14. March 2014 - A helpful correspondent noticed that the status of the Weaverham exchange on the BT Openreach where and when website changed from "Under Evaluation" to "Coming Soon" recently, and has now advanced to "Accepting Orders", though BT's website doesn't say fibre is available yet.

4. March 2014 - Connecting Cheshire have sent us another Update, which doesn't seem to be on their website yet, but you can download a copy from this link (it's a PDF, so you'll need a suitable reader such as Adobe).

Your Editor attended another Connecting Cheshire Conference on Friday 6. December, and was pleased to learn that the Weaverham Exchange (BT Code MRWEA, which serves almost all of Acton Bridge) will be in the first phase of upgrades as Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) is rolled out by BT Openreach across rural Cheshire. This phase should start becoming available at the end of March 2014, and be finished during the summer. We don't know to what extent this improvement in timescale has resulted from the efforts of your Parish Council in attending such conferences and presentations, and pressing the case for rural broadband during our constant engagement with CC and BT, but it's very good news.

You can learn more about locations and roll-out phases from Connecting Cheshire's news page. You can also download their latest hi-res map (5MB PDF), now showing Parish boundaries, by clicking on the link on the CC page, or directly from here.

You'll notice a few anomalies on the map, such as a blue area around the River Weaver by Little Leigh. For reasons of legacy cable routing, some premises here are served by the Comberbach Exchange and will not benefit from the Weaverham upgrade. There are also some parts of Weaverham itself where the rollout will be a little later, owing to trunking access or other engineering issues. However, the databases used for generating the mapping are quite crude, and there will be many localised variations.

Having cracked the "chicken and egg" problem by getting fibre into the ground before demand is proven, BT Openreach and Connecting Cheshire are understandably anxious to get a return on their £30M investment, and this will be the ongoing role of Digital Champions in the various Parishes. It's important to realise that the substantial improvement in bandwidth resulting from the fibre will only be available to subscribers who pay a premium to their Internet Service Provider to upgrade to a faster package. I don't think this has been made as clear as it might be, but one advantage of the Openreach roll-out (as opposed to come other cable providers, such as Sky or Virgin) is that any ISP (such as PlusNet, TalkTalk, Tiscali and so on) can offer products over the Openreach network, so subscribers can shop around for the most appropriate deal.

At Question Time, your Editor asked the 6. December conference whether BT / CC would consider supplying high-speed WiFi to neighbourhood meeting places, such as our own Parish Rooms, where it could act as a demonstration facility to encourage uptake of the FTTC services. After all, it may be difficult for some customers to quantify what the benefits would be. In return, the Parish Council would offer to run surgeries for potential users, who could bring their own laptops, tablets and so on to try it for themselves. A continuing benefit would be that future users of the Parish Rooms would be able to log on to the Internet during meetings, such as when the Parish Council needs to discuss Planning Documents on the Cheshire West & Chester website, which is not possible from there at present.

Here is a link to the new Business pages for Connecting Cheshire, and you can read their Project Update newsletters on their Resources and Links page (opens in a new window).

Your Editor attended a presentation by Andrew Arditti of Connecting Cheshire at the Weaverham Parish Council meeting on Monday 16. September, but unfortunately this was very brief, and the local Digital Champion was abroad on business.

Speakers included Julian Cobley and Andrew Arditti, of Connecting Cheshire Partnership (CCP); Howard Hopwood, Deputy Chair of Cheshire & Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership; Bill Murphy, Managing Director of BT - Next Generation Access; and John Williams, representing Rainow Broadband Group, who presented a Community Case Study of how his village had brought forward FTTC to the parts served by the Bollington Exchange.

This was an opportunity for CCP to build on the recent announcement of awarding a contract to BT to accelerate the rollout of SFB in Cheshire, bringing "Fibre to the Cabinet" connectivity to many more premises. See the June Update PDF for more details. Questions were taken, including one from your Editor, put "on behalf of his grandchildren", as to whether this new funding would mean that local exchanges such as ours in Weaverham (Code MRWEA) would now automatically move up the pecking order from its present status as "Not Currently in Rollout Plans". Unfortunately Mr Murphy had left by then, and Mr Steve Edwards from BT was unable to give any assurances about specific exchanges, as the upgrade schedule will depend on the outcome of a detailed survey of the engineering practicalities across the County, which was started on receipt of the contract but will not be complete until December 2013.

Your Editor attended another SuperFast Broadband (SFB) event at Marthall Village Hall on Friday 1. March 2013, and reported to the following meeting of Acton Bridge Parish Council. The event was chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon. George Osborne MP, in whose Tatton constituency Marthall lies. Other speakers included Mrs Kathy Doyle from Over Peover, local businessman Steve Jones, Bill Murphy from BT, and Julian Cobley from Connecting Cheshire. The Government is allocating £530M to facilitate the roll-out of faster (if not always super-fast) broadband, mainly as Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC), in rural areas.

The speakers, and some of the audience who asked questions, emphasised the disadvantage suffered by rural communities as so many services come to depend on the Internet, and having a fast connection. For example, most Government departments such as DWP and HMRC insist on electronic communication, and we have seen this ourselves with CWAC regarding planning documents. Education is going the same way, and many children and higher education students are expected to "log in" to download homework and projects, and upload the results of their work. Add to this the trend towards TV catch-up such as BBC iPlayer and films from the likes of Netflix, and the problem is compounded. It's even worse for small businesses, who may need to exchange large files and operate remotely.

Frustration was expressed that BT are rolling out "infinity" fibre to the premises (FTTP), offering tens or hundreds of Mb/s in many urban areas, while large tracts of the country can't even get broadband, never mind super-fast. It's unrealistic for Acton Bridge to expect FTTP, as our population density is too low, so the best we can realistically hope for is an increase from the present 2Mb/s or so download to perhaps 6Mb/s or 10Mb/s via FTTC. That would be enough for most domestic users, so if we as a village, or perhaps in concert with our Ward neighbours in Weaverham, Cuddington and Dutton put pressure on BT through Connecting Cheshire, we might improve our chances. However, at the moment, our local exchange in Weaverham (BT code MRWEA) doesn't even have a date for FTTC capability.

Update 21. November
We've just received the following message from Chris Capes at Cheshire West & Chester Council :-

Dear Digital Champion,
Thank you for attending the Digital Champions Event on the 25th October, we hope you found the supporting information sent out to be useful. We want to keep you up to date with the latest information and are acutely aware you are waiting for a template from us to gather information from your communities. We attended an event last week with Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) and they informed us they will be releasing a toolkit at the end of November for us and communities to use. We therefore feel that it will make sense to wait till that toolkit is available before we send out the templates to you as we want to make sure that it is right first time.
We hope that this doesn’t cause you any problems and thank you for your patience, please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions in the meantime.
Kind Regards
Chris Capes
Cheshire West and Chester

When we have the template, I'll write again to those who kindly participated last time (see below) so that we can form a common response to Connecting Cheshire.

Steve Pardoe
Acton Bridge Parish Council

Please type this address into your e-mail message It's shown as an image to reduce spam

[#1] "Superfast" hasn't really been defined, but in practice it means at least 10Mb/s, or significantly faster than is possible via copper telephone lines all the way from the local exchange (in our case, Weaverham) to the home. This increase can be achieved by running fibre-optic cables into the home (as is available in many urban areas, known as FTTH) or, more realistically, by fibre just to the familiar green kerbside cabinets much closer to consumers (known as FTTC) with the final link to homes via the existing copper. Other options include 3G phone "dongles", local line-of-sight microwave links, connections over the utility networks, and even satellite up / down-links. These high speeds are most useful if you are streaming video such as BBC iPlayer, using Skype or other video conferencing, downloading films, and so on; but, like most improvements, today's "nice to have" can become tomorrow's "bare minimum". It's notable that the EU has very much more ambitious speed targets than the UK.

[#2] You can find out your own actual download and upload speeds via free websites such as Broadband Speed Checker,
broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk, or get an estimate from BT by entering your phone number into their web page
productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=25795.
The upload (your home to the exchange) speed is typically only about a quarter of the download (exchange to your home) speed - that's the "A" in "ADSL". Most Internet users don't upload large files, so it's usually less important.
In my own case, I have noticed a recent improvement (from about 500kb/s to 2,400kb/s), though I don't know whether this is a permanent feature or just lucky. BT's "Infinity" fibre-based product isn't available on the Weaverham exchange, and at present BT have no firm plans to make it so, but you can register interest on the BT website by looking for BT Infinity. It was through just such registration of interest that we got ordinary ADSL broadband into Weaverham several years ago.

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