As many people know, Madingley exchange which serves the villages of Caldecote, Childerley, Hardwick, Coton and Madingley was one of 10 exchanges that won the BT Race to Infinity. The prize was the upgrade of those exchanges to provide superfast broadband to the communities they served.
Needless to say, the prize still seems to be elusive, and frankly, if I got a pound for every conversation, email, phone call or enquiry made to me asking when BT was going to make superfast broadband available to the rest of Caldecote, I think I’d be able to go on holiday to somewhere nice and warm.
The Race to Infinity
It was in October 2010, almost 3 years ago now that BT launched “Race to Infinity” to publicise its superfast broadband service. The usual plan is to roll out faster services to those who already have fast broadband and to leave those struggling with less than 2Mbit/s to wait at the end of the queue.
This time BT was offering something different. If local communities could get enough people to register their interest, then BT would fast track delivery of superfast broadband to March 2012.
The Race to Infinity, as it was called, completed at the end of 2010 with ten winners, one of which was Madingley exchange, covering the villages of Coton, Madingley, Hardwick and Caldecote, Childerley and parts of Dry Drayton, just outside the high-tech city of Cambridge.
This was a remarkable achievement made possible by a team of activist giving up huge amounts of their time to go door to door canvassing support. The weather was atrocious, being the worst winter for at least a decade, with sub -zero temperatures and the pens that BT provided in their marketing pack had to be abandoned in favour of pencils because it was so cold that the ink froze!
Infinite Wait for winners of Race to Infinity
After the initial euphoria of winning, the residents and businesses of the communities served by Madingley exchange looked forward to their new service to be launched in March 2012.
Needless to say, the project was delayed, but some customers were connected in the summer and autumn of 2012. We kept faith, as afterall we were winners of the race to infinity, had helped BT boost its publicity for its product, albeit in the pursuit of a benefit for our community.
However, all work then stopped and only after a mini protest by the MadingleyX team coordinator, and enquiries from the media were further connections made in the spring of 2013. Not everything went smoothly and while about half of Caldecote were able to order the new service, stories like that of Trish Pritchard, a Caldecote resident, were not uncommon:
“We’ve had two appointments cancelled and the work only half completed and now we’ve been told Openreach are doing no more installations in the area for the time being as they are having ‘problems’. We originally ordered early- mid April. I don’t appreciate having a wire hanging out of my wall which they put there and being told they can’t proceed my installation any further at the moment.”
So with service available to only about half of Caldecote and half of Hardwick by May 2013, Annette Thorpe, BT Partnership Director for Anglia Region, attended a number of public meetings to explain what was going on. Apparently there was a problem with delivery of fibre by overhead poles and a new technical solution was being designed. This new solution would be ready for delivery within a few weeks.
Apart from the fact that there has been no further progress in the following five months, the excuse about overhead delivery made people suspicious and even angry. Several streets in Caldecote have had many houses enabled, yet about half remain stubbornly on super-slow broadband. This is in spite of the fact that fibre cables had already been laid in the ducts and there being no telegraph pole in sight. Whether or not you get Infinity seems to be down to some kind of house number lottery. Even the roads that do have poles have had fibre laid to the foot of each pole, sometimes necessitating the road to be dug up for new ducts to be laid.
What do Race to Infinity and BDUK have in common?
Simple answer BT! The organisation that is the supplier for both projects, the organisation that is nothing but a monopoly that exploits its position with impugnity.
The real reason for the delay in finishing the deployment for the Race to Infinity winners is becoming clear to everyone. The technical issues the BT mentions are obviously a smoke screen. The truth is that they have abandoned the people who worked so hard on their behalf and like a builder who doesn’t turn up to finish your extension, they have moved on to the next project. As always, those that already have fast broadband are prioritised to get the early improvements, while those stuck in the slow lane seem destined to stay there for ever.
What makes people most angry though is the way they have been consistently lied to throughout the process. People donated a great deal of their time to BT during this competition to make sure their community won (and that BT achieved its publicity aims), and many of them are still without the fibre broadband they worked so hard to get.
This is not just about streaming youtube or playing online games. A local businessman told us,
“We gave up time we should have spent building our business to help BT with this project. On the assumption that BT would deliver, we have invested in Voice Over IP and Cloud Storage, neither of which we can exploit properly with the existing broadband service.”
To make matters worse, the recent BDUK project, as exposed by the recent report, failed to take into account BT’s track record in failing to fulfil its promises. The Connecting Cambridgeshire project is making use of the BDUK funds, and I have consistently questioned whether Cambridgeshire County Council did sufficient due diligence when evaluating the bids for this project even though the council was aware that BT was failing woefully to deliver superfast broadband to communities served by two exchanges in the county.
The residents of Caldecote, Hardwick and Madingley who have been waiting for what seems like infinity, would like to see BT get its act together and deliver on the promise it made to the winners of the race to infinity in January 2011.
Contacts:
BT representative: annette.thorpe@bt.com
Race to infinity co-ordinator and District Councillor: tumi@tumihawkins.org.uk
Further information: http://tumihawkins.org.uk/superfast-broadband-rollout-in-caldecote-hits-brick-wall