Forum for residents of St Georges Park and Long Leys Road Lincoln

[matt_lincoln]

Hello everybody my name is Matt and I live on Mercer Drive with my partner Natalie and my dog, Toby!

I have stumbled upon this site as my partner has mentioned it in the past and I have decided to hunt you out as I am looking at trying to get some response from the community in St Georges Park on a matter I am very passionate about.

Firstly a bit of background:

My partner has been living here for 5 years, myself for 2. And I have been struggling with the choice of Broadband and TV packages we have. Struggling with our BT line and having engineers out a plenty I have managed to squeeze 3.5Mb/s out of our line when BT have told us we could only have 1.5Mb/s. This in itself is unacceptable seens we all pay for upto 24Mb/s!

Anyway, while walking Toby out and about I noticed on Long Leys Road that Virgin Media have cable laid and are offering services to users. Upon further inspection I realised that this cable goes all the way to the entrance of St Georges Park!

After whining relentlessly to my partner and subjecting her to numerous internet blackouts while I tinkered she finally mentioned that maybe I should do something about the whole Virgin Media cable dilemma, which is exactly what I did!

I hunted down the email address of Virgin Media CEO, Neil Burkett and kindly pointed out how annoying it is to live 100 metres away from his services.

Unexpectantly I got a reply! One thing led to another and today I got a telephone call from the Regional Development Manager who told me that it was too expensive too install the equipment in the area without having some indication of what kind of take up they could potentially receive.

This, eventually brings me to my point! As an initial gauge of interest what would other members of the community suggest that I go about gauging interest?

I am tempted to do a mailshot with all the pros and cons, making it as unbiased and factual as possible, listed but I can imagine that most of them will end up being chucked in the bin as junk!

I'm really passionate about this, and not just for the speed increase in my broadband connection. It would be nice for BT and Sky to have some competition in the neighbourhood. I would like our community to have the same options available to them as the majority of other residents in Lincoln.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

I'm off to browse through the forum now as its all very interesting!

Take Care

Matt
Mercer Drive

[john shipton]

On our little estate the tunnelling was not completed 100% for cabling. Thus some of the residents, including myself, cannot get cable. This problem occurred due to Westbury Homes for not completing the estate properly. They made short cuts for completion. Virgin Media said to me when they took over the previous company that it would be costly for them to do. For example digging up footpaths, driveways, etc. In some areas this is OK which has underground cabling. I have to rely on a BT landline. My internet speed is upto 8mbps. It averages around 5 to 6.5mbps due to the part of Lincoln I live in.

[matt_lincoln]

Thanks for the reply John,

Its such a shame that speeds are so sporadic even in our own little community. Its also sad that building companies don't really think about the residents when building the houses. For example, with your estate not being completed by Westbury Homes and our David Wilson estate not having any underground ducts put in at all.

Luke Pattison, the gentleman I spoke to from VM, explained to me that there would be an "area" that they would look to enable. Which includes all the footpath digging and network implementation. Maybe your area comes under this? I am waiting on an email from him with more details, which I will post when I get them.

matt

[James]

Hi Matt, Welcome to the forum!

Firstly, we just 'bullied' Sky to reduce or monthly rental by 50% as I threatened to leave them for Virgin/NTL even though I know I can't! (worked a treat...)

More importantly, I'd be interested if you get any positive response from Virgin, I doubt it will cost in or be possible.

There is another alternative, we as a community 'could' get speeds near to 24Mb ADSL over our existing BT lines within about 2Km of the St Georges hospital main entrance by a process called 'sub loop unbundling' but it would require some investment and commitment from a fair number of people to cost in.

If you get a feel for interest then this could also be explored as an option (it's not a million miles from what I do for a living!)

Cheers
James

[matt_lincoln]

James,

Thank you for bringing up the option of sub loop unbundling. It is a term I'vecome across before but not delved too much into. Maybe now would be a goodtime to do some background research!

I like your approach with Sky, very inventive and it paid off! Isnt Sky expensive nowadays? We no longer use it and have gone 100% IPTV, hence the frustration at our lack of decent internet.

If you would lke to discuss the possibilty of sub loop unbundling outside of this forum my email is matt@mnjs.co.uk I would be fascinated to know what your proposals would be. Its inspiring to see other communities championing Fibre to the Premises technology but i don't think thats a pheasible option for our area?

Some more info on Virgin:

They would not be prepared to invest in deploying the infrastructure without any "unusually" high number of expressions of interest. Not that this should put us off!

From the details Luke at VM gave me, his plans included the enabling of 320 homes with a new network nodal area..costing in at about £600-650 per house. Which gives a figure of about £200k for the whole thing..Now I am starting to see why they won't just throw some cable down!

Although Luke was very positive, he is putting me in touch with the regions sales team who can help me with all manner of things, apparently they have just recently done something very similar with an estate in Mansfield.


Mixed news really.
Matt

[James]

Thank you for bringing up the option of sub loop unbundling.

Not looking good... according to the latest BT data there are only 227 customers using BT line(s) off of our local connection point outside the hospital (where we'd sub-loop) making it not cost effective to do I don't think by time you take into account backhaul, civils, street furniture, BT costs etc etc... We'd save about 3Km in line length though

Now we've started the conversation.. what about a powerful Wifi point to multi-point antenna in the middle of the estate... hmmm.. I can't be far off the middle

I'm off to the drawing board....

Cheers
James

[matt_lincoln]

Now we've started the conversation.. what about a powerful Wifi point to multi-point antenna in the middle of the estate...

One of my original hair-brained ideas was to convince City/County Council to let me put a powerful antenna up onto their roof and hijack some of their fibre goodness. Use the antenna to link up to another point to multiple point antenna over here.


Let me know what you come up with!

P.S what do you do for a living James?


Matt

[James]

One of my original hair-brained ideas was to convince City/County Council to let me put a powerful antenna up onto their roof and hijack some of their fibre
Matt

Ok, I'll give it some thought... we won't be able to borrow any council connectivity but they may be open to conversations about masts on buildings etc... we do need however to gauge a level of interest from others in the area otherwise it may just be the 2 of us using it

[matt_lincoln]

I'll put some thought into a questionnaire and post it up.

Edit: Questionnaire is attached, if anyone would like to have a look and offer some (positive) criticism!

Matt

[deb]

Hi Matt, the broadband Q has come up before and there were a lot of favourable replies re. BT for speed and reliability so do not know why it is so bad where you are. I regularly get over 5, work from home and have had no trouble either here or at my previous house on the estate. It would almost be better to log into one of the Openzones as a number of people on BT have signed up for it on the estate creating some quite good hot spots!

All new builds have BT to start with and then the other people come in and take their customers, use the infrastructure and make lovely black streaks of tar up and down the pavements so I am sure our time will come since the roads are now at the final inspection phase.

I do have some inside contacts at BT so may be able to help out with your problem. If you let me know your tel number and broadband number and the name of the person the line belongs to I'll see what I can do. Send it on PM if you want me to give it a go.

[matt_lincoln]

I would log into the openzones..but feel guilty! Plus I don't have my broadband with BT so cannot log in!

I'm just concerned for the estate, I'm finding the speeds vary from street to street from 1-6Mb/s. and in the future (which is always creeping on us!) families are becoming more and more reliant on the internet and will start to consume more and more bandwidth, if they haven't maxed out there connection already.

Just thought I would try and see if we can future proof our estate and bring in some more options for us.

[deb]

Sorry Matt I thought you were with BT - perhaps you should try them! There's various deals but perhaps you are locked into an 'everything' package. It sounds like your broadband supplier is saying its BT's fault though, as I said before, when someone came on here asking for recommendations BT was up there...

[matt_lincoln]

Sorry Deb, didn't mean to mislead anybody!!

I'm really happy with my current ISP, they are totally transparent and relinquish a lot of control over to the end user for the lines, i can recommend them 100% although they are by far not the cheapest!

At one point I had the Director of the company on my side trying to sort a fault out

I think you can sign up for the Openzones seperately so i may look into that.

Anyway on a different matter I received this from VM today, comments welcomed as always

[deb]

I have a friend on Claranet and he really rates them - sometimes the little guys are worth supporting.

I'm not really up on speeds, I know distance from exchange makes a difference, peak times etc and fibre optic (like BT Infinity I think) make a huge difference but I'm not having any problems, I can watch iplayer, 4OD, demandfive all with no trouble.

You've probably tried them all but there is an accelerator available and tips to increase speed here. It says we have up to 2.5 but just checking mine right now (www.speedtest.net) I register 3.74 (apparently my server is in Manchester?!):
http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/c ... edTest#for

[matt_lincoln]

Thanks for the tips Debs,

Never heard of claranet but will have a look. I can confirm the Accelorater (i-plate) is very good. I had one installed for a while before I had Openreach out and they fitted me with a new faceplate with one already built in.

I really hope we get to see BT infinity soon, Stamford and Market Deeping are flagged up for enablement so hopefully we should follow!

Matt