Frustration of Fibre

I blogged about #BT #Infinity installation in Bracknell being delayed for another 12 months – that’s a 24 month delay in total now from December 2010 to a new projected install in Dec 2012. My frustration mounted further today around the whole fibre issue.

When we first moved  to Bracknell over 25 years ago we moved to a housing estate that had cable TV installed. At that time CATV was not common and was associative with ‘out of the way’ areas that couldn’t get a terrestrial TV signal. At that stage I had been lucky enough to work for Wang computers and had been responsible for launching a ‘new type of corporate network’ based around CATV cable. Something that was common place in the US but not here in the UK. The benefits of CATV networking were amazing – at that time – you could use it for both voice and data (wow!). Seems laughable now but then it was state of the art.

Anyway, when we saw new houses in Bracknell being built with cable I was extolling the virtues and talking about how TV and telephone could ‘one day’ use this cable. Not a visionary just lucky enough to get involved early. A series of companies, starting with Phillips and moving through Telewest (I think), NTL and then Virgin took over the cable. But our estate – for reasons beyond me – was not connected to the main cable network in Bracknell whch today provides high speed Virgin broadband, VOIP and TV. So for TV we switched from cable TV to Sky Satellite which gave us just what we wanted.

On broadband though we were stuck with BT dial-up, we installed Satellite broadband from BT at one stage – incredibly expensive for home and speed and quality was appalling – but faster than dial-up. Then we moved back to dial-up and when BT put in ADSL we migrated over to broadband at speeds a bit above dial-up. Today, we have a line ‘capable of 2Mb’ but delivering shared broadband speeds of 1MB maximum (at low times, 3am in the morning etc) and an average during normal peak times of 760k.

Today I though  I’d talk to Virgin Media (@virginmedia/#virginmedia) about how to get our housing estate cable linked into the main Virgin Media network which ends about 500 yards from my house. They came straight back with a tweet response saying talk to the sales guys. Who I spoke to and who were very friendly but basically what I want is out of the norm i.e. it’s not a straight broadband sale more of a business proposition.

So back to my frustration with fibre. I reckon there are at least 500-1,500 houses around here that have cable but no fibre broadband. I reckon I could get a major percentage of these owners to commit to signing up for Virgin Media all-in-one package, like me people are fed up waiting for BT and incredibly hacked off with 12 month delays being posted without any rhyme or reason.

But my frustration is that I can’t get to the people at Virgin that could say yes or no. It may be that Virgin need 50,000 properties to make it viable or 500 – I’ve no idea. All I do know is there is a cable network in place that used to provide cable TV and that must be a source of revenue to a switched on broadband/TV company that wants to switch on users.

So if you happen to know Richard Branson (@richardbranson/#richardbranson) or anyone at Virgin Media that wants to talk about a possible increase in revenue by linking their cable network to an existing cable network 500 yards away, tell them to tweet me.