Lancashire Villages Accuse BT of Overbuilding their Community Network

Residents of three villages in rural Lancashire (England) – Inglewhite, Whitechapel and Bleasdale – have accused BT and the council of wasting public money after the community built its own B4RN 1000Mbps FTTH broadband network only for BT to suddenly turn up and overbuild it with 40-80Mbps FTTC.

As a county Lancashire has perhaps suffered more complaints about Openreach (BT) overbuilding other networks than most, not least because the area is home to the popular B4RN project that has had to battle tooth and nail in order to fight against the local authority’s perceived intransigence towards their otherwise successful community-built and funded FTTH network (the Dolphinholme example).

However the story in this case is perhaps complicated by a long running dispute over existing network coverage and service availability. The situation began in 2010 when, according to local residents, much of the area was classed by BT and local authority (SFL – Superfast Lancashire) as having been “Superfast Enabled“, yet many locals complained that they could not in fact receive the service. We attempted to contact SFL two weeks ago to clarify their plans for the area, but received no response.

Indeed some locals complained that they were still stuck on dial-up, while others struggled to get an ADSL speed of 2Mbps and a few suffer from generally unstable telephone lines. A lack of good 2G or 3G mobile reception (4G is almost non-existent) is another complaint and a quick look at the map shows why, with the area being very rural and sparse in its geography. A lot of homes also exist well outside of the village centres.

Some premises can apparently get BT’s FTTC (VDSL) “fibre broadband” service, albeit mostly those who reside really close to a street cabinet at Goosnargh or Bilsborrow. A couple of Fixed wireless ISPs (Boundless and Sonning IT Services) have also been providing a 10Mbps fix to locals, but that is quite expensive and also not “superfast” (24Mbps+).

Part of the problem might be blamed upon the combination of long copper or aluminium lines, with many joints, multiplexers and poor home wiring also meaning that what is estimated by ISPs (speeds) often ends up being too optimistic or simply wrong.

The Alternative Challenge

Residents soon grew tired of the problem and in 2011/12 they began working with B4RN to setup a community funded and built solution, which would eventually become known as Gigabit Broadband CIC (GBCIC). The aim was to harness B4RN’s experience and then follow their model by deploying a 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) network to all who wanted it.

According to GBCIC, Lancashire County Council (LCC) was informed of “what we were doing in 2014 and had meetings with their senior people.” At that point the project was again told that FTTC from BT was “already enabled … but for those few that are not – they’ll be in the last 2% and may get satellite“. Locals inform us that the same response continued to be echoed all the way up until Nov/Dec 2015.

ISPreview.co.uk notes that LCC launched a new Open Market Review (OMR) in June 2014 (here), which lasted several short weeks and is the mechanism that local authorities use in order to establish which areas are still being left neglected through a lack of superfast broadband.

However OMRs are not perfect (a somewhat bureaucratic approach with limited flexibility to adapt to rapid changes) and at the time the local community had not yet established a formal structure for GBCIC, which meant they couldn’t submit to it and thus weren’t factored into SFL’s post-2014 coverage plan.

Never the less GBCIC was officially formed one year later in July 2015 and at that time they held another meeting to inform the local authority of their plans, at which point they were once again told that the area was already “superfast enabled” and would not be receiving further help.

Shortly after that GBCIC and B4RN began building the new network and the first customers went live in January 2016; the official announcement about this was made on 19th, although unofficially it occurred on 6th Jan. The project cost £30,000 to start and another £15,000 may be needed to deliver what has been promised.

GBCIC Statement

“On Tuesday 19th January 2016, the first two customers were connected to the B4RN fibre broadband service. Gigabit is helping local people to organise and are now bringing B4RN connectivity to Inglewhite, Whitechapel, Beacon Fell and Bleasdale.. JFDI.”

What happened next came as a surprise to all involved. Within a few short days of the announcement lots of vans (one resident claims to have counted around 20 within a 3 mile radius), all belonging to BTOpenreach’s contractors, suddenly flooded into the area.