Originally Posted by Horizon
Just done a bit of Googling Street View down the Middleton Ring Road and some surrounding roads. Nice area, by the way, just the kind of place that cablecos like to deal with!
Clearly there is ducting along the ring road and some streets. You can see where the ducts go up to each individual house. But as you say, its hit and miss. I personally don't think there is any cable in any of the ducts, or the ring road. There are clearly no cable street cabinets and I didn't see any BT street cabinets either. Do you have BT fibre services available in your area?
I think the street diggers "the Murphy Men", were given a whole area to dig and duct and so they started it as they saw fit, hence the ad hoc nature of it. Some roads have ducts, some don't.
I don't think the cableco ever had any oversight on the work being done or were ever involved at street level. At some point the money dried up and the work was abandoned.
If there was no oversight, it calls into question the quality of the work done and whether the ducts that were built are fit for purpose. What may have seemed a small task to begin with, could actually become something else, ie a total rebuild from scratch.
Someone from VM has got to go the area and have a look, assuming they don't already know what was done and not done. When all the cablecos started merging with one another, a lot of information was lost as people were laid off, so VM may not have accurate records for the area.
If the ducts that have been built are fine, I cannot see why VM wouldn't want to lay cable in the area and put in their street cabinets. The bulk of the work and cost is done.
Assuming a small takeup of services, say 10%, a 1000 homes paying about £40 a month, that's half a million quid a year in revenue being lost. No wonder all the old cablecos went bust. They were just crap.
But VM don't do FTTP, but you could point out that very fact to them. Not having to build a load of street cabinets is a big incentive. But I have never heard of VM even considering doing FTTP, so good luck on that one!
As for East London, a totally different situtation and its already been mentioned in the thread about the East London expansion why it wasn't done.
Basically, the area was/still is made up of a high immigrant population from Bangladesh and Pakistan. It is densely populated, the highest in the country. When the cableco started offering services in those areas it found out there was a very high number of "issues", like bills not being paid and theft of services. A very high number of issues... The cableco, Encom, never publicised this for fear of being branded racists, but those areas were abandoned for that reason. The poor quality ducting being given out as the official reason for not upgrading the areas is rubbish. By the way, although some of these areas have changed, most have not. So, VM will rediscover this is due course....
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