Cheshire Villagers to Stump Up GBP35K for Faster Broadband from BT

Residents and local businesses in the Cheshire (England) village of Ollerton, which sits just 2 miles south of Knutsford and is home to over 330 people, have clubbed together in order to pay BTOpenreach some £35,000 so as to get a working “fibre broadband” connection installed.

At present the “local” street cabinet (PCP 10) is already listed as supporting “fibre broadband” connectivity via Openreach’s Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service, although the cabinet is more intended to serve part of Knutsford and the village resides too far away for it to deliver “fibre“. Similarly the local ADSL2+ services are painfully slow (around 1.5Mbps to 5Mbps).

On top of that the regional Connecting Cheshire project, which is currently working to make FTTC/P connectivity available to 98% of premises in the county by summer 2017, looks set to miss Ollerton out of its current plans (here). However it should be said that there is talk of eventually reaching universal coverage (here), although villagers aren’t willing to wait any longer.

As David Malkinson, a resident of School Lane, said (here), “We can either sit and wait and see if we get internet, or grab the bull by the horns and that is what we have elected to do. I started leaflet dropping in December and it got a great reaction, so now it is full steam ahead.”

Instead a number of local businesses and residents have setup the Connecting Ollerton campaign, which has agreed to co-fund the build of a new all-in-one (Phone and FTTC) Street Cabinet with Openreach.

Ollerton’s Plan

The plan is to run a new fibre-optic down the Chelford Road from Knutsford, and install a new superfast-enabled cabinet on the corner of School Lane and Chelford Road. The existing copper wiring will be reconnected to this cabinet and will be a short enough distance to enable superfast to all households in the catchment area.

Our scheme will be the first one of its kind in Cheshire, but not far behind us is the neighbouring Peover Parish, who have the exact same issue as us: the distance from the cabinet is too far to carry a ‘superfast’ signal.

The price for the works is expected to be in the region of £35,000, which covers around 65 households and and handful of businesses. BT are currently in the process of performing a detailed survey after which they will produce a contractual, fixed price for the work.

It’s possible that some surrounding areas may also be included into the project, although this is still being investigated. However finding £35,000 from such a small community is no easy task and certainly won’t work everywhere.

At this stage it’s unclear how much has been raised, although the campaign has support from 5-6 local firms and this suggests that more than half of the target may have already been achieved (i.e. businesses have been asked to contribute between £2k and £5k each).

Assuming the money is found then the network should take around 12 months to build and could then be completed by January 2017. Mind you the project is somewhat bitter-sweet in the sense that a community felt so overlooked that it ended up having to pay for itself to get vital infrastructure installed. It’s unclear if they asked any altnet ISPs, such as Gigaclear, to give a counter quote.