UPDATE Blocked Cable Ducts Hamper BT Fibre Optic Rollout in Rural Wiltshire

BTOpenreach’s state aid supported plans to roll-out a fibre optic cable through their existing cable ducts in order to help bring superfast broadband connectivity to parts of rural south Wiltshire in England, specifically the Dun Valley and surrounding areas, have been dealt a blow due to several key ducts being blocked by silt.

The Broadband Delivery UK based project in Wiltshire currently aims to ensure that BT’s ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable FTTC network coverage reaches 91% of local premises by the end of March 2016. Regular readers might also recall that the Dun Valley area was the scene of some controversy last year between BT’s plan and a rival project from Gigaclear (here).

Gigaclear had tentatively planned to deploy a significantly faster 1000Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) network in much of the same area, although they were later left with little choice but to pull out (i.e. it didn’t make commercial sense anymore) after the local Wiltshire County Council suddenly decided to add the area onto their state aid fuelled BDUK / BT deployment map.

Matthew Hare, Gigaclears CEO, said last year:

“It is really quite a surprise to us the GWB have made the announcement that they have. We have kept them fully informed of where we are engaged with communities and making progress on securing the demand we need to make what is a sizeable capital investment.

Given the scope of the job that they have to do and their limited funding, you would think that it would be in their interests (GWB, ratepayers, taxpayers and BDUK) to prioritise areas where there is no realistic chance of commercial NGA, rather than prioritise the areas where there is a reasonable chance of a commercial solution.”

Never the less BT’s project did at least mean that locals in Pitton, Farley, East + West Grimstead and Winterslow would still benefit from faster FTTC based “fibre broadband” connectivity, even if it wouldn’t be able to match Gigaclear’s promised 1000Mbps that also wouldn’t have required any state aid.

At the time it was stated that the first customers would be able to connect to BT’s new network by the end of Summer 2014. Sadly the summer came and went without much progress and a recent update from the local Pitton & Farley Parish Council appears to reveal why (note: we’ve converted the update into text form because it was originally posted as an image file).

Pitton & Farley Parish Council Statement

You may recall that Wiltshire Online made an announcement on 23rd January 2014 to the effect that a BT Infinity service would be available in most of the parish by late summer 2014.

Late summer has passed, and we have recently received the latest information from the project team. Many of the ducts carrying the existing cable from the exchange in Farley are blocked with silt and it has proved impossible to lay the new fibre cables in them. Moreover it has also proved impossible to easily clear the ducts. Consequently, road(s) need to be closed in order for BT to occupy the road and dig down to investigate the precise nature of the blockages. After the required three months’ notice, road closures are expected in the second half of January 2015.

It is difficult to say at this stage exactly how long it will take to clear the blockages. It may be that new ducts will need to be installed before the work of laying the fibre cable can begin. Hence it is not possible today to give any estimate of when BT Infinity will now be available in the parish. The Parish Council will make every effort to ensure that the latest state of the project is known to us, and will keep you informed through notices such as this, and through the parish website.

At present the project’s website anticipates that the new service won’t be available until late 2015 and we’re currently attempting to get a more detailed update from BTOpenreach. Naturally locals are quite disappointed, not least because Gigaclear might well have been able to deploy a better service by now had they been able.

It should be said that blocked cable ducts are something that BTOpenreach has also had to contend with in other areas too, which sadly does have a nasty habit of causing delays to the deployment of local connectivity. Unfortunately this is also one of the reasons why no amount of pre-planning can ever be perfectly reliable until you get boots on the ground.

UPDATE 14th Jan 2015

It looks like better news than expected is on the way for related locals.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Our engineers have been working extremely hard to deliver fibre broadband throughout Southern Wiltshire and the Dun Valley on behalf of the Great Western Broadband partnership.

As is usual of an engineering project as large and complex as this our engineers face a number of challenges. More than 35km of new fibre and sub duct have been installed between Salisbury and Farley in addition to the surrounding communities in the area. Large parts of this work required specialist equipment to clear numerous sections of ducts that had become blocked with silt. More than 100man days of work has been carried out on de-silting the duct serving the Farley exchange alone.

This issue has now been resolved and premises in Farley and Pitton that are served by the Farley exchange should be able to place their orders before the end of the month.”

Apparently Openreach also made good use of their Gulley Sucker machine to tackle the ducts.