Deal Brings “Fibre Broadband” to New Homes Development in Bracknell

Residents of The Parks development in Bracknell (Berkshire, England) are celebrating today after Taylor Wimpey and BT reached a deal that will finally improve local broadband connectivity by upgrading two local street cabinets to support an ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service.

The development itself consists of about 730 new homes on the site of Ramslade House (former RAF training college), including various different sized apartments and houses. The project began a few years ago and much of it has already been completed, although unfortunately Taylor Wimpey (property developer) paid little attention to the need for good broadband provision and this left many residents to suffer slow connectivity.

However the Government and Local Authorities have recently been putting a lot of pressure on both property developers and telecoms operators (here) to ensure that they don’t build new homes without also ensuring that residents will be able to get a good broadband connection.

In keeping with that Taylor Wimpey has now agreed to contribute £25,000 towards the cost of upgrading two local street cabinets, which Openreach (BT) had previously said were “commercially unviable“.

Dr Phillip Lee, Bracknell MP, told residents (Get Reading):

“I am grateful for Taylor Wimpey for stepping up to the plate and helping to resolve this issue. I am only sorry that it should have come to this before we can provide adequate broadband speeds to the residents of a new estate in the most technologically advanced area of the country.

I will continue to monitor this situation to see if we can get something completed sooner than the current 12 month estimate.”

The Bracknell MP also added that he thought BT’s 12 month wait for the upgrade to be delivered was “frankly ludicrous,” although in fairness such a time-scale is fairly common for newly approved cabinets and not least because Openreach’s engineers are being kept busy by the state aid supported Broadband Delivery UK programme. Various surveys and planning work will also need to be performed, all of which tends to take a fair bit of time and that’s before the build itself begins.