There are widespread complaints that in the green belt BT is selectively installing fibre connections only in profitable areas
Tom Hosking and his family are living in digital limbo. When BT engineers came to their village to install fibre-optic cables last year, the green telephone cabinet on their street was mysteriously left off the list. Now the Hosking family home, along with 62 other premises on their housing estate, is stranded, connected to the only BT cabinet in Cuckfield that does not have fibre.
Theirs is not a remote hillside settlement. Cuckfield is a sizeable West Sussex village of more than 3,000 people, 30 miles from London and a seven-minute drive from the town of Haywards Heath. And the housing estate off the main street in the village is home to more than 200 people.
Maddeningly for Hosking, his copper-only cabinet is just across the road from a fibre-enabled one with space to spare. "It's crazy," he says. "If we were on top of a remote hill somewhere I could understand it, but there is fibre only a few feet away. I could dig the trench myself, the cabinets are only 50 metres apart."
This is not an isolated case. There are widespread complaints that in the green belt BT is selectively installing fibre connections, enabling the largest, most profitable cabinets in an area but leaving the rest to struggle on with creaking copper lines that in many cases are not able to cope with the internet.
Down the road from Cuckfield in Burgess Hill, the same thing has happened to Barry Collins. The, editor of PC Pro magazine, who lives on a densely populated estate near a business park. "Lots of people have got in touch with me to say they are 200 yards from a business park and they are not connected either," says Collins.
BT maintains that Hosking's cabinet in Cuckfield is too small to be profitable. There are no other options: Virgin Media, the only other national broadband network, concentrates on urban areas and does not serve the village.
Hosking says he needs better broadband for his job. A digital advertising sales executive who lives with his wife and two small children, he often works from home. Face-to-face contact is important and he relies heavily on Skype video calls.
But Skype works for him only half the time – and he is one of the lucky ones. Many homes on his estate cannot get the minimum two megabits per second that the telecoms watchdog Ofcom says is needed to view video, and thus to qualify as basic broadband.
Hosking has taken his case all the way to the top, lobbying the BT chief executive, Ian Livingston, via email. But Livingston offered no solution. "The issue with a small cabinet is the economics of running fibre and electricity to it are very poor," the BT chief executive wrote back. "We cannot share with you the economics of every single cabinet and our exact costs but suffice to say, if it had made sense we would have done your cabinet with all others."
He advised Hosking to lobby his local council to include his cabinet in its plans for publicly funded rural broadband under the Broadband Delivery UK scheme. By March 2017 the government target is for 23.6m homes – 95% of all UK premises – to have a fibre connection. BT will fund 16.2m of these itself, and the final 4.6m will be largely paid for with central and local government funds, along with some European money.
BT has won the BDUK contract for West Sussex and promised to wire up 98% of homes. A spokesman said this meant Hosking's cabinet stood a "good chance" of being upgraded. But the fear for those left on the wrong side of the digital tracks is that public money is likely to be focused on virgin territory rather than mopping up the last few cabinets in otherwise fibre-connected areas.
Hosking has been told that his postcode is included in the public plans, but the council cannot confirm whether his cabinet will be. Although BT has agreed initial lists of so-called no build areas with councils, one of the much criticised peculiarities of the BDUK process is that these are not made public until later in the process, after surveys have been carried out. The reason cited is commercial confidentiality.
With the West Sussex contract not due to be completed until the spring of 2016, it may take another three years before Hosking finds out whether fibre is coming to his home. His only other option is to persuade a smaller broadband provider to invest in a community project. But alternative providers will not come to an area without a cast-iron guarantee that BT is not building there.
"I would like to know what the plans are, from industry and government, to ensure that these 'not spots' are wiped out," says Hosking. "BT are in a very privileged position. They've been given a huge customer base on a plate from being a state-owned monopoly, and with that big footprint they've got comes responsibility."
Reported by guardian.co.uk 52 minutes ago.