Fibre Provider

Almost six hours I waited, the other day, for my broadband connection to upload a relatively meagre 122MB video file to Vimeo.

The BT broadband connection I’ve got here is typical for a rural service. Downloading content doesn’t seem that bad, a bit intermittent at times, but it’s only when uploading something that you realise how woefully slow the ‘pipes’ are round these parts.

Most places in Scotland are being upgraded to fibre this last year or so, due in no small part to the Scottish Government making £210m in funds available in their Step Change 2015 programme.

The upgrade hasn’t reached our small village, however. We’re still on an “Under Evaluation” status according to the Openreach website, whatever that means. I just hope they see value in upgrading our small North East corner.

So I won’t be holding my breath for any discernable amount of time in the near future.

Another thing that’s worth noting, is that while we’re being sold “Superfast Broadband”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the speed you’ll eventually get will be that phenomenal, as what we’re getting is Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) as opposed to Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), so depending on how far away you are from the cabinet (those new green things that keep popping up on pavements in streets in towns and cities) depends on how fast the super fast broadband will potentially be.

I know the Openreach teams are hard at it, as I find they’re constantly stopping my progress in my van with their traffic lights as they pull the new fibre through the ducting in hunners of roads around the area.

Och well, just have to be patient, I suppose.