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Broadband Project Update September 2019

Post in Utilities by Steve Jones
This message is relevant to those living between Garbat and Inchbae inclusive, and Grudie to Achanalt inclusive. Look out for an email from DCMS in near future!

You need to respond to a forthcoming email from the UK Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to ensure Garve & District Broadband and LCT can fully fund your Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) installation.

The FTTP installation in our community has been part-funded by a UK government voucher for £350 for your property. 32 properties in the community were involved - those with the poorest broadband before the FTTP installation.
 
BT OpenReach has already used the value of these vouchers as a discount to the community for the project. They now need to claim back the value of the vouchers from the DCMS. 
 
To do this, DCMS will send you an email asking you to confirm you have had FTTP delivered to your property. And they will ask you to validate your email as part of this process to prove that it is your property.
 
You will NOT need to confirm that you have taken a new fibre service - you just need to confirm that FTTP has been made available to your property.
 

Please Note : You cannot claim the value of this voucher for your own benefit - it is part of our community scheme.

 
You must respond to this request from DCMS.
Failure to do so will mean BT OpenReach cannot reclaim the value of your voucher.
This would require Garve & District Broadband/LCT to pay for it unnecessarily, effectively paying for something that the government should be paying for.
Also Garve & District Broadband/LCT have not budget for this.
 
Please look out for the DCMS email and respond as soon as you get it!
 
Thank you!
 

 

Questions & Comments

Here's what others said...

Andrew Biddlecombe said:

Hi Steve,

Any news on the Strathgarve front please?

Have not seen any update on this for a very long time now.

S

Steve Jones said:

Hi Andrew

There is a very high probablity that the LCT will receive funds from Eneco and EDF very shortly.

When Garve and District Broadband has confirmation that these funds are in place, we will sign the OpenReach contract for Phase 3.  We expect to be able to do this before the end of September 2019. 

BTOR will then be contracted to deliver Phase 3 within 12 months of signing the contract.

I will post another update as soon as we have signed the Phase 3 contract to set the ball rolling on this last phase of the project.

Laura Gauna said:

Is there a contact for the Openreach exchange in Garve? Being messed up by BT. Reported a fault on 6th September as the fibre box is completely dead. BT was meant to have someone call for appointment but the request failed. I called again on TUesday night and they sent out a 4g mini hub (arriving tomorrow and someone has to be there as courier cant leave it in safe place or nextdoor!) to keep me going until the engineer appointment that was meant to be this morning between 8 and 1. No sign of it so called again and looks like the two appointments failed to go through (was told possibly is because I live in the Highlands)... Now they have hopefully managed to rebook engineer for Monday morning but just wanted to be able to check that this is actually happening. Already had to wait for three weeks back in July when the phone was struck by lightning for someone to come and change the main socket! I have two complaints open so far this week. End of rant

S

Steve Jones said:

Hi Laura

I cannot offer you any information here.

Only by getting BT to visit you will you will be able to find out where the fault is and whether it is in fact an OpenReach (infrastructure) issue or a BT (inside the home) issue. 

Hang on in there!

Laura Gauna said:

Thanks, all sorted after 2 "fake" appointments (looks like the system wasnt confirming the engineers appointments so they had to phone Openreach instead of booking online). After 10 days, I finally got the mini hub that is now switched off but I will be able to use it in case of another fault and the engineer fixed the problem. In the end was a faulty plug due to a lightning strike back in June, that fried my master socket. The box had been working on batteries after the strike and it finally gave up. Now everything is fixed and got some compensation from BT.

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