Lockerley4 – Newtown Square Area. Infrastructure on this scheme is underway but not yet complete. If you are part of this scheme you should be getting updates from your scheme co-ordinator Kevin. As of mid February Openreach were estimating the scheme should be up and running by the end of April 2022.
Lockerley4 – The Prophets/Newtown road area. We had a quote for FTTP BUT cannot manage to get Openreach to progress it forwards. I am just crossing my fingers that as this area is between two existing schemes Openreach might have built in capacity to serve this area too – will have to wait and see when Newtown Square scheme goes live.
WW3 – The Frenches and perhaps other areas – another volunteer has stepped forwards to request a new quote for ww3 properties who get by far the worst speeds in our locality. We are still waiting for the new quote to come back….
WW5 (Mill Lane) – this scheme has stalled due to scale and costs, happy to support anyone who would like to step up and lead the project for this area.
Other options – for those with good mobile 4G coverage than it is now affordable to have a 4G hub that gives MUCH better speeds than some properties are able to get with a standard broadband connection
LANDLINES & VOIP – the government is trying to get all properties that still use a landline to move to a digital fibre landline telephone service that is provided via their broadband connection and thereby remove the copper telephone line system, by 2025. I have raised some concerns about this with our provider as mobile signal is poor/non-existent within some village properties and power cuts are not that infrequent, which means that in an emergency householders are unable to make emergency service calls. Unlike the copper telephone service a VOIP service requires a working broadband connection. Many properties on Lockerley 4 exchange that have FTTP will have or will about to be moved over to the VOIP service.
Even if you do not currently have a broadband connection at some point soon you will have your landline telephone service changed to VOIP – details are unclear at the moment but you are welcome to contact me for advice if needed. I note other villages have raised similar concerns.