BT Race to Infinity shudders to a halt in Madingley

In October 2010, BT announced the Race To Infinity which offered the winning exchanges an upgrade for superfast broadband. A number of residents from all the villages served by Madingley Exchange got together to form the  team that helped campaign and  saw Madingley be selected as one of 6 winning exchanges to win the prize of having the exchange upgraded to provide BT infinity to residents of Madingley, Caldecote, Childerley, Hardwick, Coton and Dry Drayton Estates.

When BT announced the winners in January 2011, it also stated that it expected the rollout to take 12 -15 months, so that superfast broadband service would be available to residents by March 2012. As it turned out that timetable was rather optimistic to say the least. The project is now one year overdue with no firm date as to when it will be completed.

BT Partnership Directors  Annette Thorpe and Dr Joe Walsh have been unwilling or unable to provide an explanation for the delay since November 2012, save to say there have been “technical issues” and “system issues” that are being worked through.

After a faltering start in March 2011, work seemed to progress somewhat steadily, and two cabinets were installed first in Hardwick and the second in Coton. The cabinet at Hardwick went live in May 2012 and in Coton went live in June 2012 and residents of those villages are now able to order superfast broadband service. The rest of the villages had to wait longer as tens of miles of fibre cable were deployed during the summer months of 2012. Unfortunately, the cable deployment ran into difficulties (blocked cable ducts, broken cables etc.), and the cable contractor had to lay new cables in August 2012.

By October 2012, superfast broadband became available to Childerley, a very small section of Caldecote, and Dry Drayton Estates. In November 2012 more of Hardwick got the service and BT Partnership Director Dr Joe Walsh indicated that he had “every expectation that most properties served by the exchange, other than those few for which an aerial solution is needed, will be able to order superfast services well before Christmas“.

Unfortunately, later that month, BT informed me that two Passive Optical Networks (PONs) serving Caldecote and Madingley had failed commissioning tests due to broken fibres, but that Openreach was working to fix the problems. It was still hoped that by Christmas the rest of the exchange area should have broadband enabled, a christmas present that residents looked forward to receiving.

However, BT Santa Claus failed to get to Madingley Exchange.  For the next two months, despite  repeated requests for updates, no further information was forthcoming …. until the end of February 2013 when BT once again stated that “Openreach engineers are currently working through the issues they found at commissioning“.

Three months down the line and BT were no further forward than the last position in November 2012. To all intents and purposes, with no visible indication in any of the villages that there was any work going on, Madingley Exchange race to infinity had come to a shuddering halt, with little hope of restarting.

This was reinforced two weeks ago, when I received the latest update from BT, and yes, you guessed it, the update was “Openreach is still working through the  systems issues that were discovered during the commissioning of the last 2 PON areas and that it is unlikely to have finished in the next few weeks“.

This was very disappointing news indeed. Having already commissioned some PONs in the area, it is inconceivable that for the fourth month in a row, BT is still unable to resolve “systems issues” to enable superfast broadband to be available to the remaining villages that have been waiting ever so patiently.

To make matters worse, the BT Infinity checker began to show non-availability for premises that until December had been showing availability. It would seem BT was trying to close the gates to more orders because it could no longer fulfil them. When residents telephone Customer Service to get updates, they are told “there is no service date showing for their exchange” or “your exchange is not scheduled to have BT infinity”.

I verified this myself  a week ago, and even when I called as a business customer, got passed from Canterbury to Derby and back again to Canterbury, with no-one able to tell me anything useful. It was a shambles to say the least!

The word on the grapevine however is that BT is short staffed all over the country, and that take up in some areas (e.g. Cambourne) has been so high that the company is unable to take on any more in this area. Even rollout in Cambourne is incomplete.

This state of affairs is even more concerning in the light of BT being selected by Cambridgeshire County Council as its preferred supplier for the Connecting Cambrideshire project which seeks to bring faster broadband to the whole county by 2015. Judging by its current performance, it is very doubtful that BT will be able to deliver on that timescale, and the residents of Cambridgeshire County are being given false hopes.

The bitter irony is that at least half the Madingley race to infinity campaign team are still without superfast broadband and feel misled and abandoned by BT. The publicity surrounding the race to infinity was good for BT, but it has not been good for those who were on the ground doing the hard work.

BT should come clean and tell us exactly what is going on and stop fobbing us off. We won a prize, and two years down the line we are still waiting.

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