BT Fibre Attercliffe and Meadowhall exchanges

[astrasri 10]

I would happily sign up for and pay for digital region. I live on a new estate in Handsworth and I can't get more than 1.5mb. All the surrounding streets have the choice of DR or Virgin, but the whole new estate hasn't got either.

[gaze1981 10]

So, about a year on from when this thread was started, will this latest deal offer some hope of an Attercliffe exchange upgrade?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-29273411

 

"A £22m deal has been agreed between BT and councils in South Yorkshire to extend the availability of high-speed fibre broadband in the region.

 

The new project will be jointly funded by BT and Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster councils, with local authorities paying about £7.5m.

 

It will make fibre broadband available to 98% of homes and businesses by 2017."

 

I'm on the Attercliffe exchange and get between 0.5 and 1 meg which was bad enough when I was just web browsing. But I really could do with fibre now, with Sky On Demand downloads and other devices connected to the wifi.

[Paddy 10]

So, about a year on from when this thread was started, will this latest deal offer some hope of an Attercliffe exchange upgrade?

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-29273411

 

"A £22m deal has been agreed between BT and councils in South Yorkshire to extend the availability of high-speed fibre broadband in the region.

 

The new project will be jointly funded by BT and Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster councils, with local authorities paying about £7.5m.

 

It will make fibre broadband available to 98% of homes and businesses by 2017."

 

I'm on the Attercliffe exchange and get between 0.5 and 1 meg which was bad enough when I was just web browsing. But I really could do with fibre now, with Sky On Demand downloads and other devices connected to the wifi.

 

I'm on the Attercliffe exchange and on a good day can get 18mb with sky but would love fibre! No virgin-media available at my address so it looks like I'm stuck with this for a while. Roll on the upgrade to my cabinet - hopefully before the end of 2017!

Edited September 21, 2014 by Paddy

[ShefStealth 10]

No it doesn't mean that Attercliffe and the Sheffield City Centre will be fibre upgraded anytime soon. There's funding allocated under BDUK for this and BT will prioritise upgrading all residential areas ahead of the business areas and especially the rural areas that were de-prioritised on their own roll out plans. These two areas will probably make up the 2% that's not covered.

[Paddy 10]

No it doesn't mean that Attercliffe and the Sheffield City Centre will be fibre upgraded anytime soon. There's funding allocated under BDUK for this and BT will prioritise upgrading all residential areas ahead of the business areas and especially the rural areas that were de-prioritised on their own roll out plans. These two areas will probably make up the 2% that's not covered.

 

The Attercliffe exchange has 23667 residential customers connected to it. The Sheffield Central exchange has 20662 residential customers connected to it. These are some of the largest customer base exchanges in Sheffield and for them not to be upgraded to fibre by now is scandalous. I've said it before many times on here - BT protecting their revenue from expensive leased lines is the reason for no upgrade!

 

Samknows exchange list for Sheffield.

 

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/llu/exchanges?filterby=c.name&filtervalue=Sheffield&status=-1

 

Hopefully by the end of 2017 we will all be able to access fibre broadband.

[ShefStealth 10]

The Attercliffe exchange has 23667 residential customers connected to it. The Sheffield Central exchange has 20662 residential customers connected to it. These are some of the largest customer base exchanges in Sheffield and for them not to be upgraded to fibre by now is scandalous. I've said it before many times on here - BT protecting their revenue from expensive leased lines is the reason for no upgrade!

 

And I completely agree with you, but don't think for one minute that Sheffield is alone and singled out by BT with this policy. For exactly the same reasons, Manchester is in the same boat as Sheffield is. I know nearly first hand of BT's policies on this matter from a previous employment.

 

---------- Post added 21-09-2014 at 12:37 ----------

 

As additional to my previous, BT have previously openly admitted this policy to PC Pro on the following article from 2012 at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2012/06/13/why-doesnt-bt-come-clean-over-fibre-cabinet-notspots/

 

However, it is important to note that our deployment is an evolving programme; we are working hard to make fibre available to as many premises as possible within the limitations of what is commercially and technically viable, and actively seeking to work with communities, local and regional government to find additional funding for those areas which are more challenging

 

As of June this year, there's still approximately 570 exchanges with no fibre rollout plan and I guess a lot of these are because of the commercial aspect. 570 exchanges still excluded from BT and BDUK superfast broadband rollout

[gribz 10]

And I completely agree with you, but don't think for one minute that Sheffield is alone and singled out by BT with this policy. For exactly the same reasons, Manchester is in the same boat as Sheffield is. I know nearly first hand of BT's policies on this matter from a previous employment.

 

I am quietly confident that the Sheffield (SLSF) and Attercliffe (SLAC) will be upgraded with the Council, BDUK and BT funding.

 

The main exclusion zone for Sheffield is the City Centre, and I was interested to find out how BDUK defined the centre so I went out to David Oliver, who's job title within the council is "Solutions Architect - Business Change and Information Solutions (BCIS)" and is the contact on the council website for the new BDUK scheme.

 

Re: City Centre Area

 

The Sheffield city centre had to be excluded from the project due to the way in which the government set up the BDUK Framework. Essentially, the scheme was set up as a rural programme and excluded urban areas. BDUK defined urban areas as the city centres of the “core” cities (Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham etc). We pushed back very hard with BDUK on the size of the geographic area to be excluded, but ultimately they would not move on their definition. I understand that the area excluded in Sheffield is one of the smaller city centre areas excluded in this programme, so we did do better than some other cities.

 

Please note that “city centre” is defined in geographic terms, not by the exchange that you are connected to.

 

(My bold on the last section) This to me means that as the SLSF exchange serves many people outside of the excluded area there is no reason not to upgrade this and roll out the cabinets outside of the exclusion zone.

 

I asked for a map of the excluded areas and was provided with this;

 

http://imgur.com/5Ytm9s5

 

And finally from David;

 

The BDUK definition of the city centre is attached. Unfortunately, I can’t give you any more detail at this stage other than that the roll out will be broken down into 8 or 9 phases and implemented over 3 years. There will be a detailed survey before each phase and that is when the details of the roll out will be known for that phase. Once the contract is signed the communications effort will ramp up and the project team will provide as much detail as possible during the implementation.

[ShefStealth 10]

I am quietly confident that the Sheffield (SLSF) and Attercliffe (SLAC) will be upgraded with the Council, BDUK and BT funding.

 

BDUK funding is a 'throw money at it' solution to a problem of primarily rural broadband availability and speeds, and areas where by BT consider it not financially viable to enable a cabinet due to lack of available customers on that cabinet. As part of the UK's "Digital Britain" report in 2009, the government announced that they were in effect wishing to support a universal service guarantee, that everyone will be able to get broadband with a minimum speed of 2mbit per second. In practice, DSL technology is distance dependant which is why rural areas with long lines often don't support broadband or if they do, that the speed is poor. Fibre is seen as a solution to this, as enabling cabinets closer to the properties in these rural areas means that buildings that were previously excluded from broadband from a technical point of view would now be more likely to get some sort of service. It is understood that these rural areas aren't ever likely to get the same speeds on mass as is available in the city regions.

 

Because of this, BT's priority under the BDUK scheme is to bring the country into line with the government's promise of a minumum service guarantee. The way that BDUK is worded means that the funding will not be provided under BDUK if market forces are compelling enough to not warrant the needing of additional funding for rollout (i.e central urban areas). Seperately, if an area is already fibre enabled or due to be, there again it will not meet the criteria to be considered for BDUK funding.

 

 

This to me means that as the SLSF exchange serves many people outside of the excluded area there is no reason not to upgrade this and roll out the cabinets outside of the exclusion zone.

Not necessarily. There's lots of appartment complexes and flats that would fall into the central area that you're talking about. Lots of accomodation above shops and offices.

Cities often have several exchanges covering a 'city centre' area. BT exchanges are dotted around all over the place and as a city grows, it's centre expands outwards to incorporate what would previously have been considered suburbs. Manchester is a prime example of this, they have a massive exchange at Ancoats but the exchange isn't classed as a "city centre" exchange where it is physically located, although it covers a large area of their city centre. We already know that both Sheffield centre and Attercliffe exchanges are 'fibre enabled' - they certainly have the exchange capacity to be able to deal with fibre, but if they admit that and roll out fibre cabinets to areas served from these exchanges then they'll come under more pressure to enable the areas that have lower residential customers and more predominently business customers that are on these exchanges, and this will erode their profits due to the uptake of fibre and the relinquishing of leased lines. Central and Attercliffe serve the largest business districts that this city has and BT as a business will always strive to protect their bottom line. Traditionally, this has been by 'sweating their assets' for as long as possible before they have to upgrade. There'll always be a cost/benefit analysis done and if they can get more life out of their older ASDL dslams in the exchanges in these areas and have the reasoning of 'people in the city can already get broadband above 2mbit' then there's not going to be the kind of pressure that needs providing to force BT's hand.

 

 

I asked for a map of the excluded areas and was provided with this;

 

http://imgur.com/5Ytm9s5

Which basically means that the central exchange covers the geographical area within inner ring road, not anything that we didn't already know. That means that everyone within the inner ring road area can't benefit from BDUK funding. We're lucky in that respect in that our city centre is fairly compact when compaired to somewhere like Birmingham or Manchester. Attercliffe may be slightly better off as they may see some BDUK funding but again, BT can play the figures and state that a certain area doesn't need BDUK funding if it generates thousands of pounds worth of profit from that area from the businesses that are in it, and then nothing will change. The government's argument is about broadband uptake to benefit the economy - they're all about the money so they'll not do anything that will affect the revenues generated by a business as profitable as BT. It's the businesses that are having to pay BT these more expensive prices to maintain their connectivity that suffer in the mean time.

 

---------- Post added 23-09-2014 at 13:04 ----------

 

Oh, and a copy of the report to the European Commission for the state aid proposal (BDUK) is here if you want to look at it. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/350760/State_aid_decision_on_the_National_Broadband_Scheme_for_the_UK.pdf

[Gluggy 10]

Some interesting points / theory's in this thread.... Any ideas how they will deal with people on the Attercliffe exchange who are getting way below 2mb connections? Since the Digital Region shutdown we're back to 1.2mb ADSL - we're so far from the exchange that the next street down is connected to the fibre enabled Ecclesfield

[ShefStealth 10]

Some interesting points / theory's in this thread.... Any ideas how they will deal with people on the Attercliffe exchange who are getting way below 2mb connections? Since the Digital Region shutdown we're back to 1.2mb ADSL - we're so far from the exchange that the next street down is connected to the fibre enabled Ecclesfield

 

As more people make the jump from ADSL to Fibre, the DSLAMs in the exchanges become more and more redundant. In effect, exchange capacity has gone up since the introduction of Fibre. If you're currently on Attercliffe, but that it then becomes viable for Openreach to shift you to Ecclesfield and fibre enable you then that may be a possibility. Green roadside cabs can overlap exchanges, especially in borderline areas. In reality, this is quite a long shot. It's more likely Attercliffe manages to get itself upgraded via BDUK funding or alternatively, whatever they come up with for the city centre may also be rolled out at Attercliffe.

 

As it pertains to this discussion, confirming what we've already discussed about the city centre was an article in the local papers yesterday.City Centre left out of the race for fibre - The Star 29 September

 

The last two paragraphs of that article are probably of most interest:

 

Eugene Walker, Sheffield City Council’s acting executive director of resources, said: “We are looking to find a solution, working with local businesses and potential commercial partners.”

 

A Government spokesman said: “Commercial suppliers have indicated they have plans for further roll-out in cities.”

 

From that statement, it appears that they're basically wanting to do something like what's being rolled out in York with their 'Ultrafast York/City Fibre' project. York council have basically partnered with Sky and Talktalk to roll out fibre to the premises. We may find the council offering a sweetener to Sky on their business rates for their call centre operation in Sheffield if they do go down this route. Indeed, if the York project takes off, it should then become easier for other cities to jump on board as the major issues of how they handle the rollout should then have been resolved.

[gremlin_mick 10]

Some nice info ShefStealth.

Attercliffe exchange user here, so nice to hear whats going on with us and the city centre exchanges.

[gribz 10]

I'm always a bit sceptical of statements published in The Star, so i've gone back out to David Oliver to hopefully clarify some further points with him.

 

I'll post back here when I get a reply, hopefully it'll make things a bit clearer.