Hi Trevor,
Thanks for forwarding on the discussions regarding Fibre connectivity to
the village. I can fully understand your concerns. I retired a year ago
now but when I was working it was in Database support, including for a
number of large global financial institutions, so my Broadband
performance was critical. I realise I'm relatively lucky - we can and do
get around 75Mb/s but I can see other postcodes in the village only get
just over 40Mb/s at best. I've travelled to some pretty remote and far
flung spots around the world and done significantly better than that.
When you think we only live a mile or two outside of the Central area of
a major technology hub it's pretty disappointing particularly as you say
when MKC and others are only too happy to exploit our surroundings for
their own profit.
Reading through the notes from Martyn Smith it seems we may need to rest
our hopes on the Outside In project in a few years time unless we're
prepared to partially fund the installation ourselves which I suspect
would be prohibitive. But we should certainly keep up the pressure. I
recall a few years ago before we got Infinity installed there was
somewhere you could register your interest so the company involved (BT
at the time) understood how much business they were potentially losing.
Aspley Guise got it before we did, partially due to the distance from
the exchange in Woburn Sands but possibly also due to the higher
response to that survey they managed to obtain. We're a relatively
wealthy village so I suspect you'd get a decent response if we tried to
encourage people to sign up, particularly as it's unlikely there would
be any solid commitment involved to do so.
Incidentally, I'm fairly sure that the closest fibre to the village
today runs to the BT junction box at the end of Walton Road opposite the
Wavendon Arms. That's probably why our end of the road gets faster
speeds than you, because we only have a few hundred yards of copper
rather than half a mile of it. I can't see the costs of running that
cable up the road would be so bad if it's as close as that, although
installing it in people's homes may still involve digging holes so that
wouldn't come cheap I suspect. But we shouldn't need to wait for the new
developments or Outside In if there's enough demand.
Regards,
Steve
