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[Bowdon]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/08/welsh-village-left-waiting-months-for-openreach-to-finish-fttp.html

Residents in the rural village of Blaenffos (Pembrokeshire, Wales) have been left confused after a mix of admin delays, cost concerns and conflicting feedback from ISPs resulted in the local roll-out of a new ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network entering a lengthy state of limbo.

Last year the area appeared to be a hive of activity as Openreach’s (BT) engineers, seemingly with support from the Welsh Government’s Superfast Cymru project, diligently set about deploying a new FTTP network into the area. By early 2018 this roll-out appeared, at least to the naked eye, to have been all but completed and in February the operator’s availability checker began to report the service as being available to order.

At this point a few lucky people promptly placed an order, but it quickly became apparent that not all the necessary infrastructure appeared to have been fitted (i.e. the aggregation node and splitters seemed to be present, but sadly some manifolds and tubing for the fibre was missing). Some engineering work continued in the area until mid-March and then.. silence.

Just to confuse matters, only around 4 properties in the affected area have a working FTTP service (they joined quickly after it initially became available, before vanishing again) and yet some of their immediate neighbours found that they were unable to order the service, where previously it had been marked as available.

    Steve, Blaenffos Resident, told ISPreview.co.uk:

    “The village of Blaenffos has patchy mobile coverage and, being a long way from the exchange, most properties have low ADSL speeds. Not surprisingly, some villagers were keen to get Superfast Broadband under the Superfast Cymru project. In early February, many were told FTTP was available to order. Shortly afterwards, most of those same people were told it was not available. This change coincided with the realisation that some of the infrastructure (mainly FTTP manifolds) was missing. The missing infrastructure was soon fitted.

    Afterwards, only about 6 out of 120 affected properties could have the FTTP ordered. Neighbouring properties had different availability despite the phone lines being connected the same way. Some were allowed access and others were not allowed access to the same FTTP infrastructure. The few that could have FTTP were essentially those that ordered very soon after it first became available. It had nothing to do with location or connection.

    The situation for villagers is frustrating and unclear. With the original Superfast Cymru project more properties were deliberately in scope than were provisioned. The base for the successor project does not appear to include any properties that were in the scope of the original contract, but not provisioned. Consequently, the successor contract for Wales is unlikely to help those properties. Most of the village appears to be in an uncertain situation with no resolution or improvement in sight, excepting the Universal Service Obligation.”

Not article related.. But how is Blaenffos pronounced!? 

[Weaver]

Pronounced /blaːɨ̯n fɔːs/  - first syllable like 'fine', second like 'force' said with a welsh accent. The ff is just an /f/, because written {f} is used for /v/ nowadays. I think there is a slight stress on the second syllable. It literally means something like 'fore-dyke' I suspect.