Hampshire County Council recently held an updating session in Winchester, which Councillor David Woodroofe attended.
It was reported that work to give Medstead exchange subscribers superfast broadband will be rolled out from June to December 2014. Superfast broadband, technically known as Fibre-to-the-Cabinet, is a new parallel service to existing broadband and users can only take advantage of it if they sign up for the new service. It will NOT automatically increase the speed of existingl broadband services and you must be within 1.5km of a fibre connected street cabinet (they are the large green road side boxes).
Due to the nature of the technology and local conditions BT Openreach cannot accurately predict how many subscribers will benefit from the new service until the roll out is completed. Their Programme Manager told Councillor Woodroofe that by then end of 2015 every broadband subscriber would receive at least 2MB, when he explained the situation in Beech he was assured that as part of their contract BT Openreach would deal with slow speeds on an individual subscriber basis if necessary. The meeting was also told that BT Openreach are trialling a number of technology improvements that would allow them to supply superfast broadband over longer distances and technology that would allow Fibre Optic cable to be connected to individual telegraph poles.
