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Wincanton is Fast-Tracked for Fibre Optic Broadband

Friday 12 June 2015, 16:53

By John Smith

Over the last few years slow broadband speeds have become a difficult issue for a number of our local businesses. The seriousness of the issue was escalated by the results of a recent survey for the Neighbourhood Plan, revealing that some local businesses may be considering relocating to better served areas.

For a small town like Wincanton that could cause serious damage to the local economy.

Connecting Devon & Somerset is a consortium of District and County Councils working to improve broadband in our area. Their website indicates that work to install fibre optic broadband in Wincanton will begin during the first half of 2016.

However, over the last few weeks work crews have been installing new green cabinets around town which BT Openreach confirmed are part of the broadband upgrade.

Matt Ballard of Somerset County Council confirmed that Wincanton has been bumped up the queue, with work starting at least 12 months earlier than expected. He said,

"Additional resources were made available to BT Openreach for a set amount of time which were utilised in the most effective way possible."

Matt confirmed that upgraded broadband should be available in Wincanton in about three months, but this time frame is a rough estimate due to the awkward nature of laying cables.

Unfortunately County stated that the Bennett's Field Trading Estate is not included in this rescheduled work, and may still have to wait till 2016 as per the original plan. Despite this boost to the town some of our major employers will still be unable to take advantage.

The Wincanton Chamber has asked Wincanton Town Council to join with them in lobbying Connecting Devon and Somerset to have Bennett's Field included in this current work schedule.

Comments

davidsmith
Posts: 1

"Superfast"?
Reply #1 on : Fri June 12, 2015, 16:15:37

This article successfully avoids using the popular, and twice contradictory term "superfast broadband" commonly used in the media.

For some years now the bandwidth afforded to users of the 3G, and now 4G mobile networks has exceeded what the majority can get through the copper cables running to their houses.

Fortunately, at the national scale, these days only a minority have to suffer poor, or lack of "broadband" connection, but the best connections currently available to the public top out at 50-80Mb. Many BT Fibre customers get around 30Mb or so.

3G (dongles and phones) can get over 10Mb, depending on the service, while 4G seems comparable to the Fibre offerings from landline networks. 5G is currently being tested, and will surely appear in cities long before the West Country moves beyond 30Mb or so.

To a large degree it's understandable that cutting edge wireless technology used by a tiny minority could outstrip the main connection used by the masses. But given that the term "broadband" today seems to represent the *narrowest* of data connection bandwidths, it's a rather odd choice of term.

To go a step further, our "narrowband" is about to get an upgrade, which is nice, but it's not the first time it's happened, and it's not the biggest relative leap the technology has seen in its history.

Taking into account the fact that there are countries (and states) where gigabit internet connections are now commonplace, I'd like to think we'll get there too, eventually, and upon that day I wonder what they'll call it. By most stretches of the imagination even 100Mb LAN can longer be considered "broad" of band, nor "superfast" by comparison.

So while this level of progress is understandable, and to be appreciated when it arrives, perhaps we can play not into the hands of the salesmen, but realise that it's really just "narrowband", which is about to become "less slow".

Wincanton is Fast-Tracked for Fibre Optic Broadband

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