Lancashire Villages Accuse BT of Overbuilding their Community Network

Before long new telegraph poles, with fibre optic infrastructure attached, were going up and associated street works began causing temporary disruption on local roads. Similarly BT leafleted local villages during the end of January.

On top of that several new banners for the “Superfast Lancashire” project have been erected on nearby roads, with GBCIC’s David Ford alleging that two of B4RN’s notices were also “torn down” and one replaced with an SFL banner.

Since then the activity has calmed down, although you can still spot the odd Openreach engineering team working in the area. So far most of the work appears to be focused upon connecting just the village centres, with those in the sparse outlying areas seeing little activity. By comparison GBCIC hopes to connect everybody who wants the service.

(One of the new poles that Openreach just built)

A quick check of the Superfast Openreach website confirms that the area is currently being surveyed as part of a “fibre broadband” deployment. Digging deeper and we note that some of the local cabinets are marked as being set to go live with FTTC by October 2016. Some locals have separately indicated that certain areas might also be getting 330Mbps FTTP, although this hasn’t been confirmed.

Edward Hibbert, Resident of Loud Bridge and GBCIC Volunteer, said:

“Broadband or lack of, in rural areas is more than a frustration – it’s damaging to people’s lives and livelihoods. B4RN and their organisers in this area Gigabit are showing brilliantly what can be achieved if people put their minds and spades to it, and BT’s response is to try to quickly kill it off by suddenly becoming very active in long neglected areas.

This is especially crazy when what BT will finally offer is a much worse service in every respect. Councils should be supporting schemes like B4RN – not subsidising a monopoly to undermine them, especially when I understand that our council knew exactly what we were doing.”

GBCIC’s David Ford also claims to have quizzed one of the contractors (MJ Quinn) and they informed him that the work had followed an “urgent request from BT” and that they were allegedly under pressure to get the fibre laid before the end of February 2016 (the final bits of infrastructure will probably be built later this year).

Furthermore the contractor is alleged to have said that the “area wasn’t being planned for previously but that they’d suddenly got the orders to run three long routes of fibre into the area from Longridge, Broughton and Bilsborrow.”

At this point it’s hard to see the situation as merely a coincidence, especially as it comes after years of precious little movement or acknowledgement of the problem from the local authority.. until B4RN turned up. Mind you it should be said that speaking to engineers directly, especially third-party contractors, does not always yield the most accurate of information.

Naturally we also attempted to quiz Openreach about their activity in the area, although their response is more a general statement of circumstance than a specific reply to the above concerns.

An Openreach Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Openreach has been working closely with Lancashire County Council on the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme.

We started our BDUK roll-out in Lancashire in 2012 and we’re pleased that we recently agreed the next phase of deployment with the council to take fibre coverage even further.

We operate in an open and competitive market, and all providers have the opportunity to outline their plans to the council before any decisions on state aid are made.

We will only cover homes as outlined in the ‘intervention’ area provided to us by the council, and we welcome any investment that brings homes and businesses a greater choice of providers.”

Openreach did however note that the relevant areas were not among those where they are excluded from building and there is a possibility that some postcodes may indeed be covered by more than one network, not least because small villages do not always have a dedicated telephone exchange (this can make it difficult to precisely separate coverage by operator / network).

Meanwhile GBCIC and many in the local area still perceive Openreach’s deployment to be little more than a waste of money, which with a bit of common sense could so easily have been better spent on extending coverage into areas that won’t benefit from an alternative network platform. The latter approach may also be the best way for BT to defend against B4RN’s advance.

Not that any of this is impacting GBCIC’s deployment and if anything local support appears to be strengthening. “Most here see the sudden action by BT as being somewhat heavy handed and inappropriate and can’t wait to get connected so they can stop using their BT lines altogether,” said GBCIC’s David Ford.

On the other hand the situation does mean that many residents could soon have access to a choice of two new next generation broadband networks, which is something that normally doesn’t exist for most rural communities and that’s a positive thing.