Broadband for Milton Keynes

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Friday 3rd October 

West Haddon

Richard and I pay a visit to West Haddon, where today they launched a community wireless broadband service.

Invisible Networks

I've been following what Invisible Networks have been doing over the last few months. Unfortunately, today I learnt that they've placed themselves into Creditor's Voluntary Liquidation.

My Inbox

543 members

I've finally got my broadband connection up and running in Abbeydore Grove after waiting 2 years.

BT/Zen no problem ordering and work done no problems. All of my problems have been with my fingers when setting my Neatgear DM602 to PPP over Ethernet when it should have been ATM for Encapsulation. OH well I've sorted it now and it runs a treat.

My thanks to Nick for all of his hard work and I'll see you next week for a beer.

Paul

 
I live on Bolbeck Park having recently moved from Newport Pagnell where I was one one of the first in the country to get broadband access (Back in the days when it meant installing new phone lines etc).

Living without it is an absolute nightmare.

When I moved to my new house, I stupidly thought that I would be able to just make a couple of calls and it would be enabled. I was initially told that this would not be possible due to the length of the line. Then one of my colleagues from work (Kevin who lives in Great Linford) informed me that there was a BT pilot to turn up the screws and give slightly increased range. Again waited a few weeks and was told that I was still too far away.

We have been looking at setting up a connection with an ISP in Great Linford using some wireless equipment (probably costing somewhere in the region of £300 a person), but due to work/holiday commitments over the last few weeks haven't been able to set aside the time to get testing.

If there is already something being piloted then I certainly would be very interested in joining and committing some time to getting it setup, (I currently work in the IT industry and have a reasonable networking knowledge due to the nature of my job).

If there is anything else I can do to help, please do contact me.

Simon, Bolbeck Park
 
Hi Nick,

A couple of things:

The area of Shenley Lodge in which I live in one of the bad line areas, I failed the 60dB level twice. One thing that is an annoyance is that even BT and Serena can't obtain line loss figures as it is 'Anti-competitive in nature." BUT all ADSL goes through the BT infrastructure, so the only thing BT would loose out on is the money for the ISP provision, hardly 'anti-competitive'.

On the subject of re-laying cable, I was told it could be done, but I would have to pay for it with a group of neighbours to share the cost and that it would be a very large cost. I don't see that BT are going to justify the cost for laying new cable when maybe only a handful of people take up ADSL on that basis. Currently there is a lot of building going on round the corner from me and it would be interesting to see if other the new people have issues too.

I know that 3 of us don't have ADSL in the street, I will find out if the other 9 do.

Also still nothing from the council on the pilot, I am getting the feeling that I won't be one of the fortunate ones. Seeing as I am on the outer reaches of the range of the tower anyway......

Best Regards

Martin

[You'll see I haven't forgotten you in Shenley Lodge.]

 

I live on London Rd, Loughton, like many in this area, I have been told by BT that as the Bradwell Abbey exchange is over 5.5Km away I cannot access a Broadband service.

This most frustrating as I run an e-commerce business.

Cable is not an option as London Rd does not have this facility either.

Regards

Graham, Loughton

 
For those people on TPON who may be looking to downgrade from home highway/ISDN2e back to PSTN beware!

Whilst there seems to be a reasonable process for TPON-Migration for ADSL orders, it seems for regular telephony things are not so straight forward!

Despite the fact am happy to have this line stay on TPON the order code with BT is 'Digital to PSTN conversion for ADSL', which in turn triggers a 'TPON to copper conversion'. Unfortunately I had the dubious distinction of being the first person to order ISDN in Monkston which allegedly resulted in some bizarre cable routing (via the Outer Hebrides I think). As a result of this I have now been cut off since Wednesday!
 
Amazingly it looks like am forced to go back to copper, however my friendly engineer tells me I may end up with a 7K distance to the exchange!

Dale
 

What do you plan to do to increase our chances of getting broadband?

Chris

[1, What's the demand for Broadband? See who's interested in getting Broadband in MK.

2, Meet with BT - What are they doing for the people in MK that cannot get Broadband

3, Assist with the Council's wireless pilot. Over 400 names have been collected.

4, Learn about the technology, hence understand why we have these difficulties.]

 
Two very helpful and chatty BT engineers came out to test my line today.

(I'm the person in Shenley Lodge - connected to Bradwell Abbey - who had ADSL for 3 months then had it taken away against my will).

Today's loss was 60.9 dB (i.e. FAIL again).

The engineers said:

 (i) they've witnessed BB working on lines with far greater loss than mine, so they believed me that it did work previously.

 (ii) my line passes the ISDN tests easily ("42"), which surprises them because they've seen ADSL working on lines with ISDN results of "47" (I'm not sure of the units here).

 (iii) they could easily get my line within limits if they were allowed to, by switching me onto a different pair from the cabinet to the exchange.

 (iv) the reason they aren't allowed to is purely commercial, because with some ISPs I could leave after 1 month and BT would be out of pocket.

The irony is that I'm with BT Openworld (12 month contract) simply because I thought it would maximise my chance of BT wholesale co-operating!

Plod on regardless!

Neil

 

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