`Services Broadband etc — Ashbrittle Parish Council

Ultrafast Broadband Update

If you passed by Appley Cross and the Primary School after Easter, it probably looked slightly chaotic... to be completely honest it was, with three different contractors all working within the school site, all with slightly different aims and deadlines... hopefully the school will soon have a nice new playground surface and all the different "fluids" will all head in the correct direction!

From our perspective this period was successful: our Fibre Cabinet is now live and we have ducts out of the school site in every direction needed. The school is now benefiting from Ultrafast Broadband from us, as are the Shop and nearby houses. The only damper is we don’t yet have a link across to our network in Appley at Frogs... more on this shortly.

We sometimes see customers’ devices struggling to hit their Fibre package speed once connected, often this is down to the age of the device (slower networking chip, processor capacity, or software), wifi capabilities or range. When I connected the school I found my own laptop’s limit, mainly due to the USB-C throughput. Fortunately, the limit in question was 3086Mbps download and 1287Mbps upload!

For some real-world perspective I streamed some 4k Netflix, while also joining a Teams meeting with some colleagues, all the while my actual bandwidth usage remained comfortably within our Basic Home parameters of 40Mbps - so even with 100x that available, day to day usage doesn’t use it.

Check before you dig!

Just before 9:30 am on Thursday 23rd, I suspect half of the readership were cursing Technological, as you all were met with the Red Alarm light of Misery and No Internet... A digger driver had met our Fibre Duct outside Waterrow severing the service to Clayhanger, Bathealton, Appley, Kittisford and Stawley. These types of incident are fortunately rare, but they do happen from time to time (the last widespread incidents were Aug. 2025, and Dec. 2023 both resolved within four hours and nine hours). On this occasion, our team was not far away to carry out an assessment of the damage and a restoration plan. Unfortunately, the repair was protracted with a number of complications, but all customers were successfully restored by 3:30 pm.

These things happen, but if you have our fibre across your land, please just contact us before you start work, we'll always be able to come and either mark the location or dig down to expose the duct for you. If you own a digger, please always use safe dig protocols, don’t use mechanical excavation within one metre of live fibre, and never use teeth near utilities. If accidents happen, please let us know, even if it looks undamaged, it could save a lot of disruption in future. Thank you for your patience and understanding when things go wrong, but we'll always aim to restore as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Our network design generally operates in rings: this provides two benefits, firstly it reduces the number of ducts that exclusively carry large number of customers’ traffic, and secondly if there is major damage, we can reroute services while repairs are carried out. Installing our Fibre Cabinet at Appley will add to this ring topography, with customers in the local areas being primarily fed from this location, but with three upstream connections back to our London Datacentre. Had we been able to complete the link from Appley Cross to Frogs Farmhouse, none of you would have lost service during this incident, as the damaged section would have been part of the ring. Finding a solution to the access issue at Appley Cross is our Number One priority and we have an outline plan and have made a substantial capital investment to facilitate this.

After our update in the last month, a number of you asked about Ashbrittle. Apologies for missing you out, you are very much in our plans and we have received a lot of positive expressions of interest in Ashbrittle itself. Our plan remains to reach you during the year, however the timescales are hard to predict; Firstly, while Ashbrittle had positive interest, we've not been getting any response from the farms surrounding Ashbrittle to the north and North West, particularly from Clayhanger to Stawley Mill. Alternatively, we would need to identify a River Tone crossing with amenable land owners on both banks and Environment Agency consent. Hopefully by the next issue, we have more positive news on timescales for Ashbrittle and the other areas in build.

Jim Weir, Technological