Does anyone know how
well the roll out of fibre (Gigabit Jersey) is going? The declared
plan was to get all 42,000 domestic properties, plus businesses
connected by 2016 (apparently regardless of whether they wanted to be
connected!). We taxpaying public put £19million into the project,
so I sincerely hope someone in the States is on top of the project
plan, progress,and value for our money. My experience and intuition
indicates things are perhaps not going too well.
On the recent Bank
Holiday Monday we had 3 men from a contract company at our house for
2 hours. It cannot be cheap to pay contractors to work public
holidays, so I'm guessing JT wouldn't unless they had to. Another
small indication that things are not quite running smoothly is that
they went to the wrong address initially (there is another road in
the parish with the same name in common usage). Astoundingly given
they were working in behalf of the 'phone company is they didn't have
our line number (you know the one they were coming to work on) so
they could call to locate us! Goodness knows how much more time was
lost while they located the right address.
They explained they
were trying to locate where the phone lines enter the house, and to
do that they proposed pushing the rod from the road end and locating
the point from the sound of it hitting the wall. I pointed out there
wouldn't likely be much noise if the ingress was, as suspected, below
the decking on the wood cladding. Besides I couldn't see the benefit
as the first team who had visited had run the rod (a yellow cable
like set up on a drum) from inside the house for the 40 metres I told
them it would be from the DP to the road. I showed them the DP and
conduit. So then they went on the locate the junction box the plan
shows is somewhere in the garden garden. I told then we had had had
a team up last week to do that too and they had located it in the
corner of the garden. (Fortunately Helen had been here to relay that
info on that occasion). After some digging about toing and froing
they found the junction box and scraped a little soil from the top of
it. They then informed us they would have to get a different team
out to raise the box and negotiate with us to move some fencing. Net
result they had replicated the work of the three previous teams and
progressed the whole by the magnificent achievement of removing a
couple of inches of soil from a small part of the junction box. It
was quite clear they had no idea or paperwork about the previous
visits or what they had done.
There's more! The
Friday before they turned up we had a letter from JT asking us to
confirm their given date for final installation, and saying they
expected us to have completed all necessary work for their people to
do the install. Bit tricky that as the JT people themselves have
not yet worked out what needs doing and are going to have to send at
last one more team to us to advise/agree work to be done.
I would like to say at
this point that a couple of the individual technicians who tuned up
in the different teams were pretty on the ball. They understood it
really wasn't a good idea to run cable up the outside of wood clad
buildings, especially ones on a timber frame. Everything moves, and
unless you use shaped copper fixings you are likely to split the
wood, and any hole lets water in and rot begin, oh and the cladding
has to be replaced every 20 years or so. Definitely not the place for
laser cable.
I have since discovered
a couple of other things. First we are certainly not alone in having
multiple teams coming each not aware of the other's work on the
property. I am also told that the contractors are paid per
installation, with JT picking up the problems. The contractors have
a quick in quick out mindset and are looking to do the simplest,
least work option possible, which of course may not be the sensible
or appropriate long term option. That is quite consistent with our
experience. Something I have not yet identified is whether the
contractors are local companies using local people, local companies
using temp off island staff, or even UK companies. I did note two of
the teams who turned up here were driving local hired vehicles.
The most recent info I
could find on progress was from October last year, saying they had
connected 5,000 properties and were on track.
A previous news item in
2012 says they had connected the first 1000 customers.
http://www.jtglobal.com/Jersey/super-footer/Latest-News/2012/ISLANDERS-AMONGST-FIRST-TO-SIGN-UP-FOR-THE-WORLDS-FASTEST-RESIDENTIAL-BROADBAND-/
Lets be generous and
allow that was December, that means in 10 months they had connected
4000 customers. At 400 per month, it will take over 92 months to
connect the remaining 37,000 residential customers. There may be some
room to play depending on whether they have for example connected
more businesses first. Let's say I have a few doubts about the
Gigabit project being completed by 2016.
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