Large Virgin Media Cabinet Frustrates Light Seeking Scottish Pensioners

A small group of pensioners living in Barrhead (East Renfrewshire, Scotland) have vented frustration at Virgin Media after the broadband cable operator built a large (5ft tall) new street cabinet near to their living room window, which they claim “completely blocks out any light from coming into the house.”

The deployment itself is part of the operator’s on-going £3bn Project Lightning network expansion, which aims to add an additional 4 million premises to its national network by 2019 and this should extend overall coverage to around 60-65% of the UK. Locals will thus be able to access a 350Mbps capable ultrafast broadband and TV service.

Most people would probably be only too happy to have such a service roll-out in their area (a small loss of cosmetic appeal is often a small but worthy price to pay for ultrafast broadband), although the Daily Mail says that this isn’t the case for several elderly residents of the latest build in Barrhead.

Rosemary Ferguson (82) said:

“It completely blocks out any light from coming into the house, and we now have no outlook at all. We were never advised they were going to be put here, but apparently, that’s because they don’t need planning permission to put them up.

We have been fighting this since January and have just hit a brick wall the whole way.”

Judging by the newspaper’s pictures (we can’t re-print due to copyright), we wouldn’t say that the cabinet itself, which is indeed bigger than most we’ve seen, “completely blocks out any light from coming into the house” (one of the images quite clearly shows the sun is gleaming inside). The cabinet also appears to be 2-3 metres away, although in fairness it really doesn’t do much for the view of ground floor properties.

Generally Virgin Media will drop letters into an area before their contractors’ turn up, although these don’t tend to say precisely what infrastructure is going where or how big it will be. As the local authority says, “planning permission is not required for these boxes, although we would expect them to be placed in suitable locations which have minimal impact on residents.”

A Spokesperson for Virgin Media said:

“We endeavour to minimise disruption and we apologise for any inconvenience to residents. In the case of the cabinets in Lowndes Court, the council was notified prior to Virgin Media installing the cabinets and the correct procedures were followed.”

Most of the complaints we see about the position and size of new broadband cabinets tends to stem from Openreach’s FTTC roll-out, so it’s nice to have a bit of variety for a change. Meanwhile the residents look set to fight on.