BT to light up Penrith’s cabinets
13:00 in News by Louis Mosley
BT has announced that Penrith will be the first area of Cumbria to benefit from the next phase of its fibre-to-the-cabinet rollout.
This is a completely separate initiative to the BDUK pilot.
The announcement follows last month’s news that BT would begin to include rural market towns in the next phase of its £2.5bn FTTC broadband roll-out.
Rory Stewart MP welcomed the announcement:
“This is a great first step in our campaign to get Cumbria the fastest broadband network in Europe. Our needs are unique because of our sparse population and we’ve been ignored for too long.
Penrith businesses will really benefit from faster broadband speeds and greater market access. So too will vulnerable communities such as the elderly and students. It brings a very welcome economic boost at this difficult time.
BT are to be congratulated for their investment. Let’s now push on together to get super-fast broadband for our rural villages as well.”
Not everyone in Penrith will be able to get access to faster broadband via BT’s FTTC immediately, but the improvement for the majority of Penrith’s residents after Spring 2012 could be significant.
To read BT’s full press release please click here.
I feel sorry for Penrith. They may get faster broadband but they aren’t getting Next Generation Access. Their broadband will still come through the copper phone lines and will not be futureproof, as BT have already said they won’t revisit cabinets to upgrade to FTTP. That means many in Penrith will be stuck with 5 megabit for another decade. Only the ones close to the cabinet will get the ‘up to’ 40 meg offering. The only way our cities will get a decent service for the future is if we build a good fibre network in the white areas, the rural places where BT won’t go. If we can do that then market forces will deliver in the urban areas. WinWin.
It does mean many in Penrith will get 40M or more sooner rather than later. There seems to be no alternative proposals around for towns and cities due to the cost of digging. For the vast majority this bandwidth is not an issue.
It would be nice to have full fibre but I definitely don’t feel sorry for Penrith
. A town with considerably fewer premises than mine is on BT’s FTTC rollout while my area hasn’t even been announced yet despite being home to tens of thousands of premises lol. Good work Penrith.
I agree with all of these comments! There’s a politicians statement! Chris is right that FTTC is not future-proof and has some significant limitations, but Somerset is right that it may provide a broadband speed increase for many (not all though and I doubt 40 Mb/s) quite soon.
The future-proof feature of fibre is, in my opinion, most important in rural Cumbria. In the more rural locations, I believe this FTTC ‘solution’ would be a disaster with very few getting the higher speeds, and little commercial incentive for upgrades for many years to come (if ever). It would be a short term measure that would end up holding rural communities back for many years. The more rural locations are the most in need of the future-proof solution that FTTH provides, particularly whilst some funding assistance is available.
In summary and as I have stated before, I would love to see FTTH for all, but I’m more concerned about the one opportunity we have for the more sparsely populated areas.
I think that is the key point John. We will only get this one chance to get it right. If we can do the rural areas, market forces will deliver the rest. If we settle for a quick fix we have blown it. For the next generation.