Broadband for Milton Keynes

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Wednesday 17th September 

MK Wireless Pilot Update

Milton Keynes Council's Head of IT, Mr Jewell, has given me an update on the wireless pilot:

  1. Everybody that has registered with the Pilot should expect a letter from the Council by the end of next week. This will contain the terms and conditions of the pilot. Please sign and return immediately.
     
  2. The council will be providing updates on the Pilot's progress via web pages. The pages will be ready in 3 weeks. The Group shall be advised of the links.
     
  3. The Pilot is going very well. NTL have installed equipment at Linford Wood Tower. Three transceivers have been deployed. The antennae have been initially set to give a 270º beam-width directed to the west, south and east of the tower. This will be adjusted as engineering decisions dictate.
     
  4. 370 names have been received from the MK Broadband Action Group. This brings the number of residents that the council has available to 400.
     
  5. 200 residents will be selected from the 400. Who will be picked is determined by engineering decisions. The aim is to provide the widest coverage of Milton Keynes. Initially "easy" sites will be chosen and deployed, progressing to the more challenging. The first connections have been pencilled in for the week starting 6th October.
     
  6. There is a range limit of 5km from the tower at Linford Wood. This is set by technical constraints.
     
  7. Planning has started using "Plato", a software modelling tool that "knows" about topology and radio propagation at 10GHz.
     
  8. NTL, the Council's partner in the pilot, will provide a variety of products from their "NTL World" range. 150kbps, 600kbps, 1Mbps will be offered.
     
  9. The pilot registration page at http://www.anotherurl.com/bbreg/ will continue. Further names will be collected and used as a reserve list.

Planning next week's meeting with BT

There's an informal meeting with BT next week. I shall be attending, along with two members of our group.

If there is any hand-wringing from BT bemoaning their "Legacy Infrastructure", I will not be too sympathetic. Our MK "founding fathers" had the future of telecommunications in mind by implementing ducting on the grid roads.

Here's the agenda:

Agenda
  1. To introduce BT's Ms Bradley Borum to the group.
     
  2. Discuss the future for the "people that have fallen through the gaps."
     
  3. To arrange a larger meeting for 100 or so members to attend.
     
  4. Monkston has had cable run in from the Fishermead exchange. There is more capacity in the cable then the TPON users that will be requesting immediate migration. Will this be capacity be available to non TPON users that are immediate neighbours of TPON people? Would this extend 100 metres to Middleton?
     
  5. Why wasn't a higher capacity cable run in at the same time to support neighbouring Middleton?
     
  6. Why do residents in Middleton get a line length of over 7km, whilst a neighbouring Monkston resident gets 2.84km?
     
  7. We need an "introduction" to the processes and chains of command within BT. Why does our point of contact at BT, Serena, have so much difficulty getting information from BT Wholesale and BT infrastructure planning? We don't have to involve outside companies such as ISP's - so there is no unfair treatment between individual ISP's. Folk in MK want Broadband - they just want BT to provide the infrastructure. (I used the word "hierarchy" in a previous email. I apologise to BT if this was misinterpreted as a derogatory term.)
     
  8. Is there a map available showing poor ADSL service areas in MK? This could be deduced from the exchange buildings at Wolverton, Newport Pagnell, Woburn Sands, Bletchley, Emerson Valley, Stony Stratford and Fishermead. (This list was gleaned by inspecting the Official City Atlas of Milton Keynes; I may have missed some.)
     
  9. Continuation of the MK broadband Campaign. The first TPON user in Monkston was migrated to copper today and now enjoys Broadband. The rest of Monkston will follow shortly. What happens once the group's coordinator has got ADSL and is too busy downloading internet movies to care about anything else? Investigate grants?

A report on the meeting is here.

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