Fibre to the home in Wansford ?

Gigaclear are now digging in Apethorpe and look to be expanding their horizons to incorporate Wansford and Yarwell (Nassington too).

http://www.gigaclear.com/ has a "Progress in my community" tool where you can enter your postcode, drop down to select your address and register your interest.

Gigaclear's business model is to get about 30% or so of properties signed up before they commit to supply. "Signed up" means committed to taking the service as opposed to "expressing an interest".

There's a meeting scheduled for the end of the month :-

Q&A Broadband Event

Yarwell Village Hall, 48 Main Street, Yarwell, PE8 6PR

Thursday, 29th January 2015 from 19:30 to 21:30

Gigaclear's service provides a fibre-optic connection into homes and businesses, capable of very fast speeds and not dependent on distance from the telephone exchange or cabinet. No copper wire is involved and you don't need a phone line to have a Gigaclear connection - you can make phone calls over the fibre optic using equipment in your home etc but this will depend on power being available.

Unlike BT's service which is sold Wholesale via other ISPs, and other ISPs using BT wires (Talk Talk and Sky), the Gigaclear service is a single provider for the physical connection and the internet service - although they are developing methods to allow others to "re-sell" their service.

Here's a screenshot of their price comparison as of 11:00 21/01/2015 :-

The "Call Plan" in the Gigaclear services is actually the price of a Vonage VoIP telephone service, in other words if you want a land line phone over your Gigaclear fibre the price is £7/month and it includes bundled call time.

New cabinet in Wansford

Excitement ! A new street cabinet (PCP) has been installed in Wansford very close to the telephone exchange. This will be to provide an intercept point for lines currently fed direct from the exchange, thereby enabling connection to a Superfast (FTTC) broadband cabinet which is yet to appear.

The new cabinet on Old North Road is shown in the first photo below. The second photo (I need to try harder with that one) shows the new FTTC cabinet installed in Nassington which will be fed from the Wansford exchange. So we are going to see speeds up to 80 Mbit/s becoming available soon in our area.

Meanwhile, Kingscliffe and Apethorpe are edging towards a full Fibre to the Home (FTTH) service offering symmetrical speeds up to 1 Gbit/s. The area has been split in two as the new Persimmon estate is apparently off-limits for digging for 12 months and Persimmon are declining to engage with Gigaclear. The "old village" and Apethorpe are 80% of the way to the required minimum connections, the area including the new build is floundering at 30%.

Gigaclear activity in the area

Just an update post, nothing concrete happening on the ground in Wansford but it's interesting to see that Gigaclear are pitching an up to 1 Gbit/s "fibre to the home" service in Kingscliffe and Apethorpe.

As the Northants BDUK project didn't propose an upgrade for that area, and unlike Wansford they have only BT's first generation 8M broadband with no Talk Talk or Sky equipment, the area should be an attractive market.

Gigaclear work on the basis of getting 30 or 40% of a population signed up before the project starts, to give them a viable project. They are also pitching in villages around Peterborough where they will use a connection to the Peterborough Core fibre project for their onward connection to the internet.

The Kingscliffe project may well get its fibre feed from Wansford where there is a fibre interconnect in the telephone exchange.


At the time of writing Kingscliffe has just over 40% of the required commitments to Gigaclear.

Connecting Cambridgeshire publishes maps

The local BDUK project Connecting Cambridgeshire has published an updated map at http://www.connectingcambridgeshire.co.uk/map/ with additional details for each parish.

Wansford's entry can be found here and it says "Superfast broadband is forecast to be available in your area between September and December 2015".

Cabinet hunting

Looking in the bushes around Wansford and the A1 is not without its moral hazards, but yesterday I found the elusive Cabinet 4 of the Wansford exchange on the slip road off the A1 :-

Note the footway box cover in front of it. This serves Wansford, Huntingdonshire or Stibbington North or whatever the correct term is for the bit of what we all call Wansford that is South of the river. The Post Office, Chapel Court, London Road, etc all show up as served by Cab 4 on the BT Line checker, as do the houses up on Elton Road Stibbington cum Sibson, the Stibbington truck stop and Nene Valley Railway. Cab 4 appears to serve the whole area to the south of the River Nene that is connected to the Wansford Exchange.

Previously we noted that Cab 5 at Yarwell crossroads serves the village of Yarwell, Cab 2 on Parkway / Station Rd Nassington serves Nassington including Mill Road which means they have a fairly long run to the cab and a double-back from the exchange. Suttons garage is also on Cab 2 with a cable run of 1.9km so it will be interesting to see what uplift in speed is possible there.

Sutton village is the home to Cab 7 on The Drift at the junction with Nene Way. A summary so far..

1. TBA
2. Nassington
3. TBA
4. Wansford south, Stibbington, Sibson.
5. Yarwell
6. TBA
7. Sutton
8. Wittering

Wansford exchange "under evaluation"

The BT Openreach "when and where" site has Wansford listed as "under evaluation" for fibre based broadband, as a consequence of Connecting Cambridgeshire BDUK project.

Castor and Elton are also listed, but the Northants exchanges haven't popped up yet.

To benefit from the fibre to the cabinet service your phone line needs to be fed through a cabinet, as many are in Nassington, Sutton, Wittering, Yarwell etc. Many in Wansford are fed from the exchange direct, and won't benefit, but they already have fairly fast service available. At some point there may be other solutions for direct lines, depending what the local projects choose to do.

Being on an exchange with a fibre capability doesn't guarantee you a fibre based service, as the people of Water Newton know - they are a long way from their exchange (Ortons) and do have a small cabinet but the number of properties is small and so far the BT commercial rollout has passed them by. It will be interesting to see if Connecting Cambridgeshire addresses Water Newton - a slow spot with less than 2M broadband on a commercially enabled fibre exchange.

BT Signed up

BT have won both the Superfast Northamptonshire contract, which used the BDUK Framework, and the open tendered Connecting Cambridgeshire contract which includes Peterborough.

Hopefully this will maximise the chances of the Wansford Exchange getting Fibre to the Cabinet and other services in due course. Northamptonshire still have their parish survey running until the end of September 2013.

Meanwhile I've seen several users in Wansford with download speeds well into double figures of Mbits/s using BT 21CN services, and my own line at 2.5 km length can manage a whisper over 10M.

Recently we've had Vtesse trench their fibre-optic ducting through Wansford, Kingscliffe and Nassington. They are building an extension to their fibre network to connect up a commercial customer - believed to be a bank. With some imagination the duct could feed high speed connections into our area, but Vtesse have opted out of the retail market. The multicore duct can handle multiple fibres and each fibre can handle multiple wavelengths, so the data capacity of this ducting is practically infinite.