Todays Yorkshire Post Re Digital Region

[clifft]

Alex said 'I wouldn't be surprised if Infinity has less than 3000 customers in South Yorkshire.' I think you are wrong here. My two sons, my neighbour and a friend all have Openreach fibre. Nobody I talk to has even heard of Digital Region, let alone got it. Several times a week Openreach seem to be at the local cabinet, I assume cabling up somebody. After various phone calls my eldest son was basically told by BT they were putting him on fibre with little or no choice, with no cost increase and no new contract. They are pushing it very hard.

[SpencerUk]

@FlipFamous

I do remember Origin say they offer it just not outright

I would agree with what Alex has said though re could take up to a year. You're not going to disconnect the education sector now before the start of the term so I think there's plenty of time.

I'm confident that Origin will come out fine. I think ASK4 dodged a bullet and Chess must have known what they were buying into haha.

On another note. More than just an inquiry needs to happen into Digital Region. The amount of MD's that came and went was laughable, the lack of marketing was embarrassing. As I've said before, the idea was technically sound, but the execution was really poor and ultimately that's what has killed this project in its current way of working.

[bgnx]

From a customer point of view, the main issue has to be the lack of advertising. A project costing tens of millions of pounds but with seemingly no budget for advertising it was always doomed to have low uptake.

Due to smaller ISPs being used for supplying service to customers ( which in itself isn't a problem; as it gives local companies like Origin and ASK4 the opportunity to grow and employ more people and generally be good for local economy ) but how were these smaller ISPs supposed to afford large advertising campaigns that would let the whole of South Yorkshire know that service was available to them? In my opinion it should have been digital region themselves that paid for wide scale advertising for the network. Tweeting every so often that xxxx postcode is now live is hardly going to reach many people. A million or two on advertising would have surely made a massive difference?

I tried to get my Dad to sign up a while ago but as he had never heard if the project he was umming and arring for months up til the point that he got a call from talk talk offering FTTC, of course he had seen their big ad campaigns and was offered various package deals to include his phone service and whatnot so he ended up getting service from them. This is likely the same for most people who have been recommended the service I reckon.

As others have said, it would be surprising if the network wasn't picked up by someone else as the asset itself is a decent asset and could be useful in the right hands ( especially seeing as South Yorkshire is unlikely to get any further financial support for super fast broadband any time soon - rightly so I guess )

[mirdragon]

BT are having a drive at the moment of moving customer's of ADSL onto FTTC if they are in an FTTC enabled area. Customers who have their TV packages are being pushed first as this is why the multicasting was originally setup, as BT are wanting to move more into providing TV Services over broadband connection.

[alexatkin]

One thing I have been wondering, is there room in the BT cabinets to move EVERYONE over from ADSL onto VDSL?

It always seemed odd that Digital Region had such HUGE cabinets and BT much smaller ones.

[SpencerUk]

@bgnx

Pretty much spot on. Digital Region hired Ruby Slippers to do some advertising for them and I barely saw anything. They wanted us to rebrand forum and become a puppet rather than work together which annoyed me off.

I'm very interested to hear how people found out about Digital Region in the first place. Me personally was driving past a cabinet I'd never seen before and then next day walking up to it and seeing a very small "Digital Region" badge on it

@alexatkin

That sort of stuff goes through BT Operate for allocation planning I believe. Can't imagine it would be hard to install a bigger cabinet or put another one next to it.

[pob]

I heard about Digital Region after seeing a news post on thinkbroadband.com - I then kept checking the DR website until it said that my area was enabled. As soon as that happened I ordered with RipWire. I am the only person in my circle of family, friends and neighbours that has a DR connection. Everyone I spoke to about it was put off by the £70 installation charge.
The only advertising I've ever seen is the Origin stickers on the cabinets.

[Nutty34]

I was not aware DR was installed in my area until I saw a Thales van and had a look on the Internet. I am not aware of others around me that have it either. I have to say I was installed whilst there was a free install offer. No way would I have paid the hefty install charge.

[bgnx]

I saw some Thales engineers laying fibre in Broomhill a few years ago and asked them what they were upto and they told me about it.

I only signed up to DR late last year as I began having problems with my Virgin connection and was fed up of dealing with "Steve" from Delhi asking me 4589327 times to reboot my router. Prior to the problems, my service ha been great so I saw no reason to switch to DR.

[Swampster]

Pretty much exactly the same as Pob.. saw it mentioned way back on some website when it was first being planned, kept my eyes open and ears to the ground about the project ever since.. oh and this was LONG before BT has even thought about laying any fibre anywhere in South Yorkshire!

I haven't been able to get anyone to see past the connection charge either, especially once BT started making inroads.. and basically nobody even upto now had heard of the project, including many in the IT business whom you'd expect to be aware.