As most of you will be aware. The new Green Box, which is delivering Broadband to Redlingfield, is not able to supply broadband to anyone on Mill Road or Occold corner. I've been encouraging everyone to take up this issue and let Openreach, BT and Suffolk County Council and our MP know how disappointed we are and to demand some kind of solution.
Peter Ingram, who is the Suffolk County Council project manager for Suffolk Better Broadband, tells us that he now has a solution that it will be delivered by the end of the year and will reach all the missing properties. The solution will be "Fibre to the Premises", which is superfast broadband.
He plans to come along to our next committee meeting on April 24th with maps etc to explain how it will work and who will get it as part of their plan as well as to discuss options for outlying farms and businesses.
I asked him about the outlying farms who don't seem to be covered by the new Redlingfield plan and he said that reaching them would involve laying a fibre cable. In other places farmers have laid the cables themselves across their land and been connected. The new plan could incorporate that if the farmers wanted it to.
He did ask us to do one thing – and we agreed – that we all would stop emailing everyone about this. It seems that all of the project team and politicians have been bombarded by emails from unhappy villagers and he would really like that to stop. I said I we would. So can everyone please stop emailing about this. Thanks to everyone who has been doing this.
He confirmed the new Green Box and would deliver broadband all the way to Green Farm, Wash Farm, Rookery Farm and to the barns on Low Road (and everything in between). He said it would be fully up and running by June 2018 (which I took to mean your ISP would be able to provide you with fast broadband from that time – though obviously you would need to order fast broadband and transfer to the new service via your ISP).
So it looks like we are going to get a very good solution – it's just going to take a bit longer.