BT Superfast Cabinets "Too Vulgar" for the Royal Borough!

It seems as if residents won't be getting superfast broadband anytime soon. The Dame hears that
BT has decided to pull out it's engineers.
RBK&C has complained that the equipment cabinets are too ugly and are not design consonant with the historic borough landscape.
As BT said, The historic borough can now have historic broadband'!

Now The Dame has never seen one of these cabinets, but it might be a good idea for residents to be able to inspect an artist impression of the cabinets in a 'street setting.'
Now the Dame is getting quite a few comments that someone is going out of their way to favour Virgin: so why would they do that? Surely, there cannot be venal reasons.....or can there?

Prettier than the old one on the right!

In this way we residents can form a judgment. Missing out on superfast broadband holds back business in the Borough.

So put up an image  on the Council website so we can make a judgment.....after all 34,000 homes and businesses are at risk of being left behind in the superfast broadband revolution.

The Dame has found a pic and frankly thinks the Council is being petty.

You can read all about it in the Guardian and below an extract from a internal BT memo with a vital comment from Baroness Jo Valentine, chief executive at London First, said: “London business needs world-class communications infrastructure and delaying broadband rollout in Kensington and Chelsea is bad news for local businesses and residents.
“BT is able to work with other boroughs with conservation areas - Kensington & Chelsea need to up their game."

 

BT pulls plug on fibre broadband for top London borough

Published on Thu 31 May 2012 10:40 GMT

BT has withdrawn its rollout of fibre broadband in a top London borough after rejection of almost all its applications for the siting of street cabinets.

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​This unusual move has resulted in Openreach engineers being withdrawn from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and being redeployed elsewhere.

Fibre broadband currently delivers speeds of up to 76Mbps, compared with the UK average of 7.6Mbps, so it means that 34,000 homes and businesses in the borough are set to miss out on the high-speed revolution.

Openreach, which supplies providers including Talk Talk and Sky as well as BT Retail, has already installed more than 4,000 fibre street cabinets across 31 London boroughs - including ones with many conservation areas.

But in Kensington and Chelsea, it has had 96 of its 108 applications rejected or put on ice.

A BT spokesman said that, after dozens of meetings and calls over many months in which BT has tried to find middle ground with the council, the company had been left with no option but to go elsewhere.

More than ten million homes and businesses can now order fibre and that will rise to two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014.

The spokesman said: “We're passing more than 100,000 premises with the technology every week, which is one of the fastest deployments in the world, and so we can't afford to let local red tape get in the way.

“It's a major political priority for the current government who have said they want the UK to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015.

“The borough seem to find the cabinets ugly and so their priority is to leave the streets as uncluttered as possible.”

He said it wasn’t practical to site the cabinets underground, and added: “Other councils, including those of neighbouring boroughs, have shown a greater eagerness to enjoy the benefits of fibre broadband.

“We will, therefore, re-focus our engineers' efforts in other areas where planning authorities have taken a positive approach and are keen to ensure their residents and businesses can benefit from this technology."

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/feedarticle/10266686?fb=native