Many residents will have no doubt noticed the recent increased activity of BT Openreach and their contractors in the Village and surrounding areas. You will also recall our August newsletter announced that Superfast Broadband would soon be available in the Parish. However, whilst we are pleased to confirm Superfast Broadband will soon be available, we are sorry to have to tell everyone this will be to a very limited number of (and yet to be defined) properties.
To provide you with some context of the current situation, our telephone exchange, which is located in Shadowbrook Lane, has nine separate BT cabinets in it – some of which don’t actually serve Hampton. Solihull MBC, as part of their commitment to improve Broadband provisions, agreed to allocate funding to upgrade the exchange for Superfast Broadband as part of their joint initiative with Coventry and Warwickshire Councils (set up to improve the provision of Superfast Broadband to rural communities).
Whilst this funding was very much welcomed, it transpires this was only enough to upgrade two of the nine cabinets at the exchange (CMHAMP1 and CMHAMP6), meaning the remaining seven will need to wait for further funding to become available. There is currently no defined timeframe for the upgrades of the remaining works at the moment.
We are also told that even if a property is connected to an upgraded cabinet that doesn’t guarantee the property will be able to benefit from Superfast Broadband. This is because the type or age of the phone line connection may not be compatible and BT will only know this when the Cabinet in question is switched on after the upgrade and the speed of the line is checked by the customer.
Residents can check which cabinet they are connected to by visiting https://www.dslchecker.bt.com and entering their landline number.
Ultimately despite Government and Local Councils announcements about being committed to extending Superfast Broadband to rural areas like ours, the roll out is commercially driven and if we are to secure funding then we need to show there is sufficient demand to make it commercially viable for BT.
The best way of showing this demand is to register your interest with them or CSW Broadband. We will also be contacting Solihull MBC to request further funding is made available through the CSW programme. We suggest concerned residents contact their local Solihull MBC Councillors to do the same.