Long long time since i posted here.. but thought you might be interested. Disclaimer: I now work for BT, but I do not post this here in the direct interest of my company. This is not an advert, I just want faster broadband!
BT have just launched a campaign to get people to vote for their telephone exchanges, to get them upgraded to Fibre technology, otherwise known as Superfast Broadband, which can potentially double or triple your broadband speeds - maybe even more in the future. This is specifically for exhchanges that aren't already planned for Fibre rollout - unfortunately, Portobello is one of them (there's only a few in Edinburgh at the moment). All you have to do is put in your postcode and a wee bit of info, no commitment. Can be either resedential or business. The top 5 exchanges with the most registered interest as a % on 31st December will be added to BT’s fibre rollout plan. Even if we don't make the top 5, if an exhchange gets more than 75% of people voting for it, they promise to look into it further. For Portobello, that's 10,816 out of a total 14,421 lines that need to vote.
Race to Infinity
A bit more info...
- Portobello is currently in the 'up to 20Mbit/s' world of broadband (and lets be honest, there's a stress on the up to part), but with Fibre technology that jumps to up to 40Mbit/s, possibly up to 60Mbit/s, or even up to 100Mbit/s depending on how the technology progresses.
- Unfortunately, the timescales are not overnight - the most they will say is 'by early 2012'. There's a wave of work already planned for late 2011, so I'd hazard at a guess at it taking place around then.
- Also, although the BT Infinity brand is behind this, the work to upgrade an exchange is actually between Openreach and BT Wholesale, who make the telephone network available to all the providers - such as Sky and Talk Talk. So as long as you have an Openreach telephone line, and your provider starts selling Fibre, this is good for you. And that's pretty much everyone, apart from Virgin, the cable provider, who have their own network for broadband. But even then, there's no harm in trying to get faster Broadband for Portobello!!!!!
- If you want to know more about your current line, the BT Wholesale line checker gives you indactive results. Please be warned this isn't the most nice to look at website, and the bit you are interested in is the paragraph that starts 'Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL2+ broadband line speed of..' . You can also check by address or postcode (less accurate) if you don't currently have a BT line.
