At the meeting in February with Becky Shaw, chief executive of East Sussex County Council, county councillors and county officers, we were told unequivocally that there would be an announcement about contract 3 by the end of February 2018 – either the contract award itself, or an update on when it was expected.
As at 12th March neither of these things has happened.
In the absence of any help from the East Sussex broadband team, I have appealed to our County Councillor for assistance in understanding and elucidating the situation, but I have not yet had a reply, despite the fact that improved broadband was featured in his election leaflet. However, by laboriously checking every postcode in Brightling, I think I have now got an understanding of the scope of the unannounced extension of contract 2 (agreed with BT, it would appear, in March 2017 but not publicly announced).
There is good news for many people in Brightling. As far as I can tell, it looks as if all the properties along Brightling Road, from Oxleys Green to the outskirts of Robertsbridge, are to be fibre-enabled by the end of September 2018. This is the new phase 3 of contract 2. Two other areas are also included in this phase: Hollingrove (the TN32 5HU postcode) and the area around Perrymans (from the mine entrance down to the top end of Brickyard Lane). There are no guarantees but my best guess is that almost everyone in these areas will see some improvement in their broadband availability with some but not all getting superfast (24Mbps download).
The bad news is that if you are not on the above list, and you aren’t getting decent broadband at the moment, then there are no specific plans to upgrade you. The original promise to bring superfast to 100% of East Sussex having been downgraded to an “aspiration” and there is no master plan for achieving it. I have not seen any announcements about the future “contract 3” and the extension of contract 2 by 12 months (from end 2017 to end 2018) must put some doubt on it because (as I understand it) they will not scope contract 3 until the impact of contract 2 is clear.
From slow progress to no progress. I look forward to the day when I can stop writing about broadband in this blog, but basically, although we have made a tiny bit of progress in terms of information, there is no progress at all in terms of getting something done.
The scrutiny committee that ESCC set up in March to look into rural broadband is scheduled to report in November. However, it has not yet, as far as I can find out, held any meetings or taken any evidence.
I have officially been told, under Freedom of Information, that the e-Sussex broadband project do not have any analysis of broadband speeds in Brightling, or indeed any other parish (not for the past, not for the present, and no future projections either) or any other sub-division of the county. They simply have data for the whole of the East Sussex intervention area. They have not analyzed this data to determine the relative impact on more rural areas, and do not intend to do so.
The MP’s promised conference on the subject, originally scheduled for March 2016, still has no date. You can quickly see everything that our MP has ever said in parliament about broadband. I promise you it doesn’t take long to read.
There may be some good news to come in the future. As previously mentioned in this column the totality of the currently available information about the benefits of contract 2 is that it ” will upgrade speeds for 5,000 premises [across East Sussex]”. There is no information to quantify the phrase “upgrade speeds” or identify the 5,000 premises, or the criteria by which they will be chosen. However, we are told “The first contractual milestone (which will be formally reported to us [the ESCC broadband team] at the end of July) will confirm the first area(s) for delivery and we will publish more information then.”
So by the time you read this, there may be some more information available. I can’t wait.
Here we are again. Our MP has now asked a question in parliament:
“My constituents in the Parishes of Dallington, Brightling, Mountfield, Ashburnham and Penhurst will welcome the Government’s new legal right to fast broadband. Can I ask the Minister if the ‘reasonable cost’ test will be benchmarked against (1) the reasonable cost to install in rural areas which are not currently connected to fast broadband and (2) the cheapest cost which any provider would charge rather than the cost which BT Openreach may calculate?”
The background to this is that the government’s proposed USO (Universal Service Obligation, or the right to receive a minimum 10Mbps broadband speed) is not envisaged as unqualifiedly universal, but will in fact be “universal with exceptions”, ie “where feasible and not excessively costly” and as the MP has said, the devil is in the detail on this one.
The answer from Ed Vaizey, and questions about broadband from other MPs, can be seen here.
Meanwhile, ESCC have at last set up their scrutiny panel to look into the issue of broadband within the county. However, I have not been able to find any information about the scope, working methods or timescale for this panel. I have written asking for more details and await their reply.
I have also written again to the county broadband team asking for an analysis of speeds within Brightling. This request was first made back in January and I have now made it clear that my request is made under the Freedom of Information Act.
Another resident has been enquiring into the business case for the county’s broadband project, also under Freedom of Information, and it will be interesting to see the outcome of this one.
For myself, a week ago I found a way of obtaining an adequate broadband service (11 – 14 Mbps download; 7Mbps upload; latency less than 80ms) at a not-too-bad price and it has been working satisfactorily, here at home, non-stop for the last 5 days. I don’t want to put too much technical detail here, but if anyone is interested in knowing how it is done, do contact me.
I gave a talk on “Rural Broadband” at the January meeting of RALC (Rother Association of Local Councils) with the result that I am now part of a RALC working party on this topic. Subsequently the working party had a meeting with our local MP, Hugh Merriman, at which we presented some of our findings. He emailed me the next day to say
“Thank you for your time in taking Frances and I through the presentation. It was extremely illuminating and gave me an opportunity to learn about the issues and the potential solutions which you listed for me. I was interested in what you presented to me and I am keen to help. We will, shortly, be sending out invites to the Parish Councils for our 2016 Parish conference where I hope to have County, BT and other broadband participants in attendance. I would be keen, as mentioned, to give you a slot. Perhaps we can discuss nearer the time.”
I have not heard any further about the Parish Conference, but do watch this space.
I have also contacted the East Sussex County Council broadband team to request details about current and forecast broadband coverage in Brightling. I contacted them on 17th January and – just under 4 weeks later – have not had a reply. Ten days ago I requested our County Councillor if he could chase them up and get a reply. I can only say that extracting hard information on this subject is proving extremely difficult.
A few people have reported back on their broadband experience. At The Street we have speeds of nearly 80Mbps (you lucky people). At Oxleys Green, you are on the cusp of superfast. Further down Brightling Road, the service tails off rapidly. At Holingrove the new service offers little or no improvement over the old service: unfortunately the phone lines to Holingrove go the long way round.
On 15th December, at 7:43am – in the pre-dawn gloom and drizzle –, I encountered two workmen working on the BT cabinet opposite the Village Hall.
After first putting the men at their ease with a little light conversation, I then asked them point blank what they were doing. It turned out that they were making the final connections to activate the “superfast” (FTTC) broadband connection for Brightling cabinet 2. They also confessed to being the people responsible for the overnight closure of Cackle Street the previous week (so that was nothing to do with the water company).
The next day I used the checker at www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm [NB enter your phone number with no spaces] and I saw that Brightling cabinet 2 had started to offer FTTC (giving “faster” or “superfast” broadband) services. I sent out a round robin email and I know that several people have already signed up for the new services.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that not everyone can actually get the new FTTC services. The big problem with this roll-out, as I see it, is that the people who already got a decent service from the previous (ADSL) connections will get a really good FTTC service; the people with a barely adequate ADSL service will see little improvement from FTTC; and the people with a lousy ADSL service cannot access FTTC at all. From the communications that I have had from various people, the biggest losers in Brightling seem to be those along Brightling Road, beyond Oxley’s Green. These properties seem to get around 1Mbps if they are lucky, with still no FTTC option.
All this comes from East Sussex County Council’s e-Sussex scheme. There will be a second phase of roll-out (“contract 2”) and this may address some of the “not-spots” in the present coverage, going live sometime up to summer 2017. I have been able to determine that Brightling is included in contract 2, but further details are hard to find.
I understand that on completion of contract 2, about 97% of the premises in East Sussex will have access to faster or superfast broadband. However, that is an average for the whole county, and it is reasonable to assume that the figure in villages like Brightling will be considerably less. There are no specific plans at the moment to push this beyond 97%; East Sussex say that they will “continue striving to find solutions for the remaining premises that are not currently benefitting [sic] from the commercial or public investments.” – which I would translate as “we are hoping that if we wait long enough, something will turn up”.
I will be giving a brief talk on rural broadband at the January meeting of RALC (Rother Association of Local Councils) and we hope to create a consortium of parish councils which can exert more pressure on East Sussex. I have also finally managed to arrange a meeting with Huw Merriman MP at which Peter Miles of Mountfield, and myself and a few other people will attempt to brief him on the specific problems of rural broadband.
Where are we with super-fast broadband? is a question that I get asked from time to time, and it is a good one. We (Brightling) were promised our upgrade by December 2015, so the deadline is pretty close! Here is what I know.
Brightling has two cabinets. Cabinet 1 is at Darwell Hole crossroads, and Cabinet 2 is outside the Village Hall. Anyone in Brightling with a landline service is wired to one or the other of these cabinets.
Both cabinets are now connected back to the exchange by fibre-optic cables, but at the time of writing, a couple of weeks before Christmas 2015, only cabinet 1 has actually been turned on.
So if you are connected to cabinet 1, you may already be able to get “super-fast broadband”, or at any rate “faster broadband”. What’s the difference? “Super-fast” is defined as 24Mbps or above. But being connected to a fibre-enabled cabinet does not necessarily mean that you can get super-fast: it depends how close you are to the cabinet. If you are really close, you can get up to 80Mbps download speed. If you are a bit further away you may get something better than 24Mbps, ie super-fast. A bit further away still and you will get less than 24Mbps but more than the previous ADSL service – people in this band are described as getting “faster broadband”. A bit further away still and you will get no benefit from the fibre-enabling of the cabinet at all – you might as well stay on the ADSL service. (I should explain that ADSL is the service that uses copper wires all the way to the exchange, following the voice line; ADSL is what we were all on until the advent of fibre optics, and of course many of us – including all the Brightlingers on cabinet 2 – are still on ADSL).
By the way, don’t assume that because you live near Darwell Hole, that you are therefore connected to Cabinet 1. In fact as far as I can see, cabinet 1 serves people up Netherfield Hill and towards Woods Corner, and houses on the Penhurst side of the crossroads, but people in Riverhouses and further up Cackle Street seem to be served by Cabinet 2.
The best place to find out if you can get super-fast or faster broadband is to put your phone number into this web page: www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm If you see the magic letters “FTTC” (which stands for Fibre To The Cabinet) among the “Featured products” then hooray! you can get superfast or faster broadband, and you can see your maximum theoretical speeds. If you only see “ADSL” and “Fixed rate” then no luck yet.
Just because FTTC (delivering superfast or faster broadband) is available to you doesn’t mean that you will get it automatically; in fact you will stay on ADSL unless or until you make a specific decision to upgrade. If you do decide to upgrade, you do not have to use BT as your supplier. Even if you get your phone service from BT you are not obliged to get your broadband from them: there are other suppliers. Whoever you go with, the underlying technology is still supplied by BT Wholesale (Openreach) but the level of service from different suppliers does vary considerably – things like how helpful they are when you have a problem.
Experience in Mountfield when they got their upgrade earlier this year is that the results were very mixed. Only those people living very near to a cabinet get the full superfast experience; quite a few have seen no improvement whatsoever and there is considerable frustration about this.
I recently met with two East Sussex County Councillors to discuss the concerns following Mountfield’s experience. ESCC are responsible for implementing a project which is now supposed to deliver superfast broadband to 96% of the county by 2016. This figure is across the whole county, so the percentage in rural areas will be much less. This can be contrasted with the promise, made in an ESCC press release in December 2011, to deliver superfast broadband to “everyone in East Sussex” by the end of 2013. Two years after this deadline has passed, they now prefer to describe this as an “aspiration” – meaning that they would like to do it (of course) but there are no specific plans, budget or timescale for achieving it.
Broadband is about a lot more than downloading those cute cat videos a bit quicker. Increasingly services are delivered “digital-only” – for example we no longer get printed copies of planning applications, we have to download them over the internet, which can take a very long time indeed with the present standard of connection. More generally, high-speed broadband is crucial in attracting and retaining businesses in rural locations. Even something like a holiday cottage can be downgraded if it has poor broadband.
A couple of weeks ago I contacted our MP to request a meeting to discuss concerns about rural broadband. I got an acknowledgement that my email had been received. If I get an actual response to the meeting request, I will write about it here.
I would be very interested in hearing of people’s experience of broadband speeds, both before and after any upgrade. A good place to check you speed is at http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com/ This site measures the actual speed of a test download on a specific computer at a specific moment in time. That is in contrast to www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm which tells you what your phone line is theoretically capable of delivering. Your actual speed will probably never reach the theoretical maximum but if you are getting less than 75% of it then there may be something wrong with your set-up. But this is a complex subject, and I may have over-simplified it.
Please feel free to use the comments box at the end of this post to record the results of your speed tests – before or after upgrading – and any other thoughs on this subject – it would be very interesting to try and build up a picture of different people’s experiences round the parish.
East Sussex County Council’s rural broadband project (which calls itself the e-Sussex Broadband project) proudly announces a new document with the latest news: “e- Sussex Broadband Rollout. Where and When in East Sussex and Brighton & Hove, as at 30/06/2015.
The document starts promisingly:
The following table sets out the outline plan for proposed rollout of faster broadband in the e – Sussex project area (based on detail available (June 2015). ”
This is irresistible; naturally one turns at once, fingers trembling with excitement, to the entry for Brightling, which is as follows:
This useful information will I am sure be very welcome by all residents of Brightling, although it would seem that the terms “plan”, “where” and “when” have a special meaning within the e-Sussex project. In fact on looking through the whole document I find that it wisely avoids as far as possible making any predictions or promises about the future; most of the document is taken up with listing what has already been achieved.