drive) was a 'mistake' and they(BT) are not going to use it at all.
2. He has asked the relevant council officer to invite Virgin Media to a meeting to look at extending its network into the estate.
I have also suggested to Cllr Hill that we should look into community broadband networks. www.gigaclear.com/connecting-my-community or somebody similar might be the best answer for the estate.
Hi all, I have started a AbbeyFields Community Wifi project to see if we can solve out connectivity issues, lets show that the community can solve these issues. We make our own value for money! https://www.facebook.com/abbeyfields.community.wifi/
ReplyDelete