Superfast Broadband

Superfast Broadband will bring you much faster speeds and a more reliable service. In the future more public services will be delivered over the Internet and in order to be able to access these you will need a superfast connection. In addition many services now available from other sources such as TV and films will primarily be available via superfast broadband.

You may also want to look at this page, which links to the various letters of support we have received.

Summary of the meeting at Audlem on June 18th, 2012.

How Will it Be Delivered to My Home.

There are several technologies capable of delivering superfast broadband. The most common is using optical fibre cables. There are several advantages of using optical fibre:

Speed doesn't degrade with increased distance from the exchange. Much more data can be carried over an optical cable, so there is almost no degradation in the service when many people are using it. An alternative is to use wireless delivery, similar to the wireless routers that already exist in many homes.

When Will We Get Superfast Broadband.

BT is committed to rolling out fibre connections to local exchanges in the next few years. So our exchange will get upgraded at some point, even if we don't do anything.

Why Won't Upgrading Our Exchange Make Any Difference?

In urban areas wires from the exchange are run to small green cabinets, which are used to concentrate connections from surrounding properties into a single cable back to the exchange. In a town you are probably not more than a few hundred yards from the nearest green cabinet. As part of the superfast upgrade optical fibre will be installed from the exchange to each cabinet. The remaining few yards will still be delivered via a copper cable to your house.

However, in our parish we don't appear to have any green cabinets. There are only around 150 properties connected to the Burleydam exchange and each property is connected directly to the exchange. So even though the exchange is connected to suprrfast fibre, the final connection to your house will be made via a long length of copper cable. So you probably won't notice any large increase in your speeds and will still suffer slow connections when everyone else is using the Internet.