OnTheWight always welcomes a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below.
This from Chris Jarman in Freshwater. Ed
A bit of a shock in the run up to Christmas. Given all of the advertising about moving to fast broadband I finally decided to make the leap from ‘standard speed broadband’ to ‘Fast Fibre’.
The online sites and telecoms advertising is full of offers, but in reality they all rely in the West Wight on Openreach, who provide and maintain the underlying wires and connections.
Having secured a deal with one of the largest Telecoms companies, my deal was confirmed and the order for the move to Fibre was placed (eager anticipation of much faster uplands and downloads and hence better quality video calls to distant family members over the holidays). I was notified that all would go live on 5th December.
Number of Fibre connections max’d out
Sadly I was informed of a string of delays with multiple calls and chat sessions trying to resolve. I have finally been informed that Openreach have max’d out the number of available Fibre connections!
There are, Openreach has confirmed to my Telecoms company, simply no more slots available in their ‘cabinets’. So trying another Telecoms provider wouldn’t make any difference.
90 days’ queue
The result – I am in a long Openreach waiting queue for the next 90 days. My Telecoms company will check and give me an update twice a month to see how their queue is progressing. There is also no guarantee that the 90 day queue will see the work done.
Perhaps someone at Openreach did their sums wrong and underestimated demand in the West Wight? Either that or we are simply too far down in the priorities in the move to a ‘Gigabit Economy’.
Take note before ordering Fibre
Other West Wight households may wish to take notice of the situation as all the Telecom providers are still taking orders for Fibre.
Living in the beautiful and still semi rural West Wight brings immeasurable benefits, but it would seem fast broadband isn’t going to be one of them any time soon !
…12Dec2019 21:57 ROCKYANGELO: Thank you for waiting. I can see that this order of yours is still in awaiting list as there is still no available slot yet for fibre activation.
13Dec2019 19:06 Sauda: I have just chased this with the openrecah team and they have confirmed, I have checked the order and found that the order is placed in waiters list with the openreach team. So, it will take 90 working days to get resolved. We will check the progress of the order after every 15 days.
