Urban Residents of Haydock in Merseyside Criticise Slow BT Broadband

Residents of Ashbury Drive in Haydock (Merseyside, North West England) have launched a new campaign to secure better broadband connectivity for the area after their complaints were turned into a game of pass-the-buck by the local council and BTOpenreach.

Merseyside is a metropolitan county in North West England. Meanwhile Ashbury Drive sits inside a similarly urban area called Haydock (St Helens). Most of the properties that surround this area are already connected to a street cabinet (e.g. Cabinet 88 on the SAINT HELENS exchange), which can deliver superfast broadband speeds using Openreach’s Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology.

Unfortunately a big chunk of Ashbury Drive sits in one of those frustrating urban pockets where poor connectivity is still the norm, with locals claiming that their broadband speeds have been getting progressively worse over the years (i.e. as the estates population has grown). It’s alleged that up to 1,200 people could be affected, although we suspect that the actual figure may be smaller.

Gavin Mitchell, Resident of Ashbury Drive, said (St Helens Reporter):

“It has got to the point where the kids can’t use the computer to do their homework. At peak times you can’t get on the internet at all. I have contacted BT and the council but they just blame each other. The council says it is all under BT’s control but BT say the council won’t let them dig up the roads.

I have had enough so I have printed off some leaflets and posted them around the estate. There is a website where if you show enough interest, Virgin will come and out fibre optic cables down, so we are trying to get people to sign up to that. It is so frustrating because just yards away there is an estate that has fibre optic broadband but not us.“

The story will no doubt be familiar to some of our readers and we’ve heard plenty of similar complaints before, with the common thread being that BTOpenreach blames the local authority and then the local authority blames BT. Effectively nobody wants to take any kind of responsibility.

The good news is that St Helens North MP Conor McGinn has decided to get involved after meeting with more than 100 people affected by the problems. Since then a spokesperson for the local council has suggested that the delay in upgrading Ashbury is probably “an issue with the programming of the works – over which the council has no control” and they also pledged to grant a work permit for the area if BT approaches them with one.

Unfortunately BT has said that the area is not presently covered by any publicly funded deployment schemes (e.g. Broadband Delivery UK) and as such it is the responsibility of a commercial operator, such as either themselves or perhaps Virgin Media, to deliver improved broadband speeds.

“Any commercial company – and BT is only one of these firms – has to make its own decision based on solid financial and technical evidence in each case. We will continue to keep all such areas under review,” said Openreach’s spokesperson. Ah the wonderful “under review” phase, which in recent years has become the ultimate non-answer for long suffering communities.

At this point it’s worth noting that St Helens is a part of the Merseyside Connected project, which is working with BT to expand their “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network to cover 98% of local homes and businesses (43,000 extra premises) in Merseyside by the end of July 2016 (here).

The hope is that the Government’s Autumn Statement will next month confirm a strategy and funding for connecting 100% of the UK up to superfast broadband, but there’s always a chance that those in the final 1-2% may only be given the option of a Satellite subsidy and that would seem silly for an urban area like Ashbury Drive where “fibre broadband” already exists.

UPDATE 3:15pm

Extended testing of some nearby addresses suggests that many of the properties that aren’t yet covered may eventually gain access to FTTC by 31st March 2017, but the results were a bit mixed and such dates are of course open to change. Mind you, local capacity could also be playing a part here (FTTC can only run superfast if there’s enough spare shared capacity to deliver it).