not so fast

I switched the radio on this morning and found myself listening to a man from BT, being grilled about the pace at which fast broadband was being rolled out in the UK.  His gist was that the proportion of properties with access to fast broadband was increasing extremely quickly and BT were doing a splendid job, and there was nothing anti-competitive about the fact that the infrastructure supplier Openreach was a BT subsidiary.  People who did not yet have fast broadband, he insisted with supreme confidence, could find out when they were going to get it by putting their address into the BT website, and rivals to Openreach could likewise discover Openreach's investment plans, so there was no commercial disincentive to rival providers, none at all.

After I had showered and eaten my daily six spoonfuls of muesli, out of curiosity I went on to the BT website, and looked to see where I should put my address to find out when we were going to get fast broadband.  It was not immediately obvious, but I got there by dint of typing Openreach into the search box at the top of the BT homepage, and then clicking on the link to allow me to find out whether I was in a Superfast Broadband Fibre area.  Except that it didn't tell me.  BT Openreach knows that we exist, all right.  The dropdown list of addresses with our exact postcode included the name of our house.  But the box that popped up on the map of our local area was prefaced, not very reassuringly, by a question mark and the message We're keen to bring Superfast Fibre to your area and are exploring how best to achieve that.  We may deliver it as part of our commercial programme, or by working in partnership with your local authority.  In the meantime you can't order Superfast Fibre.

Funnily enough, I didn't think I would be able to before going to the website, though I did think it would have been a good idea if the Today interviewer or at least a researcher had spent five minutes playing with the website before the interview, so that they could have challenged the BT spokesman's blithe assurances.  There are eight categories of possible availability of Fast Fibre, according to Openreach, including our ?.  Lucky souls with an AO rating are already covered by an enabled cabinet, though in a minority of instances that doesn't guarantee availability.  I'd take that as a maybe.  If you're in a High Demand area you're probably going to get Fast Fibre sometime fairly soon, since the cabinet has been installed but Openreach are too busy to connect everybody at once.  If you're in an Enabled Area then the area is enabled (obviously) but no cabinet installed as yet, so you can't place an order.  You're on a roll if you're Coming Soon and fast broadband should be yours within six months, while in a Planned Area you're looking at eighteen months.  If you're Under Review or they're Exploring Solutions then nothing doing at the moment, maybe or maybe not in future.

It isn't as though we live anywhere fantastically remote.  If we were one of a cluster of three dwellings half way up a mountain and our nearest settlement was a small market town twenty miles away, that would be one thing, but we're less than seventy miles from the centre of London, in one of the most populous counties in the country.  And three or four miles by copper wire from our telephone exchange, and therein lies the rub.  Several years ago there was the tantalising prospect of a small provider, not BT, setting up a fast wireless broadband service using an existing mast with a clear and uninterrupted line of sight to our house.  BT increased their speed of service just enough to kill the rival wireless idea stone dead.  Nowadays we get around 4Mbps, according to the Systems Administrator, whereas the wireless project would have given us 20Mbps.  It takes about half an hour to download an hour's worth of TV, so forward planning is needed, and live streaming on the iPlayer is apt to be interrupted by fifteen second bursts of buffering while the telly catches up.  We manage.  Whether we would if we were trying to run a design business from home, or wanted to play games online, or do both at the same time, I don't honestly know.  But I did think the Today programme might have probed a bit harder, instead of letting the BT representative claim that all was sweetness and light.

Addendum  Meanwhile, my headache that ran for four days solid has almost gone, leaving just a faint ache and a strong instinct not to move violently or do anything to get my blood pumping.  My right nostril has stopped streaming as well.  I have no idea what that was about.  A summer cold?  A new and virulent susceptibility to hay fever?  The hormonal perils of female middle age?  Novels sometimes feature women of a certain age who suffer from Bad Heads.  Often as not they are portrayed as unsympathetic characters who suffer strategically in order to annoy other people. Best keep quiet about it and carry on.  The SA, a lifelong headache sufferer, was sympathetic, and phlegmatic about having to eat cheese for supper last night after eating cheese for lunch, because the only food I'd bought were the ingredients for a vegetable curry and instead of cooking it I went to bed.  The SA does not do vegetarian cooking, beyond arranging slices of tomato and mozzarella on a plate.