Cabinets - can you help

If we want to get faster internet access via our local BT street cabinet it's handy if we know where they are. There's one in Parkway in Nassington (numbered 2, below) and one at Yarwell cross roads (5). I found two in Wittering - a larger new one on the main road in off the A1 Townsend road at its junction with Burghley Avenue, and another small ancient one (8) not far away on a corner on Burghley Avenue.

If you are connected to one of these, and if BT or another operator puts a new active broadband cabinet next to it (or close enough to connect to it) then up to 40M downstream / 10M upstream services would become available. If you are in Wansford and your cables go direct to the telephone exchange then FTTC isn't an option at the moment, sorry. Nassington and Wittering would benefit most, as they are about 4 and 5km from the exchange so using the cabinet chops a big piece out of their copper cable length and hence reduces signal loss dramatically.

So, dear readers, where are they situated ?

Hello World

Welcome to the first entry in the Faster Wansford blog at fasterwansford.blogspot.com

I'll be sharing some thoughts on options for getting faster internet access into Wansford and surrounding villages, focussing on those served by the Wansford telephone exchange ie Nassington, Sibson, Stibbington, Sutton, Thornhaugh, Wansford itself, Wittering and Yarwell.

It is now coming up to 8 years since we got first generation ADSL broadband in Wansford, following a successful campaign to hit BT's "trigger level" for the exchange. 8 years is a long time in technology and we are still using the same first generation ADSL technology with a single wholesale provider in the exchange. In recent years other exchanges (Stamford, for example) have seen the arrival of cheaper and faster services from other wholesale providers like Talk Talk, Sky/Easynet and Be/O2. BT have also moved on to "up to 20M" broadband using ADSL2+ technology in Stamford, but not here :-(

The next step in broadband speed is to use fibre optic cables, either direct to the home or (more likely) to a local street cabinet where new equipment would be installed to use the shorter copper line from there to your home. The latter is called FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) and BT's own product is called "BT Infinity" although several other ISPs use the same system. BT recently ran a "Race to Infinity" inviting users to "vote" to receive Infinity in their area, Wansford came 609th out of 2500 with 94 votes or 4.33% of lines.

As we came in the top quarter of eligible exchanges there's clearly a demand for faster services, so I was inspired enough to create this blog. Comments and contributions welcome !