BT Infinity Superfast Broadband Update at January 2012

Folks,

You may have noticed contractors working by the roadside. They are installing fibre to beside the cabinet and laying the concrete plinth for the fibre cabinet. They have confidence in meeting an end of March 2012 deadline (subject to not being disrupted by bad weather). The BT Openreach engineers should have leaflets on Superfast to hand out.

Now is the time to register your interest in Superfast Broadband and this doesn't commit you to Superfast or even BT but BT will contact you in due course over the available services under Superfast Broadband and the actual date when you can place an order. I am also negotiating with BT for their Infinity demonstration bus to come to the area so you can see more about the service and talk to the staff about Superfast, its facilities and costs - I'll update you shortly on the dates for this.

BT tend to install their fibre street cabinet initially with about 30% of the total capacity and increase this as actual orders come in. As I expect over 50% of Innerleithen to switch to Superfast I would advise everyone to register their interest NOW so that BT can plan their cabinet capacity. Otherwise those who register their interest/order later may have to wait for Superfast until after installation when the cabinet is upgraded with additional equipment. As always you should check prices and availability with your existing ISP and/or other ISPs for cost comparison - do be careful that the ISP is talking about Superfast Broadband. An ISP has to install additional equipment in the BT exchange for Superfast and an unscrupulous salesman may try to pass you off with standard Broadband.

You can register at www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=25795

It'll show you the speed you can expect and the go live date - we suspect that BT Infinity are being cautious with the date of 30th June 2012 to allow for any implementation slippage and hopefully this date will come forward. Do remember there is a drop off in speed from the street cabinet due to the physical length of the cable wire running from the cabinet into your house so for example those of us fortunate enough to be closest to the cabinet may get close to 30Mbps download and 10Mbps upload whereas those farther away from the cabinet may receive about 15Mbps download and over 2Mbps upload. These speeds are of course orders of magnitude faster than at present. In my case, 33 times faster on download and 50 times faster on upload - I think I'm happy with that.

You can check your current speed with Think Broadband Speedtest - www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html?utm_source=mainsite&utm_medium=navigation&utm_campaign=speedtest&utm_content=sidebar

Monthly costs are shown on another page - www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?topicId=25633&s_cid=con_ppc_maxus_vidZ59_Broadband&vendorid=Z473&sissr=1

If you have any questions/comments please get back to me. Please distribute to as many people as possible.

Regards
Brian McCrow
1 Cardrona Way
Cardrona
EH45 9LD
01896 833188
07712 841768