Operation Fibre | bighton-v1

Please read carefully and act immediately

What is Operation Fibre?

Operation Fibre is a community attempt to bring truly fast broadband to as many premises as possible in Bighton and Gundleton. Currently our communities have only poor to moderate broadband; only fibre to the premises (FTTP) will enable us to have fast error-free connections to the internet for social and business use, thereby future-proofing our properties’ value, and keeping our villages attractive places to live and economically viable.

Why now?

We have a narrow window of opportunity to try and get this expensive upgrade paid for by central and local government, with a voucher scheme that runs out soon. If we all join together we might/should get it fully funded; if we don’t it may not be possible at all, or may have a cost.

What can I do to help?

We need every property to register an Express Of Interest (EOI) – right now. There’s no commitment at this stage, all we are doing is collating a list of properties which we will give to Openreach (the installer) so they can determine if there is sufficient demand and sufficient voucher money available to deliver the scheme.

Please, now, do two things:

Go to our form by following this link , enter your property name and address, and express interest
Encourage friends and neighbours to do the same.

NB: We are aware that some B&G addresses may also come under the Ropley copper exchange – but please express interest anyway, as the logistics/geography may not match the exchange areas. Until Openreach assess, we won’t know which groups of properties best suit the reach of the fibre.

Will/can this happen?

It’s important to understand that this is a difficult process, dealing with central and local government and the Openreach behemoth, and will require community cohesion, tenacity and some luck! The government says it wants rural communities to have FTTP, but there are significant logistical issues, and we are competing for funding and infrastructure deliverability. If we can make it happen it will be a major win for our community, but it needs to be understood that it may not happen (or not this time round), or it may happen but not necessarily for every property, due to geography.

But we must try – it’s in all our interests.

Who's co-ordinating this?

At this early stage this is a loose volunteer group of myself, Jonathan Booth and Bighton parish councillor Ian Johnson. Mark Shaw of IDS Solutions (and former Bighton resident), has kindly offered to be our Technical Advisor and help us deal with applications and The Science.

We will be seeking other volunteers to join the team as we progress, so stand by!

Glossary

FTTP

Gigabit

Openreach

Callflow

Voucher

Commitment

Fibre To The Premises, the fastest way to connect you to the internet

1000 megabytes. UK Gov wants all households to be enabled for this

Separate division of BT that installs and maintains all the infrastructure

Supplier of service down lines/fibre. Would probably be the supplier in this case, once FTTP installed. Some of us have BT as a suppier already, but they only deliver max 4MB to the villages.

Current supplier for many of us, delivering faster speeds. They do not want to engage with this project.

UK Gov are offering a voucher scheme to help FTTP installation. Hampshire County Council are matching it for a (very) short application period – which could make the project viable.

None at this stage. All going well, we end up only committing to an initial 12 month broadband package with (probably) BT. We would hope package costs to be about the same as Callflow, but for between 10 and 100x faster speeds!