Residents of the new Woodilee Village estate between Lenzie and Kirkintilloch in Scotland, which includes 900 contemporary homes built by CALA, Charles Church, Miller Homes and Springfield, are campaigning for better broadband connectivity after they were left with “up to” 2Mbps download speeds (plus uploads of 300-400Kbps) and told that they’d have to fork out £15k to £30k for an upgrade.
Locals have been told by BTOpenreach that it is “not commercially viable” to upgrade the area with superfast broadband (FTTC/P), despite the fact that many residents work from home, and the operator appears to alleged that the housing developers originally said they would pay for the work, but have since decided not to do so. However the developers said that such work is Openreach’s responsibility.
In fairness Openreach does have a legal responsibility to ensure that everybody can access a working telephone line, although there is no legal onus upon them to deploy superfast broadband (24Mbps+) and in fact Ofcom’s regulation effectively calls for little more than the most basic of functional dialup (narrowband) style connections.
On the other hand even the Government’s current Universal Service Commitment requires speeds of at least 2Mbps and some of the new houses already appear to fall below this level. In this day and age you would surely expect developers to be mindful of the need for modern broadband connectivity, which is a lot cheaper to deploy during a build than after it.
A Spokesperson for Openreach said (Kirkintilloch Herald):
“Although around 10,500 premises in the Kirkintilloch area can now access fibre broadband, the cabinet serving the new premises was not included in BT’s commercial fibre deployment programme as it did not meet our commercial investment criteria.”
Meanwhile the developers, following complaints from residents, say they did look into the local ducting some nine months ago and said their engineers “confirmed there was more than adequate ducting to facilitate BT’s cabling but the cabling installed by BT could not support fibre optic broadband.” The developers added, “Funding and installation of the ducting is the responsibility of the consortium, but the responsibility for cabling and accessibility lies solely with BT.”
The Government has said on many occasions that it expects home builders to develop good broadband connectivity as part of any new builds, although there’s no legislation for this. However new rules from the EU are on the way, but they won’t arrive soon enough to help.
Indeed the above story follows only a few short weeks after the Home Builders Federation (HBF), whose members in England and Wales deliver around 80% of the new homes built each year, warned that a future requirement for all new buildings to be “high-speed broadband ready” from 2017 onwards could “seriously damage” future construction (here).
Mind you it should be said that some blame for the situation might also rest with the home buyers for failing to establish what kind of broadband connectivity would be available to them prior to purchase. Had the developers miss-sold this side of things then that would be another matter. On the other hand it’s not always easy to get an answer to this question, especially for new builds which won’t yet have been added to any ISP checker databases.
Sadly we’ve seen quite a few stories like this over the past few months (examples here and here) and no doubt there will be plenty more to come. The lesson is, never assume you’ll get a good connection just because it’s a new build.
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