UPDATE BT and CALA in Fibre Broadband Deal for New Build Homes

Property developer CALA and Openreach (BT) have finally agreed, following our article last year (here), to roll-out a “fibre broadband” (FTTC) service to “around” 330 new build homes in Surrey (Brookwood Farm) and 260 in Reading (Orangery and Parklands).

The article we ran in October 2016 centred on the plight of new residents at CALA’s Orangery, Parklands and Brookwood Farm estates / developments, many of which claimed to have been promised access to a “fibre broadband” connection but instead ended up having to fight for months just to receive a basic copper ADSL broadband and phone line.

Initially CALA appeared to shun the complaints and declined to help, until ISPreview.co.uk got involved. Shortly after that we were informed that Openreach and CALA had begun discussing the possibility of a solution and today there’s finally some good news to report. The two sides have officially agreed to co-fund an upgrade of the local infrastructure.

Alison Deakin, CALA’s Sales and Marketing Director, said:

“When the homes at Brookwood Farm were first planned, the option for installing fibre optic cabling was not feasible. However, over recent months we have worked closely with Openreach and residents to agree funding for upgrading the infrastructure to enable more homeowners to enjoy faster internet access. We are delighted that a solution is now in place that will allow all residents to benefit from high speed fibre broadband.”

Kim Mears, Openreach’s MD for Infrastructure Delivery, said:

“It is great to be able to work with proactive communities like Brookwood Farm to find a fibre broadband solution. We are working on hundreds of similar community fibre partnership programmes across the UK, which are bringing faster internet access to even more homes and businesses. Openreach is committed to making fibre broadband as widely available as possible.”

Apparently the first residents can expect to receive their new service towards the end of 2017. Sadly no figures have been given for the cost of this deployment, although residents at Parklands did inform us last year that Openreach had originally proposed to install an FTTC cabinet for the area and this would have required CALA to pay a gap amount of just £6,300.

UPDATE 31st Jan 2017

BT put out two separate press releases for the CALA story yesterday, although both seem to have been quickly removed and initially we only saw the first one; hence some early confusion over locations. However we’ve left the original news story in place, albeit with some tweaks to reflect all of the locations, since local residents also appear to have been given the same commitment directly by CALA. We’ll keep an eye out for BT’s revised PR and update if it adds anything new.